/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>465060
explain it better or gtfo

>>465059
>Should we say it's a cooling rate of profit ?
Well, no more than you would say a decrease in temperature is a cooling of the temperature. That would be a weird way to say it. You can say the economy is cooling, but that also doesn't explain it because you might have high production and consumption while no profit is being made. I think the phrase "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" perfectly encapsulates what is actually going on without any abstractions, which is not something that you want when you're studying trends.

You're an idiot and clearly didn't read what the crises of overproduction really were. At its core, Marx is not making an ecological claim at all. He is answering the Machine Question which had been an issue in economic thought up to that point - why is it that machines, which are so obviously beneficial, cause such economic turmoil? Ricardo asked this question and came away with the conclusion that no matter what, you fucking use machines and damn the economic consequences. The tendency of profit to fall is attributed to more machinery entering labor, and less human labor being involved in the productive process comparatively. If this is so, then the market to sell things to will shrink, first and most obviously for the workers, and then for the lower and middle rungs of the bourgeoisie, who face a recurrent crunch. The beneficiaries of the crises are those who sit at the top, who can predict them in advance and prepare themselves for the fallout. This means that a lot of people get fucked, but those at the top see this as a feature rather than a bug. The resolution to a crisis restores profitability by finding new markets to enter, new niches to exploit, and this is done by people rather than by the logic of the market. If it does not do this, the economic slump continues until drastic measures are taken. This is what finally came to a head in the 1930s, when capitalism as Marx understood it had basically ended. Now, the market economy is planned in such a way that any crisis is seen well in advance, and the arrangement is propped up by massive outlays of wealth, most of which is paid for by the middle and upper-middle class and benefits a tiny elite and those that the elite wish to keep. This undermines the basis for unity within the bourgeoisie. That's really what is being discussed, rather than this ecological nonsense.

>>465477
>this ecological nonsense.
Nobody in this thread is talking about anything ecological tho.

maybe this helps:
Thermodynamics is a branch of physics that deals with heat-energy, work (measured in Watt), and temperature
Entropy can be a measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness of a system.
Entropy can also be a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system.

>>465504
Don't listen to him. He's a retarded Bookchin fan.

>>465522
I don't think you know what Bookchin wrote at all, because I very vehemntly disagree with him and do not like him.

As for the rest - you'd have to believe capitalism is a perfect and closed system, which is absurd if you think about it for five minutes. Human societies are very open systems which devour resources to survive, and behave like living organisms - since we are life - but societies are not comparable to human life and cannot be treated in the corporate manner that is often imagined.

The TRPF is, if anything, a critique of capitalism's supposed ideal state - that it can't exist as it is written, which necessitates intervention into the market to correct this error. This correction is of course the class struggle - there are winners and losers, and among the losers are those who had a stake in capitalism who are now out of business and see their money stripped away from them, squeezed between competing capitals. The state often has to involve itself to correct the error with some policy or another, and the chief actors in the capitalist arrangement are aware of what they must do to gain advantage in these conditions. No smart capitalist believes capitalism is a system which just sort of happens. They know that to win and to rule, the capitalist must be vigilant and ready to transgress the expectations of justice and fairness one might have beld, to the extent that those things mattered to a liberal - and they did matter, because the free trade arrangement doesn't work if everyone distrusts institutions so much that they are in active revolt and constantly undermine the state that makes free trade possible. What we have today is a situation where cannibalizing institutions makes sense for certain actors, leaving behind the tyranny of the manager but nothing that suggests that there is anything but management of people and a limited world, lorded over by a few people who see anything productive as the enemy. That is one of the points of the entire communist project - to recognize that a world ruled by a few oligarchs is obviously undesirable to a lot of people, and not just the narrow program of one class. You would have to understand that Marx primarily wrote to the bourgeoisie, and was telling them "hey, here's this thing, the proletariat, we should co-opt them".

>>465566
>The TRPF is, if anything
The falling rate of profit is underpinned by centuries worth empirical of evidence. It has to be considered hard science at this point. Of course there are ideologically motivated attempts to socially discredit it but that's as futile as holding on to geocentrism.

>Human societies are very open systems which devour resources to survive
Sure you are correct that civilizations use a lot of resources.
But capitalism is not the same as civilization, it's just a mode of production being used by civilization, once capitalism becomes a fetter on the means of production it's going to be replaced.

>What we have today is a situation where cannibalizing institutions makes sense for certain actors, leaving behind the tyranny of the manager.
I guess that is one way of describing neo-liberalism. One of the points that Marx made is that structures that oppose the advances of the means of production are not viable systems.
Look to physics, to see why that is. From the perspective of thermodynamics advanced means of production lead to a higher use of energy in society, which in turn means that more entropy is increased. Statistical mechanics tells us that systems that increase more entropy are more likely to exist.
If capitalism leads toward stagnating by a "tyranny of the managers" as you call it, than it's trying to fight against the physical processes that govern reality, which is a fight it will certainly loose.

>You would have to understand that Marx primarily wrote to the bourgeoisie, and was telling them "hey, here's this thing, the proletariat, we should co-opt them".
Yeah that's a load of bullshit.
Marx wrote agitprop that told the workers to unite and seize the means of production.

>>465571
>But capitalism is not the same as civilization, it's just a mode of production being used by civilization
You don't have capitalism without capitalists and institutions perpetuating capital in its recognizable forms (but then there is a mystification of what "capital" even means so I'm not going to get this through you).
Anyway you seem to think the rulers are motivated by some goal of productivity, when that has nothing to do with property rights. If we wanted to optimize productivity, we never would have invented money in the first place. It's a terrible tool for optimizing resource flows, and it is not beyond science in any era to know what is actually useful in a productive sense. Slave systems catalogued extensively the abilities of slaves and the professions of workers. No one who has ever managed anything economic did so by happenstance or something just-so happening. This is a conceit certain idiots cannot break themselves from - that human behavior in politics is always deliberate behavior. Their myth requires them to believe that humans are predictable animals which can be cajoled infinitely, where anything can be interpreted as anything through endless mystification. It's a sickness and I don't know why any socialist keeps going to that same well. It's always been a trap and was recognized as such, but a sucker is born every minute. So goes the Satanic cycle…

>>465566
>I don't think you know what Bookchin wrote at all, because I very vehemntly disagree with him and do not like him.
That was a joke about Bookchin being obsessed with ecology. I know that was a typo.

>>465631
>Anyway you seem to think the rulers are motivated by some goal of productivity
No, the opposite is true.
Capitalism is going to go away because it no longer raises productivity through improving the means of production, labor productivity has been stagnant for at least a decade, and that means capitalists stopped investing.
The neo-liberal variant of capitalism or late stage capitalism is focusing on lowering the wages of workers. A cheap labor force negates the incentive to invest in better means of production.
From the physics perspective increasing productivity with better means of production maximizes more entropy.
And statistical mechanics tells us that systems that maximize more entropy are more likely to exist than those that maximize less entropy.
So that proves Marx's assertion that once a mode of production becomes a fetter on the means of production it's going to go away. Because fettering the means of production leads to an unfavorably rate of entropy maximization.

>If we wanted to optimize productivity, we never would have invented money in the first place.
I guess that's true in a general sense, but i don't understand why you think anybody is arguing against that.

>>465633
>From the physics perspective increasing productivity
What do you mean by "productivity?" Are you talking about the rate at which use-values get produced or the rate at which surplus-value is extracted from labor-power?

>>465633
You have to ask a basic question - why do the rulers produce, if they are not seriously motivated by profit, let alone profit from producing things? Productive capital is not the ideal if you're a property holder. You would, for yourself, seek rent extraction and monopoly pricing. Producing things for the market is one of the last things a capitalist wants to do. You have to invert reality to claim that the capitalist is there to make things for you, when the capitalist really wants to hold what is his and doesn't want to give you the worker a single thing at all. Capitalists were never motivated by productivity for its own sake. Productivity was only ever a means to an end, and on some level the rulers of nation-states understood the necessity of producing real things if they wanted to survive. Capitalists, for their own sake, are not motivated inherently to produce anything, not even for themselves. The first priority of any capitalist or any individual is their own security, and when a few capitalists own most of the stuff worth owning and can take at gunpoint everyone else's shit, they're going to do that before they beg people to buy stuff from them. Nothing about capitalism, particularly neoliberalism, is oriented towards productivity or any goal of expanding value. You wouldn't create trillions of dollars of fictitious capital purely so the oligarchy could be saved if you cared about productivity, or viewed capitalism as a steady state system to be preserved at all costs. It is always possible for a capitalist to translate his property into another type, in preparation for a change in the situation. That is exactly what happened from the neoliberal period onward, as the coming of a slave society was more overt, and the chief aim of the property holders was to hold what they possessed rather than accumulate more through productive labor. They wanted raw materials to remain cheap, preferably extracting them from the colonies rather than the core for all the reasons that makes sense. The free trade system was premised on conserving the metropole's natural resources and stripping the colonies of resources, while making sure the colonies remained underdeveloped. This is essential to their entire strategy in Africa. It was no longer possible to constrain the rest of the world's development in this regard, except by extreme interventions of warfare and economic influence. The wars in Asia were in part waged to inflict deliberate depopulation, and also to bring China to heel and integrate them into the global system.

>So that proves Marx's assertion that once a mode of production becomes a fetter on the means of production it's going to go away.
This is not axiomatic. The way this was resolved in the 20th century was by stimulating demand - that's what Keynesian economics did, push demand and encourage state intervention in drastic ways, which was possible now that there was a Federal Reserve controlling money supply and global integration was realized more thoroughly after 1945. Even the communist world wasn't completely cut off from this global system or alien to it. Otherwise the USSR and US would not even have had diplomatic recognition of each other.

>>465692
This is actually pointed in the right direction.

Capitalists aren't motivated by productivity or even profit. They are motivated by power.

That said, this is a key distinction between classical capitalism (in which the development of ever more efficient MoP was a conduit towards greater power) and modern oligarchal capitalism (in which power can be directly pursued by expanded means of control or investment into rent-taking activity).

That is to say, we've reached a point where inequality is isn't so much a function of the relations of production. Rather, the economic relations are arranged and tailored to serve the maintenance of structural inequality as an end unto itself.

>>465701
That's wrong though because it takes an idealistic approach to understanding the nature of capitalism. Yes, many or most are motivated by power, but, capitalists must follow the profit motive or they will not achieve their ends. It doesn't matter what that profit motive leads to. This is the very heart of the falling rate of profit because in their mad dash for sed profits they are inadvertently lowering the maximum threshold for what profits that can be gleaned through innovation.

Innovation allows what once required an exponential amount of capital to cost exponentially less and thus they are able to lower their prices (again to myopically chase profits) but over hundreds of years it becomes a race to the bottom.

That is the very nature of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

>>465701
>They are motivated by power.
Anytime anyone says "power" in relation to something that cannot be measured in watts, horses, or amperes I immediately want to ask, "define 'power'."

>>465711
Two definitions comes to mind
a) the ability to get other people to do what you want
b) the ability to allocate resources
If you can't do either of these, you have no power

>>465715
>the ability to get other people to do what you want
The obvious problem there is that such a "power" is unquantifiable and describes only a dynamic between two individuals. What exactly compels a person to act on behalf of another varies with both the individuals involved and the activities that they perform. The genius of class is that it eliminates individuals as unique points of consideration; the dynamic is framed entirely by the activity that individuals are compelled to perform without any regard to the question of "why" beyond the definitive nature of the class of the individuals involved. Even in this sense, "power" is not quantifiable–it still makes no more sense to say that one indivdual of a given class has any more or less power than any other individual of the same class. It only says that there is a very specific dynamic between opposite classes to which individuals may belong. It is a significant distinction to make when looking at class warfare as a fact and not just as a moral imperative.
>the ability to allocate resources
Systemically, capital does that. The capitalist merely follows its dictates or is swept aside.

>>465732
Have sex, incel

>>465727
It's not tautological you moronic faggot. Cope and seethe.

>>465743
>Everyone's dumb except me
The broke guy

>>465701
Anyone is motivated by power - which, in a material sense, would be first the liberty and security to act as they would want to. All we do for productivity or profit is not done for its own sake, but because it serves some purpose that we hold dear. That's what an imperative is. I shouldn't have to say this or make it into something spiritual or foundational, but the imperative doesn't exist as some inborn trait. That was not the argument of the liberals or the communists, or even the fascists - the fascists offer that moral philosophy for the slaves because they are slaves and treated as such. Workers too are motivated by the same things - they desire security against a beast that seeks to invade their life, and this is not because the workers had some gene for freedom, but because they know the consequences of slavery and submission is not an option. All efforts to force the slaves to love slavery run into a harsh truth that slavery is premised on a series of lies, one after another, to keep slaves in place. If you had a form of slavery that was relatively benign, it would lead to the conclusion that free labor - or at least relatively free labor - is preferable to the desulstory, imperious desire to make the slave suffer. This is undesirable to certain people because their motives are sadistic, but we're not permitted to acknowledge the sadist as what they are and treat them accordingly.

>>465727
Once they get stuck in the cycle, you can't get through them. It feeds itself and is continually reinforced because it "feels good". That's the utilitarian moral philosophy. It's a disease and they are immune to anything that suggests that there is a barrier between imperial will and themselves.

Profitability has always been an imperative for the struggling middle class, and because they are blinded by this lust and avarice, they don't think of what it means to attain the prize they seek. It should be clear that once you have something to defend, you have an imperative to defend that thing that is not beholden to any system. That's why Marx is writing about contradiction in capitalism - the need for security works against the practice of economic freedom, which is not a need but a choice that governments can choose to encourage or act against. That concept is inadmissible today because the ruling ideas are that the ruling ethos and power has untrammeled spiritual authority, and the weak have no right to defend themselves even by walking away. Those who are habituated to such a society will only be able to conceive of various forms of slavery as the only permissible social arrangement for humans, because their moral philosophy forbids a concept of genuine cooperation. They only know the bullbaiting and insinuation that is common to eugenics and a Satanic morality.

>>465744
Since you want me to hold your hand for you like a child:

The notion that capitalists are driven by power and not profit implies that they are of their own will acting in and on society. It's idealistic.
A materialist conception of the world implies the profit motive comes first and this is clearly deducible by simply pointing out the fact that with out profits a company or corporation will fail. You have the cart before the horse.
Keep in mind you said nothing other that, falsely, accuse me of being tautological when what we are saying is, very obviously, two different conclusions that are drawn from what we are implying..

>>465769
Lol this kid. You do realize imperatives are ideas people hold, not spooky forces that move people by some ineffable logic? Okay, I'll spell it out for you, yet again, but I doubt this will get through your head.

Capitalism as a situation exists because there are capitalists and people who conduct business in accord with free trade, and institutions favoring it by policy. This idea in capitalism was not always the imperative in humanity. No one - not Adam Smith, not Marx, not even the Austrian School - claimed that capitalism was an eternal system or "human nature", or that it just accidentally happened. The moment capitalists cease acting on the principle of free trade, the imperative for profitability is removed.
Since we live in monopoly conditions - the rich literally cannot lose, and print money to declare that they win - profit is no longer an imperative.
For your thinking to hold, you have to imagine capitalism entirely in its ideal conditions that are imagined, where an infinite number of firms compete in perfect competition. This was always a thought experiment rather than the material reality, and every economist viewed free trade / capitalism with that in mind. Capitalism was from the start dominated by trading companies and an interest in national and global projects, rather than a million small firms behaving like ideal atoms. It is the classes beneath the institutions that are made to behave like atoms, not the commanding heights. The rich, like any ruling institution, do not play by the same rules as a lone individual. They form conglomerates, collude with each other. This is what the liberal state does, which is very fucking basic politics.

I don't know how many times this has to be repeated and re-explained for you to understand this, but you refuse to process basic things, or you are deliberately obtuse and refuse to engage honestly under any circumstances. It doesn't matter - I am writing to the people who are being misinformed because people like you are allowed to speak. People like you insinuate and move to censor and ban anyone who speaks honestly or speaks in any way that breaks this hyper-specific wank you create, because the meme perpetuates itself. It's disgusting.

In place of any material reality, you commit to this idea - pure idealism - that humans have no agency and must not, and you do it purely for selfish and retarded reasons, because engaging with people as they are would damage your precious world-view. This is literal autistic behavior. We're all trying to help you, anon. None of us have anything to gain by seeing this retardation continue. You only hurt yourself.

>>465771
>The moment capitalists cease acting on the principle of free trade, the imperative for profitability is removed.
What a fantasy. There is no such thing as "free trade." How can there be?

>>465783
Why do you think people come to market if they have no consideration whatsoever? If there is no law and no society, there are no stable markets, and someone who have an imperative to get rich will just take it from someone else, i.e. the things empires did for a long time. You have capitalism in the first place because there were people who decided setting up markets, and then laws and institutions to protect those markets, was preferable to having war and everyone at war with everyone else. If you have anarchism, you don't have conditions that allow for capitalism to exist - you have some sort of abject slavery or Ingsoc where there is no law but power.
So, you are being idealist and incredibly retarded to boot. Or do you believe markets are just natural? Why not just out yourself as an Austrian Schooler?

>>465783
And to make this clearer to you - what do you think money is? It is issued by states or merchants who have the ability to say "this is valuable". Without regular price-setting markets, which only exist because people cooperate enough to even enter market relations, you don't have capitalism. It didn't just happen by some inertia. People can and did choose to piss on the market. General commodity production was a thing the consumer at market wanted to avoid. It is far better to remain self-sufficient then to pay a merchant who can gouge prices. You only have a situation where merchants are compelled to operate with a basic level of honesty in their dealings because there are laws and customs preventing dishonesty or merchants just deciding they're going to take your shit. When you have a situation where the bank takes all of your shit, and decides they want to liquidate the middle class - the bourgeoisie save for a few very rich oligarchs - you no longer have the conditions of capitalism. You have a slave society, where profit is no longer a concern, because the rich own everything and no one else can make profit. Any profit a little person makes is just taken immediately by the oligarchy.

I don't know how much more I have to spell this out to you.

>>465784
>Why do you think people come to market if they have no consideration whatsoever?
That has nothing to do with anything.
>If there is no law and no society, there are no stable markets
Hence no "free" markets.
>You have capitalism in the first place because there were people who decided setting up markets
Ahistorical bullshit.
>If you have anarchism, you don't have conditions that allow for capitalism to exist - you have some sort of abject slavery or Ingsoc where there is no law but power.
LOL, mob rule.
>>465785
>And to make this clearer to you - what do you think money is?
Top lel! Are you sure you want to go down that rabbit hole, fucknut?
>Without regular price-setting markets, which only exist because people cooperate enough to even enter market relations, you don't have capitalism.
Cooperation never had fuckall to do with capitalism. Isn't that the basis of your entire economic philosophy?
>You only have a situation where merchants are compelled to operate with a basic level of honesty in their dealings
As if.
>When you have a situation where the bank takes all of your shit, and decides they want to liquidate the middle class - the bourgeoisie save for a few very rich oligarchs - you no longer have the conditions of capitalism.
Lol, yes you are. If capital is still predominantly how production is done, then you have capitalism.
>Any profit a little person makes is just taken immediately by the oligarchy.
Huh-duhhhhhhh…
>I don't know how much more I have to spell this out to you.
Your dumb ass should learn your ABCs before you start trying to lecture.

>>465789
>Itt dunning Kruger

Imagine how much better your life would be if you devoted some of the time you spend typing angry gotcha posts to improving yourself and immediate surroundings

>>465789
Last I checked, there was still a law and an expectation that someone can go to a supermarket and buy their shit. If you didn't have the conditions that made capitalism possible, supermarkets would not be possible. It's difficult to maintain a market during a serious siege. The market is not something that is wholly natural, as if humans formed markets as soon as the concept was conceivable. Primtiive society did not have markets, and a "market" used to be a time of the week/month where vendors assembled anywhere for trading rather than an established facility, depending on where you were. The condition of general commodity exchange and liberal property rights only came about because many developments made it possible, and the situation allowing this was known to be fragile from the outset. The capitalist arrangement would obviously fail if you did a program like neoliberalism, and that is intended. The rulers do not need capitalism and do not want it, because capitalism would entail an extant middle class that has no reason to accept the level of wealth disparity the oligarchy wants, and the oligarchy does not want a middle class that needs to be paid off with luxuries and entertainment and brainwashing. That shit is not cheap.

This is why it is so exasperating to talk to you. You're awfully confident after saying the stupidest shit. I'm explaining very very basic shit about what a market is, and you're doubling down on this idea of a spooky force that compels men to conform to highly specific models you have in your mind about society. Who is the idealist? You've lost the plot.

>>465791
You're arguing with a midwit who thinks in hyperbole
>You're awfully confident after saying the stupidest shit.
Pretty much a walking example of
>The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[2] whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

>>465792
Yeah I know the Dunning-Kruger thing. This is something on a whole other level. It's not so much a lack of competence, but a total lack of any sensical foundation for us to hold an intelligible conversation. That's what a lack of understanding of metaphysics does to a motherfucker if it is left unattended - you are left with nothing but speaking of tautologies to each others' faces and the simplest understandings are no longer possible in discussion. The skilled manipulator knows exactly what he is doing, but the poison is so extensive that people actually believe this shit. It's the only way to sell this wholly artificial reality where China is totally socialist. It's insane.

>>465771
What the fuck are you talking about? You obviously lack reading comprehinsion. Kill yourself you stupid midwit faggot uyghur.

I never said capitalism was any of that. I merely am pointing out the imperatives that you are saying drive capitalism are fucking bullshit. It doesn't matter if they can't win or cannot loose; Ye they can it happens all the fucking time and you live in a fantasty world. I am not saying humans have no agency they obviously do (though we could seriously argue the route of determinism.) but you cannot understand that humans are influenced by the objective world. You're literally calling materialism idealism and vice versa because you are a dumb midwit uyghur. Go back to your infrared hug box transhumanist fbi.gov.

Like what you are saying makes zero sense because you ignore the fact that even if capitalism has crystalized into an oligopolic state that the profit motive STILL drives human interaction. God damn you are such a fucking retard

>>465789
Capitalism is anarchy.
First of all.

>>465797
>you live in a fantasty world
He raged-typed, which he sincerely believed was part of his important and impactful political activism against capitalism

>>465797
Okay now your argument is incoherent… so you say imperatives are bullshit, yet the capitalist is driven by some force to seek profit in all circumstances. Is the capitalist a mindless producer? Is he buffeted around by social engineers who cajoled him to do this, who have access to some super-truth that allows them and them alone to determine history? The profit motive is an imperative. The way it is enforced is that capitalists who don't seek profit fail in conditions of perfect competition. It is assumed the capitalist has agency in order for this natural behavior to exist. The capitalist cannot control at will the entire productive process - he has to reckon with the reality that he has to pay workers to do things for him, whether he pays in wages or buys slaves which amounts to the same thing in general commodity production.

A profit motive is not inborn in humans (showing your eugenist side, I can tell). Humans don't have a drive for "profit" built into them, because you need money and stable markets to conceive of "profit". There is arguably a propensity to "truck and barter" as Adam Smith claims, but this claim is not the same as a commitment to profitability in general commodity production. What Adam Smith is saying is that basically humans have an ability to make deals, whatever the situation they find themselves in, and these deals are not motivated inherently by justice but by some cunning in humans that is a faculty they possess. In this claim, humans are not destined like automata to screw each other. Entering a market is a choice. It can be a choice made under duress, because any alternative to survive outside of the market is enclosed - that's what Marx spends the closing of Capital vol. 1 describing in detail as the origin of general commodity production. I've seen this get strawmanned by bad parodies of Marxists, to claim that liberals are saying if you leave everything alone it will work out fine. It is assumed that rational people have an interest in fairness, which is why you have regulation of market activity to prevent obviously gross ripoffs and a level of intellectual honesty about what the market is. This is more for the middle class, because the workers were not seen as having any rights as such, but it wasn't as if the workers were fooled or tricked into being workers. The workers were fucked and told "work under these terms, or die". When this happened, it was understood the lower grades of wage workers were entering a slave-like relationship with the bourgeoisie, not necessarily as individuals but by being subordinated to the city and the bourgeoisie's institutions and laws, and so the workers encounter things like urban police and strikebreakers in addition to the boss's whip and control over their lives.
If the profit motive is eternal, you've basically declared that capitalism doesn't matter and that the same motive would exist in any other system, including socialism. If the profit motive is not eternal but something people do because the situation calls for it, then it is an imperative rather than a basic inborn behavior or some hobgoblin moving people like the demiurge. Obviously you've just defeated any purpose to cybersocialism because you've considered managerial rule a fait accompli and ordained by nature, which makes all of your claims suspect. If you actually understood cybernetics, you would see automating governing could be used for good or bad - the point is to get rid of the manager, because the managerial task is the easiest of all. If you want to make the managerial task absolute and insist workers will need to be cajoled infinitely, you're going to push a rock uphill. Such a tyranny would be like chasing your tail. The system will never work. That's what I could spot right away in Cockshott's proposals. You'd really need a moral philosophy compatible with cooperation to even begin, and that is beyond you if you speak of people like they're thoughtless animals. You would have to accept that people want things besides money, and that is true of capitalists. The capitalist isn't doing this because of some impulse or blind avarice, but because money has political meaning in a capitalist society. You get money so you have security and freedom to act, and part of that freedom is the command of others' labor. If the money comes at the expense of any genuine security, then capitalism is undesirable except for those who can wall themselves in gated communities, as it has happened. That was Marx's argument against capitalism to the bourgeoisie - that if this keeps up, most of them would be screwed.

I don't know how many more go-arounds will be necessary for you to get it, if this is even possible. I know you actually do believe the shit coming out of your mouth, which makes this conversation even sadder. If you were a troll I'd just do my thing and move on, but you are genuinely suffering because of your faulty thinking, to the point where your arguments have become incoherent and self-contradictory.

>>465801
This is what you don't understand: The profit motivation is systemic to the system of capitalism. It doesn't need to be ingrained in humans to function as the deus machina. It is the soul imperative of the system which is what Marx was trying to drive home. Why do people need to consciously be aware of something in order to be effected by it? Do white people unaware of the systemic bias that the current order has against block people need to be aware of that to function? No. It is systemic and rests outside of the real of conscious influence. Even if people consciously believe one thing the forces behind them are in motion regardless.

If the capitalist fails to accrue profit he will loose his power. Period. Capital is power, period.
It's like thinking people need to be aware of the forces of gravity to be effected by them. It's nonsensical idealism.

>>465849
Oh my god, reading comprehension. Jesus. You have to be trolling to be this obtuse and self-contradictory. This is what dialectics does to a motherfucker.

Guys reading, this guy is lifting Malthus' argument and making it eternal. This is why you don't do that - it's circular and Satanic. It really is. This shit corrodes the brain.
Nice of you to rehash the "systemic racism" dodge to mystify what nearly all black Americans can tell you about the racist shit they sense. White people are not stupid. They know exactly what the real score is and always have. They wouldn't behave as they do if they were truly ignorant, and those who are ignorant tend not to do racist shit because the default stance for normal people in this society is "everyone should get along and be nice". Nice to know you want to mystify race too.

>>465862
This is cope from a huge faggot who knows he's been bested.
Seethe.

Also I never said capitalism is "eternal" something doesn't have to be "eternal" in order to have objective forces acting under it. You're a faggot log off and touch grass.

>>465865
>This is cope from a huge faggot who knows he's been bested.
He rage-typed from a dirty, clutter filled room

>>465868
Do you have anything to actually say though?

>>465873
Yes, quit being a faggot and take a bit of criticism

>>465881
Don't fill the board up with hundreds of haphazardly constructed shitposts because you have no answers to peoples retorts to you.

>>465865
You haven't beaten anything. You won't even engage with substantive matters and keep going back to the same mystification. That's autistic, and it's a game certain people play where they make people "debate" on dishonest terms. I've learned the best way to defeat that is to just talk past the mystifiers and go straight to the crowd, the rest of the people on the forum watching. When it works, the mystifier blows up. They really hate people showing proper contempt for their entire practice.

>>465801
>That's what I could spot right away in Cockshott's proposals. You'd really need a moral philosophy compatible with cooperation to even begin.

You think Cybernetic socialism like what Cockshott and Cotrell have written about, needs a dedicated moral philosophy that empathizes cooperation. I think moral philosophy falls under the category of superstructure that upholds the economic base.

I guess it makes sense that a cybernetic socialist economy would have it's own superstructure too.
Is it really necessary to invent that beforehand ?
Can't you just build the economic base, and let the superstructure figure it self out ?

>>465891
I have "enguaged" with your argument. I am pointing out that right out of the gate you have the cart before the house and you have done nothing but call me names and be a dick and your last few posts have not actually given any substantive response. Just ad-hominem.

Again. I never said capitalism was "eernal" you are putting words in my mouth. People don't need to know how gravity works in order for it to effect them. In the same way people don't need to know how the profit motive works for it to effect them. That's preposterous.

I think we would get somewhere better if we could both stop being so hostile to one another, though. If you want my honest opinion.

>>465891
>>465897
Hey, how about this–you two restate your respective theses.

>>465897
No I'm not going to passive against a bigoted racist asshole trying to sell ideology and call it "the science". Since you conceded that morality is a spook, you've already given up the claim that anything we do is meaningful beyond an observation. If that is true, why should there be any revolution or anything at all? Humanity will just default to imperial command and control, which is what you want, because you'd rather be a tinpot dictator and feel good about yourself than think of anything else.

>>465899
I didn't have a "thesis", I pointed out some very obvious characteristics of politics, and posted a long text file which he refuses to even read because I don't have time to recapitulate an entire theory. He won't engage with it, because he doesn't have an answer. He is being autistic and seems convinced of his superiority. I wouldn't care, except shit like his has made it impossible to have any constructive discussion on the internet, and we just echo the same faggotry ad nauseum. He doesn't want anything to change. So, why should I do anything but show contempt? I would very much like to get back to the OP's topic of what the left is in this day and age, because at present it is nothing. Poison like this guy's autism is a contributor to the problem.

>>465901
Ah I mixed up threads, since he's being autistic in another thread. Anyway the falling rate of profit thing was never an ecological claim, which is what certain people want to do so they can reimagine Marxism as reactionary drivel. I wrote this before and will say it again that the TRPF is primarily concerning the Machine Question rather than some "essential nature" of capitalism. The rate of profit falls because more and more machinery and dead labor is part of the productive process, and this is pursued because capitalism had in the past incentive for the participants to invest in machinery so that competitors could attain profits. The end of meaningful competition in monopoly conditions meant the end of that problem. If you are a monopolist, you don't care about profit, because you can extract rent and just declare you win. Certain autistic behaviors seek to tell us there is no capitalist and no monopolists, and this is some ghoul claiming to be for the workers and the people. It's one of the many ways in which there is no left any more, just this shit that no one who thinks for a minute would ever want to join. It's pure autism.

More to the point, the focus of the "new left" shifted from attacking the rich to attacking the middle strata of capital, while aligning with the ruling oligarchy that was more managerial and ecological in its outlook. This alliance is represented most of all by eugenics and the shared interest of an intellectual elite and its institutions with the commanding heights of the ruling arrangement. The middling, failed capitalists understood their part of the bargain as a belief that they would still keep theirs, and it turns out they won't. The workers and the vast majority of people are screwed, not even allowed the dignity of being slaves. That is too much for us, and the only thing in the future is depopulation, unless something changes very soon.

>>465903
>More to the point, the focus of the "new left" shifted from attacking the rich to attacking the middle strata of capital, while aligning with the ruling oligarchy that was more managerial and ecological in its outlook.
That's true except for one part, the ruling oligarchy isn't ecological in its outlook.
It just pretends to be, because they think they can green wash austerity for the masses.

>>465901
>I didn't have a "thesis"
Okay, you have fun.

>>465904
I mean ecological in the sense that they concern themselves more with controlling the space than controlling labor directly. The people are considered animals, and are controlled to the extent that is necessary - some are allowed to be free range animals as long as they facilitate the ruling program, while the key functionaries are not only controlled individually, but their space is controlled, and they are controlled by total control of their environment. That was the break in understanding value that the noobs didn't catch onto - that the rulers had long ago moved past this liberal "atomistic" idea. That was only for the losers and the slaves, who were all alone against the institutions. Anyone suggesting that there are no institutions and everything is individual is a fed.

No one cares about protecting the environment for us - quite the opposite, the "green" initiatives are entirely about controlling space, rather than any preservation of resources. We would save far more resources simply by not prioritizing death and despair in everything we do, where we glorify the professions actively harming people and shame the honest as retards and fools. For many reasons though, humanity those that, because they just hate us that much.

>>465906
I would hope you didn't need to be told basic shit about what politics even means. This is like a dumb uyghur being rewarded for saying the stupidest shit, to keep them in the dark and enslaved. The slave masters love people like that, just smart enough to make the other slaves miserable.

>>465900
>You said the n word on this imageboard so you are racist waaawaaa

Ok Well you keep dodging my points anyways so I am done here.

>>465902
>If you are a monoplist you don't care about profit

Yes, you do though, because you still need to retain positive revenue or your corporation will fall apart eventually. You have not made a single argument against this point. This is the point I have been making the whole time and the contention between the two of us.
Every time I point this out you just call me names and proceed to shit up the board like a petulant child. I might be an asshole and I will admit that, but, I am an asshole who is simultaneously presenting a point which you have failed to do several times over now. To say that companies with virtual monopolies don't care about profit is the same as saying that scientists don't care about thermodynamics.

>>465910
My god you are literally a retarded child. I spelled this out to you god knows how many times and you just repeat the pure autism because you refuse to think at all. It's just mindless automation. You're hopeless.

>>465911
No you haven't. You just keep repeating it like it's truth with out actually deducing why. "Cause I said so" is not an argument.

>>465914
That is your argument. I have laid out the mechanism at work in monopoly - the capitalist is no longer under serious competitive pressure with rival firms. The imperative for profit exists because a rival capitalist is imagined that would buy you out. If you are a monopoly, you have no rivals. Your imperatives then become those of anyone who has something to defend. That is the first imperative before you can speak of imperatives of an economic system, because the economic system is always comprised of social agents - people - regardless of what society may be. I'll try to lay it out to you AGAIN since you cannot read, though this is for people who might be reading this.

Capitalism is not capitalism, and capital is not capital, if there are no capitalists and no one in the market. The entire premise of capitalism is the liberal subject acting in this fashion, rather than some other fashion, because strangely we didn't always do things with the expectation that "the market" was the concern that it is today. Past societies had currency and markets and economic crises, but they did not have stock markets or joint-stock companies that a middle class invested in and served. A slave owner is not motivated by profit in the same way a capitalist would be. He is motivated by wealth and all the things that he must do to maintain his property, so long as he wishes to utilize his property in this way, but the right to his slaves won't be revoked if the line doesn't go up. He's not in a society where shared investments in the stock market motivate a large class of investors. His investment is in slaves and landed property, and his imperatives are in accord with that.

Even in a capitalist society, the imperative for profit is not the sole imperative, because capitalists are proprietors and people rather than machines. It has never been the sole imperative, and no one who studies political economy would make such a stupid claim. Profitability is a requirement in general, but it is not a requirement in the short-term - a company can lose a lot of money for years but survive. This is how Amazon started - it lost miillions of dollars per year over a decade, but the investment was not for profit but the uses Amazon's services mean for the oligarchy. It was worthwhile to do this for the class as a whole, and the money to allow this was not by selling products to people, but extracting already existing wealth, which included all that property the struggling middle class acquired - which is why everyone's house is mortgaged and they're deep in debt to the bank, in a rigged economy that is intended to weed out anyone who isn't going to make it into the new society, when capitalism is abandoned as it is now.

The only natural imperatives are those of the social agents themselves to remain social agents - that is, people have an imperative to survive if they want to maintain a society, and for a society with laws and regular practices to persist, the society must first be able to reconstitute the social agents day after day. That is the first requirement before there can be any stable society which can be assumed to act "passively". Even these natural imperatives aren't really natural - people can choose to die if they like, but if they're dead, they can't remain social or political agents. Staying alive has some definite requirements, among them food and security against other humans. That is the origin of politics - not that humans just happen to do politics, but that being a political animal makes sense for a lot of basic reasons, which you usually learn as a child and up to your teenage years. It is a characteristic of our time that some poor children are lied to from birth and fed a completely maladaptive, autistic, and retarded ideology. It is that which you suffer from, and once the cycle starts, it is a living Hell to get out of it.

At the macro level, the concern of every ruling institution is to continue ruling - and it is institutions and actual people who rule, not "systems" or "ideas". The imperial concern takes precedence over some belief that a system must be perpetuated, because the empire is necessary for there to be any system. Capitalism is at heart an imperial system rather than the imagined assembly of petty shopkeepers and managers. Without the empire, capitalism could not last long, and the imperial operations are always at the commanding heights, just as they would be in any other imperial arrangement. Capitalism is understood as a situation - no one decided exactly "we're going capitalism", but there was an inquiry as to why and how this imperial wealth existed in the first place, and that is an origin of the free trade idea. Allowing a middle class to buy into the stock market and join the imperial cult of Mammon was a way to reconstitute the empire, which began the transformation from the state being little more than a glorified warlord and his court to the bureaucratic state of today. It was never about atomized subjects and those who thought that was the takeaway did not understand what the imperial project was. Eventually, men figure out what money really is and what they're being made to work for, some later than others.

All of this used to be a pretty basic understanding - i.e., it was assumed you knew these things and weren't autistic. Everyone involved in writing about economics is aware of these things on some level, and does not expect that those basic political imperatives of survival and empire will go away because you pretend they don't exist. Even the anarchists don't really pretend they go away - they just mystify and reduce the state purely to its pretenses, so they can have a very repressive state in the name of "freedom".

>>465915
Is this uygha seriously trying to argue that a monopoly isn't beholden to the profit demands of its shareholders? Only in a monopoly owned and ruled by a single benevolent philosopher king would this ever be true.

>>465917
Monopolies don't want to pay out dividends if they can just hoard all of the money for a few really rich guys and the CEOs. That's what happened starting in the 1980s - a few guys get really rich by plundering the giants of old capitalism and plundering every country in the world. The shareholders - that is, all those people invested in the stock market - get nothing, and a fake paper economy is maintained temporarily to pay off the ever-shrinking middle class. Increasingly, the only people who own stock are the very rich, who own all of the stuff. Why would those very few people be motived to accumulate more when they can cannibalize the very middle class that was formerly paying in to build capitalism?

Nice to know you consider such people to be benevolent, but you gave away what you really are, or you really are too stupid to see your head from your ass. You bought into a program the oligarchs fucking love, and you didn't get a damn thing from it. Idiot.

It's well known that the stock market is fake, and trading is dominated by bots and conducted by hedge funds. It's not as if you, middle class investor, are making decisions for your portfolio any more. That's too risky, and the winners of the new capitalism - what's left of it - are selected long in advance. Amazon won despite losing money for over a decade, because it would be funded by the oligarchy to accomplish a mission with retail and the other shit Amazon does. Technology companies don't sell a product or make a profit in the main. The only companies in tech that make money off a product are able to strongarm everyone into buying their software or else - think Microsoft. Everyone else is getting peanuts, because the real money in tech is the largesse given by the oligarchy to prop it up. The behavior of the oligarchy is more akin to a planned economy than the anarchy you imagine. So, I don't know what world you think you're living in.

>>465918
>Increasingly, the only people who own stock are the very rich, who own all of the stuff
This isn't true in the slightest.
The general gist of what your saying about oligarchy may be true, but the notion that no one owns stock except the wealthy is far off the mark.
In fact, it's a key blindspot of leftoid marxists a refusal to acknowledge that a significant proportion of Americans are petty capital owners via investments and retirement funds.
That said, 'ownership' of capital and 'control' of capital are two different things, and the latter is what the ruling class ultimately bases itself on. But, mass 'capital investment' schemes are a great way to coopt the masses and create a comfy corporatist atmosphere (minus the jingoist rhetoric, of course).

Basically, in burgerstan, you'd literally have to have subhuman intelligence to not own a bit of stock, either directly in something like a Charles Schwab account or through a IRA retirement fund. This, of course, weds the interests of workers to capital.

I assume this is too much nuance and comrade dunning kruger will be firing off invectives any second.

>>465920
>a significant proportion of Americans are petty capital owners via investments and retirement funds.
LOL, uyghur please! Do you still think this is 2007? 401ks are a fucking joke.

>>465921
There are a lot of Americans who were and still are dependent on the pension funds, but it's well known that the pensions aren't actually funded and were a scam. Everything from Reagan on was pure, unmitigated, shameless scamming, and the idiots on the television danced like Satanic retards as the real plan was implemented - as two generations would be poisoned and degraded, before the big cull began. I was trying to sound the alarn during the 2010s and the usual idiots jumped up and down like retards saying that depopulation was necessary and there were too many people. This is on the left. Now that the lethal injections are happening, you're "allowed" to speak - when it is too late to stop what is set in motion, and when all channels of communication are tightly controlled.
I made my comment to say that this is the direction things were going, not that we were fully there yet. There is still a middle class clinging to their stocks and property for dear life, because the family home is the last bit that hasn't been taken away from them. If you have a 401K you're invested in the stock market, and most people have something like that. So the fictitious stocks are not just propping up a comfortable middle class but everything people came to rely on. Everything about the American Empire is propped up by lies and more lies. Nothing in America works and it isn't intended to work. You don't want anything to work under conditions of depopulation, because if anything works, people will hide from depopulation. Even the purge mechanism is only as efficient as it needs to be to ensure that depopulation happens and the behavioral modification occurs as the generational plan calls for it - no sooner and no later. Only a moderate level of competence is desired so that the more troublesome cases are neutralized. It is much preferable to control the residuum by poisoning them and bombarding them with "die die die die die" then it is to have effective police and control mechanisms. If the control mechanisms are held by people who are too compentent, the police and guard labor and all the people tasked with killing the residuum would see that they have a machine that could purge the masters very easily, and do just that.

>>465922
>Now that the lethal injections are happening, you're "allowed" to speak - when it is too late to stop what is set in motion, and when all channels of communication are tightly controlled.
Imagine having taken the coof vaccine lol. The scamdemic was kinda a litmus test for who on the left were NPCs. Some passed. Most didn't

>>465915
That's not what I am doing or have done at all. Again, with out profitability a corporation will die. Said this multiple times. It's a-pirori true. I never said either that profit was the SOUL imperative. I said that profit is the fundamental imperative that shapes everything else. Every system is a way to organize labor and capitalism does this through the profit motive. This is very, extremely, basic Marxism. You are just a seething lying butthurt faggot. I tried to be nice and you want to cont to be a faggot so you can just suck a million dicks in heel you massive retard. You have no idea what you are talking about.

A company cannot exist with out profit but a company can exist with out power.

>>465924
Holy Jesus, you really are autistic.
I'm trying to help you. I really am. It's sad to see someone talk this much bullshit.

>>465923
And the rounding up of anyone on the streets who looks funny, and the buildup of the state in preparation for a general purge.
You aren't going to survive that unless you're one of the assholes. Certainly there are people on the left who are ready to join fascism - that was the signal that came out. The left had been trained to look for the Boogaloo moment and they got it. The price is anything worth fighting for, because whatever you get after they're done won't be worth living in… and you aren't getting that even. You're just getting a bunch of faggotry.
Letting them do COVID and rolling over to enable it is all the proof needed that the left is irrelevant at this point, or worse, it is actively harmful and designed to feed into the worst our lords and masters want to do to us. That's why the left spaces are so toxic and disgusting. No one would want to join that. Really, that is what the left was at heart - just pure nastiness. I hate to say because I fucking despise the right more than anything, but the left at present is no opposition. They prop each other up and they're filled with retarded ideologues. There's nothing real there.

Also, normal people have jobs that are under threat, so congrats on enabling a purge to make sure only Nazis have a place in the world to come. But hey, you have a snarky Boogaloo and get to say stupid shit on the internet, as impotent as the left always has been! What a fucking joke you all are.

>>465925
Yeah i think you are correct, none of the capitalists can rise above the profit logic of the system entirely, tho they can subvert some of the system.

I think the other anon has in effect already conceded this point to you, but instead of admitting it, he just attempts to socially discredit you.

>>465927
Couldn't that profit logic apply to socialist states as well.

I.e., they would only be able to outlay resources below what they accrue, at least over the long term

Or a hermit, who, over the long term, would need to secure more calories than they expend acquiring them.

Perhaps I'm a retard, but I'm failing to see the case scenario where either an individual or organization can stay around for long if it expends more resources that it acquires - i.e., if its costs exceed exceeds revenue.

The US government may be an exception, only because it prints money that the rest of the world uses. But even that's a bit of a shell game that the rest of the world is waking up to.

>>465927
The lingering need of profitability to keep the charade going has been understood as a weakness of the system, rather than something to aspire to. There seems to be this perverse logic that the people at the top of the system personally lose from an economic crisis, when the exact opposite is the case. The very powerful love crisis because that is when they can buy out their competitors for pennies on the dollar. It always worked that way in capitalist crises - there are those positioned to win the scenario, and it is the lower orders of capital that get fucked, which turns against the workers and ultimately the residuum are the scapegoats. The residuum that manage to find work are the first fired and will always be the escape hatch - as long as there is someone to kick down, the workers will never rebel, because they will be given the option of going after those deemed unworthy. The only way to eliminate this possibility is if there is no residuum, or there is a willingness to set aside the ancient hatred of the residuum against a greater enemy, which would require the lower and middle classes to accept that they're going to face poisoning to degrade their status and they'll have to salvage the damaged of their own ranks. So long as the contending classes can be shamed into submission through fear of what the beast will do to them, so long as they see the lowest class as the Other to be feared more than the masters, there was no serious possibility of a mass uprising. This is why the first thing a socialist would have understood was the need to improve the conditions of the lowest class, and that is where eugenics understood its alliance would be found - to mark those selected to die and suffer, and threaten the valid with the same status if they didn't get with the program.

What is profit, except human suffering? Who bears the brunt of that suffering and contempt? It is always the poor sods at the bottom who get the ritual sacrifice. When there weren't enough crazy or retarded people, the ruling institutions poisoned generation after generation and did everything possible to make a Malthusian crisis happen, with the losers selected in advance. That is what was done from 1970-2020, and then they pushed the button. So, it's too late to change that now. Those who are rallying to the eugenic cause have chosen their side. Only thing that remains is to see how much suck this will be, and if there is any countervailing force at all. I highly doubt it - eugenics is the only idea that is taken seriously at this point, and to go against it at this point would mean cancelling the purge against a residuum that has been prepared for maximal torture for two generations. I just got to be an example of things to come. You all are going to be treated the way I was as a kid, without the false hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. They see you as retarded and will make you retarded come hell or high water, and no pride can save you.

>>465929
Profit and wealth inflow are different things. Profit is realized in very particular ways, while wealth/energy can come from simply taking it. Neoliberalism entailed taking back the home and cannibalizing everything in sight to feed the rot. Such is the logic of depopulation. There's no profit in the work of a repo man, but it feeds the institutions that need it vast sums of wealth, and it disciplines the people to comply - or else. None of this project has been voluntary or oriented towards some productive goal. The only thing that is produced are new methods of controlling and degrading the subjects. The rulers do not want to produce anything, and keep saying how industry and growth and productivity are evil.

None of these organizations operate alone. At the apex of any ruling system, there is a bank and a treasury that has the final say in law. States require a bank if they want to be anything, even if that bank is a foreign power. If you want to be really rich, you form your own bank, or better yet a banking cartel - that's what Standard Oil did to make the most of their monopoly. The history of Standard Oil can be found and it's very fascinating how much this was just there, and that's just one bank. At the time when Standard Oil was big, everyone knew what they were and that they got ahold of the bank. Lenin makes reference to the American banking interest because that was understood to be the real governing interest in America at the time. It would have been standard to acknowledge where the real apex of capitalism was - the banks and those with the greatest leverage to set policy and position themselves in every crisis. This doesn't prevent oligarchs from fighting each other, but there is no good reason why they would attack each other. They're not stupid enough to believe in the ideology of eternal essential struggle among themselves. That ideology is for the slaves and the retards.

>>465882
>A majority of OPs here are from 1 shit poster.
Was this supposed to be interpreted as something other than an L for you?

I've told you guys thousands of times. No one (but u) is preventing you from posting interesting OC content. Given your high opinion of yourself, I'm surprised it's so difficult. I literally keep waiting for the super valuable contributions you have to offer in the form of OC, but it never materializes. Very strange.

>>465929
>Couldn't that profit logic apply to socialist states as well.
Not really, maybe in lower-stage socialism.

But i think you make an error, profit is not related to resources.
You are confusing capitalist accounting with money (like cost and revenue) as material reality like resources. Look beyond the monetary veil too see material reality. Profit is expropriated labor. (see definition for more details)

A fully realized socialism certainly won't have profit.
But that doesn't mean socialist societies lack the ability to expand their resource supply or grow their economy. Socialist societies decide their own fate, as self-governing collectives, they just give them self's the permission to do that.

>>465931
>There seems to be this perverse logic that the people at the top of the system personally lose from an economic crisis, when the exact opposite is the case. The very powerful love crisis because that is when they can buy out their competitors for pennies on the dollar. It always worked that way in capitalist crises
Yes crisis accelerates the consolidation of capital into fewer hands.
Big capital eating the small capital leads to an over all drop in the rate of profit, but for the individual big capitalists it means their profits increase, at least in the short term.
In the long term the falling rate of profit also hits the big capitalists.

As for the predatory tactics like austerity and other degrading inhumanities of class society, that is causing a demographic decline induced labor shortage, and in the long run that will restore the political power of labor.

>>465934
>A fully realized socialism certainly won't have profit.
Who's labor supports the bureacracy and military

>>465941
>When the proletariat hires soldiers for it's defense, it's the same as when capitalists hire soldiers for conquering.
Sorry but that doesn't check out.

Also profit is not the same as surplus.
A socialist society can have economic surplus too.
The difference to capitalism is that the proletariat decides how much surplus they give and what the surplus is spend on, rather than the capitalists deciding that.

If you don't have surplus that means nobody works for more than just bare survival.
the implication is that if socialism is defined as not having surplus, that would prevent it from investing. Like for example improving the productive forces, having state services like infrastructure, health and education.
The general thrust of this line of argumentation is that only the ruling class may be allowed to direct surplus. That is you being an NPC regurgitating ruling ideology.
Of course we don't need capitalist to invest in development and civilization. They just want you to think that.

>>465943
>The difference to capitalism is that the proletariat decides how much surplus they give and what the surplus is spend on, rather than the capitalists deciding that.
Aww, I see. In the Soviet union and pre Deng China, the workers themselves decided how much surplus they gave the state and what it was spent on. That makes sense and totally sounds like the truth…
Lol literally clown shit

>>465944
Actually Existing Socialism in the 20th century did have high quotas for lifting people with a labor background into decision making positions. So within the limitations of that era they did genuinely try to have labor power decide over surplus allocation.

They did have relative success, if you compare AES20th countries with similarly developed capitalist countries, much more surplus was directed by and for the workers, even if it was very bureaucratic. If you compare that with a corporate bureaucracy allocating surplus on behalf of the big bourgeoisie, AES20th doesn't look half-bad. Even if it had really big problems.

You are correct that AES20th didn't poll the entire working class about their priorities for surplus allocation. That's something that wasn't really possible with the communication technology of those times. Doing that with paper would have meant insurmountable overhead.

With technology of the current era, it's relatively simple and efficient to do this. So there's no reason to be dismissive about the idea of the working class deciding about the allocation of surplus.

>>465945
>Actually Existing Socialism in the 20th century did have high quotas for lifting people with a labor background into decision making positions
Ya, Khrushchev did wonders for the ICM too
>directed by.. workers even if it was very bureacratic
No contradiction there
>With technology of the current era, it's relatively simple and efficient to do this. So there's no reason to be dismissive about the idea of the working class deciding about the allocation of surplus.
Yes, in the ideal system that exists only in your imagination, I'm sure it all works out perfectly
<Honk honk

>AES20th doesn't look half-bad. Even if it had really big problems.
This is the only part I agree with. AES solved a lot of problems while engendering others. The difference being, I don't pretend like a ruling elite caste/class didn't exist. I don't pretend like the working class wasn't effectively exploited, or that their lives were some leisurely paradise of plenty.
Like I said, it was trading in a set of problems associated with bare monopoly capitalism for a set of problems (perhaps better problems) associated with bureacratic state capitalism.

>>465946
>No contradiction there
You can have efficient bureaucracy that mostly works, it can be a useful tool.
Corporations are basically just privatized bureaucracies, but nobody screams muh burocraticness on that end, it's only when somebody suggests that this tool can be used on behalf of the working class, when they big REEEEing starts.

I get it bureaucracies are annoying to deal with, but somehow that's only recognized when the working class is the beneficiary.

>In the ideal system
I'm not suggesting that using telecommunication technology for polling labor-preferences about surplus allocation is an ideal system. Please avoid attacking a strawman caricature of my argument.

>>465947
There are two ways to go about this.

The first is recognizing what the short-comings of previous attempts at building socialism were, and that leads down a constructive path where you can find ways to improve upon it.

The second is to just declare the Soviet system and the other type of socialisms to not be any different than capitalism, and that leads into a dead-end where you think history has ended and nothing can ever change.

Guess which way the ruling class wants you to go.

>>465948

We were originally talking about how
>the proletariat decides how much surplus they give and what the surplus is spend on, rather than the capitalists deciding that.
You then noted that, well, actually no, it's a bureacracy that decides, but it's practically the same thing (it's not).

>Corporations are basically just privatized bureaucracies,
I think you mean corporate management, but sure.

>But nobody screams muh burocraticness on that end, it's only when somebody suggests that this tool can be used on behalf of the working class, when they big REEEEing starts.
People 'reeh' because it's a naive fantasy that never plays out that well in reality. And top heavy management structures are typically seen, even by capitalists, as inefficient from a profit-maximizing perspective.

What typically happens in the socialist context is that the bureacracy itself begins to form something of a ruling caste/class.

>I get it bureaucracies are annoying to deal with, but somehow that's only recognized when the working class is the beneficiary.
>Omg, why won't you ignore something that is an obvious flaw in my fantasy

>Please avoid attacking a strawman caricature of my argument.
I'm sorry. Did you not state that the proletariat itself decides the amount and allocation of surplus given to the state before backtracking and admitting that the state bureacracy itself decides?

>In the ideal system
>I'm not suggesting that using telecommunication technology for polling labor-preferences about surplus allocation is an ideal system. Please avoid attacking a strawman caricature of my argument.
No, I said it was a system that only exists in your imagination and thus appears to you as ideal. Please don't strawman me..

>>465950
>There are two ways to go about this…
Agreed.
Which of the AES countries have you spent considerable time in to learn from and improve upon?

>>465951
>originally talking about how the proletariat decides over surplus
>You then noted that, well, actually no, it's a bureacracy that decides, but it's practically the same thing (it's not).
You are mischaracterizing my point.
At a technological level that only allows for a paper based information system, the best you can achieve in terms of creating a system that lets the workers decide over surplus, is a bureaucratic system that has a very high quota of laborers in decision making positions.

If you level up the technology tree to digital information systems, you can create a much better system that allows for labor decision power over surplus to a much larger degree.

Over time the possibilities for implementing labor control over surplus are improving.
The Soviet system had some successes of realizing labor control over surplus, but also many failures.
The next attempt at this was perhaps Cyber-syn in Chile, although it was violently interrupted, you could see signs that people were making improvements on the core concepts.
There will be future attempts, and those will be able to utilize much better technology and that will probably yield much better results.

>it's a naive fantasy that never plays out that well in reality.
But It's neither naive nor a fantasy, the technical base and the core concepts are rigorously rooted in realism.
It's beyond obvious every ruling class will put a lot of ideological effort into instilling the idea that a world without them is not possible.
You are not providing a counter argument but rather are attempting to socially discredit the ideas that <surplus allocation doesn't need a ruling class.
<society doesn't need a ruling class.

You can prove me wrong, saying something that breaks with current ruling ideology, that a ruling class is inevitable and indispensable.

>And top heavy management structures are typically seen, even by capitalists, as inefficient from a profit-maximizing perspective.
Lol No
Have you looked at the gargantuan size of corporate management structures that the capitalists have build, the Soviet Union was a lean mean efficiency machine compared to that.

>What typically happens in the socialist context is that the bureacracy itself begins to form something of a ruling caste/class.
That did happen in the Soviet Union, the managerial strata and the technical intelligentsia were comparing them self's with their counter-parts in capitalist countries and they basically betrayed the soviet proletariat because they thought they'd get a better deal under capitalism. But that's a fixable problem, you can fix the political organizational mistakes that lead to poor discipline, you can fix the political system so that it negates sellouts.

>Did you not state that the proletariat itself decides the amount and allocation of surplus
Yes this can be achieved by asking people 2 questions:
<What do you want in return for the surplus ? (ask)
<How much surplus are you willing to part with ? (give)

Obviously people will tend to give you a reply that amounts to them wanting more returns than they are willing to provide surplus for. And you solve that by taking the arithmetic mean. Basically half-way between the ask and the give.

>No, I said it was a system that only exists in your imagination and thus appears to you as ideal.
Well no there have been conceptually similar systems, so there is real world precedent.
And i don't think that this system will be an ideal society, i think it will solve most of the economic problems we have now. But I have no illusions that this system will also generate new contradictions.
It'll work better than what we have now, as a step in a better direction, and then future generations can figure out where to go from there.

The point we are arguing is whether it's possible to have a better system, we're not talking about a perfect system.

>>465955
>But It's neither naive nor a fantasy, the technical base and the core concepts are rigorously rooted in realism.
Cool. Can you point to a real world example of this in practice. Otherwise it is, by definition, a fantasy.

>But that's a fixable problem, you can fix the political organizational mistakes that lead to poor discipline, you can fix the political system so that it negates sellouts.
Example in the real world where this was done and successful.

>Yes this can be achieved by asking people 2 questions:
<What do you want in return for the surplus ? (ask)
<How much surplus are you willing to part with ? (give)
example of this from the real world?

You have a lot of great ideas. But you don't seem to be able to distinguish between ideas and practice.

And you keep avoiding any questions about you real world practical experience or qualifications. That's why I keep hammering the point that you are stuck in a fantasy world, but have no successful practice to show for it.

Here, I'll help you plan your trip to investigate AES:
https://www.airbnb.com/s/Cuba/homes?adults=1

>The point we are arguing is whether it's possible to have a better system, we're not talking about a perfect system.
Cool. Of your just concerned for creating a better system, why not settle for a system which has some plausibility and real world precedent, i.e., bureacratic state capitalism, minus all the ghey infatuation with so called workers democracy and equality?

>>465959
Some Actually existing socialist countries like Yugoslavia were more market based, but all the others had at least some of the elements of what i'm talking about. You can find partial practical implementations, that allow you to draw conclusions from. Obviously this being a new system, you can't expect it to exist already. That would preclude the possibility for new things.

I'm not going to respond to anything personal.
I consider Politics is never personal a cardinal rule.
Because i've witnessed how liberal politics turned into a total disaster after it got personalized.

>Of your just concerned for creating a better system, why not settle for a system which has some plausibility
I think this is very plausible.
I take it as a point of ideological struggle to conceive of futures without rulers because, that hole end of history narrative and the neoliberal there is no alternative narrative. Basically there is no future for people that insist on eternal rulers in an unchanging system. It's a physical impossibility.

I don't know why you are opposed to workers democracy and economic equality.
Please make it a real criticism, not a expression of dismissal (like labeling it unrealistic or implausible)
The current ruling class does not like the idea of workers democracy or economic equality, and because of that i will just consider it ideological struggle if you only make dismissive comments.

>bureacratic state capitalism, minus workers democracy and equality?

The capitalist class (especially the imperial big bourgeoisie) is absolutist in their refusal to make any concessions, like political reforms that would include at least some representation for the interests of the rest of the population. They block any kind of wealth-redistribution that would bring down economic inequality to tolerable levels (like in post WW2 socdem systems). They won't even consider taming down the warmongering and brinkmanship.

So they basically have ruled out the possibility for any kind of improvement in material conditions of the masses, they are in fact driving towards worsening conditions for the masses.

That means realistic improvements of the situation has to be based on beating them into submission. If you go through all the trouble of making that happen, why not get rid of the possibility for something like a ruling class to exist ever again ?

There are countries like China that allow some capitalist elements, without it hindering the development of society and social outcomes too much. But you have to understand that entails following in their foot steps to make that happen, like for example when Mao did a culling for the landlords and druglords. The Chinese communists have "moderated" elite ambition for installing their own class dictatorship with an Iron-fist for roughly a century. Are you really willing to do that ?

One thing has to be clear progress in the material conditions for the masses have to become irreversible.

You are literally retarded

Of course you don't want to get personal. As I said, you have no practical success to speak of, especially in terms of political activism, and aren't qualified to offer a opinion of reality. You're stuck in a fantasy world, and hence the practical reality of your life is in shambles and any attempts you've made at political ventures have gone nowhere. I can't even prod you into creating leftist content to improve the traffic on your leftist website. That's how incompetent you are, and why you're stuck with so much of my shitpoasting.

You can't even get a plane ticket and go for a month or two to a country like Cuba. Well, you could, if you had a slight bit on common sense and competence.

>Some Actually existing socialist countries like Yugoslavia were more market based, but all the others had at least some of the elements of what i'm talking about.
No they didn't. At best, they were bureacratic state capitalist social democracies with very little direct input from workers about how much surplus was allocated. Again, I'd say that's awesome, and in many ways an improvement upon bare capitalism, albeit with problems of its own.

>Obviously this being a new system, you can't expect it to exist already. That would preclude the possibility for new things.
Nothing is ever 'new' but always built upon more rudimentary forms. This is dialectical materialism 101 as its taught in those very state socialist countries that you claim to know so much about (while having never visited).
>I think this is very plausible.
You think a lot of things yet have nothing to show for it.
You're like a fat guy offering weight loss tips ("it's possible that you can eat tons of junk food, exercise minimally, and be trim"), or a defacto incel giving advice about women. Or like a guy claiming you learned to fight from books. It would be comical if you were being purely ironic.

>I take it as a point of ideological struggle to conceive of futures without rulers because..
Cool, so basically a mystified religion that's based on wishful thinking and not grounded in any sort of practical reality or worldly experience

>Basically there is no future for people that insist on eternal rulers in an unchanging system. It's a physical impossibility.
Admitting there will always be some form of power relations =\= insisting power relations will never change form. Assuming that there will always be a ruling class =\= believing the current ruling class will always exist. This is one of those areas where you thing you're being deep, but you kinda come across as mentally underdeveloped.

>I don't know why you are opposed to workers democracy and economic equality.
I'm generally a practical person, as opposed to believing in things that sound good. There's a reason why one of us is better travelled than the other and has more experience in a wider variety of places. It's also the same reason why one of us is probably more successful in most measures of life (though I'm guessing you could probably outlast me in a drug taking contest). Life is better when you do things that work, instead of soaking your brain in fantasy. I say this as someone who used to be fully bought into the vision of communism. Again, doing things that work based on practical experience vs doing things that sound good or to make 'an ideological point.'

>Please make it a real criticism (of workers democracy and equality)
How am I supposed to critique something that doesn't exist and never really has.
I guess, if we were to use an example like the Paris Commune or Allende's Chile, my critique would be that it got defeated rather easily.

>The capitalist class (especially the imperial big bourgeoisie) is absolutist in their refusal to make any concessions, like political reforms that would include at least some representation for the interests of the rest of the population.
This is quite hyperbolic considering that they most certainly made tons of concessions in order to placate and coopt the American working class during the 20th century.
This imperialist system has somewhat morphed into an oligarchal system in which a national labor aristocracy has been transmuted into a technocratic and managerial worker elite, but that's a whole other discussion. (And granted, I'd take my own ideas with a grain of salt on that matter).

>why not get rid of the possibility for something like a ruling class to exist ever again ?
Umm, because as a somewhat universal principle, power congeals. This is something you can attempt to mitigate and put checks on (and you should), but it's pretty retarded and childish to just assume that you can do away with any and all ruling class because you want to. (Going back to you being naive and deeply affected by dunning kruger syndrome)

>There are countries like China that allow some capitalist elements, without it hindering the development of society and social outcomes too much. But you have to understand that entails following in their foot steps to make that happen, like for example when Mao did a culling for the landlords and druglords. The Chinese communists have "moderated" elite ambition for installing their own class dictatorship with an Iron-fist for roughly a century. Are you really willing to do that ?
Minus the failed disaster that was the GPCR, ya…
I'd caution you against speaking so confidently about modern China, since I can guarantee I'm more familiar with the matter (while its painfully apparently that eating Kung Pao chicken is the closest you've coming to visiting there).

>One thing has to be clear[colon] progress in the material conditions for the masses have to become irreversible.
A fellow theory of the productive forces enthusiast, I assume… Um based..

>>465963
No you can't bait me with insults. Politics isn't personal.

Actually existing socialist countries were not the same as social democracy, can you please refrain from overusing the equivocation bludgeon

<Workers controlling the surplus of society, isn't possible because bad dieting advice
I'm sorry , noclue what you mean

>ideological struggle is religion
no

<Basically there is no future for people that insist on eternal rulers in an unchanging system. It's a physical impossibility.
This wasn't directed at anything you said, this was a jab at ruling ideology
>Admitting there will always be some form of power relations =\= insisting power relations will never change form.
>Assuming that there will always be a ruling class =\= believing the current ruling class will always exist.
See this is why politics can't be personal, it took away your ability to consider that i was talking about a structural element of society that wasn't really related to you.

>I'm
I'm not interested in your personal live, it has no bearing on the validity of the arguments you make. If you do this, you just look like you are attempting to construct an authority fallacy.

>if we were to use an example like Allende's Chile, my critique would be that it got defeated rather easily.
That is a valid criticism, but Allende had to much of a pacifistic streak, which doesn't really relate to their economic experiment. They could have done their economics system while also ensuring that they were armed enough to put down the Pinochet coup.

>This is quite hyperbolic considering that they most certainly made tons of concessions in order to placate and coopt the American working class during the 20th century.
But they later reversed the concessions with the introduction of neo-liberalism. To what extend is this really proof of good will and willingness to compromise, rather than just clever strategic behavior ? If they had not done social democracy, they couldn't have generated enough industrial expansion and the Soviet Union would have lapped them economically and militarily. Just look at how much they can't keep up with industrial warfare against Russian state capitalism, even-though Russia has barely recovered from the shock-doctrine in the 1990s.

>ruling classes a somewhat universal principle
I think this is a strange ideological conviction of yours.
From the perspective of historical materialism, class society looks like a phase in prehistory, where societies figure out how to create higher order social organization.
Ruling classes manifest as a result of organizational errors. Once we patched all those errors, history proper begins.

The cultural Revolution was borked indeed, but please refrain from attempting to speak from authority based on self referencing personal anecdotes. It's not a valid form of argumentation, and i'm too jaded to believe any of these stories, don't take it personally.

>A fellow theory of the productive forces enthusiast, I assume… Um based..
Yes

>>465964
take the l

>>465965
You don't win debates with rhetorical tricks, you keep the L

>>465966
Ya, comrade dunning kruger, you're out of your depth. I'd trust you to tell me which strains of weed are the best though.

>>465934
If the argument for socialism is that it would be a steady state or would not grow, that's a shit argument. Living things will grow and accumulate resources. That impulse to say "growth is bad" is really saying people, or certain people, shouldn't be allowed to grow at all. Whether you should grow is a different question from wehther you will. Simply to live, humans require certain property and will accumulate the means by which they can live and be secure against predators.

"Profit" is a specific outcome of economic exchange, rather than the concept of growth itself. It is a simple reality that if you want nice things like a home, you need some energy inputs. That doesn't happen just because. Even in natural conditions, human will seek security in their environment and the means to do what they wanted to do before the state came along to raise the going price to live. It is not "profit-seeking" to gather food in nature, or manage a farm to increase its output. Profit-seeking concerns financial activity, and so deals with quantities of money, which don't line up to the qualities someone would want to extract from the world.

>>465947
This just gets to the silliness of defining communism as this unattainable ideal state where everyone lives in perfect conditions. It's a unicorn and doesn't concern the thing we wanted in the first place. Nothing the Soviet Union did was for ideology or these conceits that an intellectual has about what humanity is supposed to be. I don't see the USSR being so different from the rest of the world. Those that hold the state do not poison themselves with ideology. They were something different, and did to an extent care about socialism succeeding, but this idea that communism conforms to an impossible situation where humans are depoliticized is a wholly alien idea. It is how they treated the subjects they considered stupid.

>>465927
Holy shit the same fag; He can't argue against me so now he is literally same faggot. That is just pathetic.

>>465969
>If the argument for socialism is that it would be a steady state or would not grow, that's a shit argument.

I think we have to design socialism so that society has the ability to control it. We might be able to continue growing for several centuries until we reach the limits of the solar system, and then we might stay at that level for a while until we can develop interstellar travel.

It's not very likely that we'll have a smooth continuous growth because we will likely have no/slow-growth waiting-periods while new sciences gets discovered and new technology gets developed.

>>465978
Hold up - if socialism is a situation alien to "society", what exactly is the point of a revolution, except to switch one set of bosses for another? The ecological concern is inherently in favor of an aristocracy, rather than any genuine resource limitation. If you want to speak of the actual "limits to growth", you're speaking of a human population in the hundreds of billions. Just from what exists now, you could easily fit 20 billion people without changing much. We produce a shit ton of food and could produce more if there were a market for it. We've become so efficient at agriculture that a lot of land is left fallow.
In any event, depopulation and family planning likely lead to population reduction, and we are locked in for severe depopulation for the next two generations. It's gone on for too long. I don't know what world you live in where population growth is out of control. Everywhere in the world, the people are defeated. Who can have children in a world like this?

Never mind that "outer limits of the solar system" would take centuries simply to reach, let alone develop every planet. Human spaceflight can't get anything out of low Earth orbit, and couldn't find a compelling reason to go beyond that. I don't expect humans to build any offworld colonies for several centuries. It is politically impossible, because any colony would not be a thing that Earthbound states could control. It is the lack of control that really stops anyone from contemplating deep space missions. Either the colony will be made dependent and thus it will never be particularly productive and needs to be resupplied at cost to Earth, or the colony will have enough independence and Earth gets orbitally bombarded while the rebels already built underground bunkers and have the advantage of not escaping Earth's gravity well. Maybe the colonies could play nice, but they would have no reason to, and the would-be "cosmists" already made it clear they consider themselves a different species from the rest of humanity. You already see this splitting of humanity into two camps become a split in the species. One way to depopulation is simply to say who is actually "human" and who is cattle. A false equality is maintained by the cajolers even though everything the new aristocracy wants has been thrown at us like an anvil dropped from high in the sky. Eventually that turns on itself and the dispossessed and the damned have no more reason to pretend there can be reconciliation. We've already passed the point of no return on that - no one can ever trust the scientists again after what they did in 2020.

>>465980
>Hold up - if socialism is a situation alien to "society"
>what exactly is the point of a revolution, except to switch one set of bosses for another?
What ? That's your take away from intermittent growth.
How ?

Marx said we are living in pre-history, where
<"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please"
Capitalism goes through phases of growth, stagnation and decline, according to the crisis cycle of capitalism, people have no control they are just along for the ride.

Socialism marks the beginning of history-proper when humanity takes fate in to their own hands, that's what's meant with society being able to control growth.

>The ecological concern is inherently in favor of an aristocracy, rather than any genuine resource limitation. If you want to speak of the actual "limits to growth", you're speaking of a human population in the hundreds of billions.
I literally said that we had centuries of growth before we level off.
Earth has a carrying capacity of close to a trillion people.
The solar system with a Dyson swarm might be roughly 4 quadrillion.

Regardless of that we still have to put in the growth-rate-dial, even if it's not relevant for another 20 generations. We can't be as reckless as capitalists, and create a system with hard-coded tendencies that takes away the agency from our descendants.

My intent is to do better at future-proofing the system and avoid fucking over future generations.

This has nothing to do with aristocratic malthusianism, and i don't understand why you think it does.

>>465983
>Marx said…
Hallelujah!

>>465983
That's a cute dodge you have, saying "oh, it's totally distant in the future and you don't have to worry about it, but still, you can't have infinite growth in a finite world! remember!" That's not the point - saying the world has a finite amount of resources is a trivial statement unless you're Maupin-tier bullshitting. If you are constraining people "for their own good", you're just invoking the old greater good excuse rulers have always used. If there is an actual resource shortfall, people tend to be aware of that. The capitalists themselves are aware of that - that is why they invented the ecological excuse and always raise arguments that capitalism is necessary because of scarcity. The "scarcity" in question is purely a matter of placing a premium price on security and survival, which is intended to be unpayable. The shrinking of the wage fund is deliberate - that is the overall obsession of those who rule. Did you think the capitalists wanted you to be paid anything more than the bare minimum? The capitalist does not raise wages out of the kindness of his heart. It's funny how people talk about the immortal profit motive, and then insert an assumption that capitalists really want to raise your wages and living conditions and they're totally trying. It's funny how that works.

To make this clear - today, we are already in conditions of abundance, or could produce the means of survival for 8 billion people without great difficulty. The greatest cost to everyone is the threat posed by other humans. Providing food and energy is an almost trivial problem if it were merely a resource allocation problem, given the resources, industry, technology, and so on available in 2020. It is so trivial that despite the effort to push depopulation, and to deliberately make goods scarce, it is nearly impossible to constrain the interest of people to get what they originally wanted out of society. The great cost is that someone is there to take away the thing that was easy to produce. That's what enclosure is, and ecology is a narrative for enclosing the world and its natural resources. That's why you see fears of a water shortage and commodification of rainfall and air. There wouldn't be a water shortage if there were any interest in building the desalination plants and paying the energy costs. But hey, we have all the energy to run data centers so people can watch their favorite Twitch streamers! Right…

If you have to invent an ecological pretext and then say people are inherently too stupid to see the world, you're a fake. If you do have an actual resource shortage, and you are operating a planned economy with democratic input, then most people will be aware of what is produced, the nature of the global economy, and will have an awareness of the environment. They can decide for themselves if there is in fact an ecological crisis. All evidence today is that there is no such crisis, and the ecological narrative has always been pushed by dishonest actors. The difficulty so far as it exists is purely in the choices the commanding heights make, which is to deprive people specifically of those qualities that allow life to be tolerable. They will allow you endless prolefeed and shit, but they will place a premium on the price of fixing a broken leg or anything to repair heart disease. They don't want a cure for heart disease, which we possess already, because that would prolong the life of people they want to remove from society. The people who they actually want to keep don't have to go through the rigamarole of waiting for a heart transplant, and if there were any sort of desire to solve the problem once and for all, artificial hearts would have been engineered by now. Very likely they exist, but only for people who are in the know.

I don't know how anyone after 2020 is still convinced that the ruling class doesn't seek depopulation. They talk about it all the time and have done so since the 1990s. I grew up around this shit and heard the true believers proclaim they will choose who lives and who dies. It's been madness to see the left encourage this, out of some mistaken belief that the Boogaloo will totally happen and bring the revolution. The worse the condition of the people, the stronger the hand of those who rule. Certain idiots built a narrative that the key to revolution is to make the poor suffer as much as possible, and this is the exact opposite of what you would want.

If you go to the majority of people in the world, and if you follow what remains of a genuinely socialist force in the world, they are horrified at what is happening and have been for some time now. That's where your revolution is - in defending the basic shit that certain of the rulers want to take away. That's how the Bolsheviks are able to win - they were one of the few who were stridently opposed to the war with Germany and willing to break the alliance. They didn't promise to make life worse. They promised to end the war, redistribute land, and not be slaves to the imperial system which is what the liberals in Russia wanted. The Bolsheviks didn't scheme to engineer a war or suggest that the war is a good thing. The war happening was the worst thing for international socialism or any sort of force for world peace. If someone knocked some sense into the Krauts and made it clear that starting this shit was going to lock the world in incessant warfare for at least two centuries, we'd all be spared this bullshit. Because these screaming warmonger idiots don't know who their betters are and decided to throw away the world for their stupid reactionary cause, we're made to suffer. It would have been better if Germany were dismantled then and there. The dumb fucks made war into their religion and sold this extremely reactionary model for the state that has never fucking worked, preventing us from having a society worth living in. They'd rather marvel at some shitty uniforms and revel in faggotry. Of course, you can't blame one race for all the problems, but encouraging their faggotry is the worst thing you can do, and we have a lot of this poison in the world. Cheering on another such conflagration is about the worst thing you can do in the 21st century, which is exactly why the Ziggers want to push their fake narrative. It is even more pointless now than it was back then, and the same people have always wanted to cause war wherever they go. That's their eternal cope for being a loser race with a stupid philosophy, and they keep trying the same shit ad nauseum. It's dumb and it's been enabled for far too long. Anyway, obligatory anti-German racism time over for now…

>>465983
So the real problem isn't that there's a resource shortage, but that we live in a society that revels in lying about everything and lies for the sake of lying. If not for the rampant lying, it would be clear that the current rulers are not only unnecessary but they are the only thing holding us back from the thing we wanted, and if we just got rid of those fuckers, we'd be in a much better world. You're left with a problem of what to do when they're gone, and this gets into the great problem of human politics - that is, that the same sort of people insinuate themselves across regimes. The only check against that is vigilance from the countervailing force, which is why you see a value placed on freedom in a genuine sense. The imperious idiots who want to cajole and lie are the enemies of the people. If you're on the side of the people, you're not a cajoler and you don't need to resort to such rampant levels of lying. It is difficult to hold to that because the enemy has no compunction about lying, and grasping the method of their big lie requires someone to acknowledge certain truths about the human project that make the quest for socialism problematic to say the least. You're back to the push for democracy in a real sense, which the world has never really known and which has become politically impossible as an idea with currency. Realistically, democracy of the republican type is a farce and always has been.

I've said before, those who rule do not fear a revolution or a conspiratorial party. That's how they came to power, so it's in their wheelhouse. What they truly fear is a Caesar who has no reason to play ball with the ruling system, who is able to rally the mob by going to the people and possessing the personal virtue to up-end the republican myth where everyone marches in lockstep to keep the system and thought-form going. That would be the thing that undoes this, and it would be a very horrible thing - but at this point it is probably the only thing that would change the situation. How someone would go about that today is the great question, but it will happen in one way or another.

>>465987
Unfortunately, Trump was too much of a grifting faggot to cross the Rubicon

>>465991
Trump was a way of disengaging people from the idea that such a thing is possible. You were expected to look at the spectacle and hate the idea of letting people vote for anything. The real power would not be any elected office, but the men behind the curtain. It's not a matter of if but when, and when it happens, it won't be the sort of spectacle with fake opposition. Such a figure today would be able to build a machine to get everyone to go along with him or else. He would most likely be a guy deep in the CIA world, rather than someone "outside the system". You'd see him when the winners of the race to the top consolidate around one man, and the losers cope about how they're actually "the best" and try to stop him for real. It won't work, and such a man would remember the Ides of March and not let that happen.

Basically imagine if Bootygay had any actual charisma and suddenly had all the big money going to him. Guy had some serious cult leader energy when he was running in 2020, and it was weird how this guy was promoted… then again they did the same with Obama, bringing a guy who was largely unknown before 2008 and making a cult around him. Obama was a team player through and through, but I could totally see Bootygay possessing Roman Emperor vibes.

>>465986
this post >>465983 talks about whether or not you set up an economic system that's like a bolder rolling down a mountain, that once it's set in motion it's impossible to stop and incredibly hard to steer, and it will keep going until it exhausted all its momentum.

You talk about something else entirely.

I do agree with a lot of it, it does appear that the ruling class is genuinely pushing towards outcomes that will make survival harder and get many people killed. While it is true that subjecting people to bad condition can be a tool for suppressing a population in some situations. Tho I'm not convinced that it will secure their position , because it is going to make the demographic decline worse and create a wicked labor shortage, that will cause a resurgence of working class power. So what they are doing is brutalizing a workforce before they are regaining their political power. That doesn't appear to be particularly wise if you ask me.

>>465987
>So the real problem isn't that there's a resource shortage
I have something to add to this.
I think that you can't have a resource shortage until your productive forces can do matter-energy conversion and fabrication at a molecular level.

Before you reach that level of technical proficiency, problems that appear as a lack in resources usually can be fixed with more advanced technology. For example you can't have an oil-shortage if your society has mastered fusionpower. However for a society that hasn't mastered such technology, a lack in fusion-power may appear as a shortage of oil.

>>465996
How does lots of dead workers + an apparatus to liquidate those who survive, populated by screaming death cult fanatics = workers have a stronger position? It has long been understood that the strength of the workers is their numerical superiority and the resources they bring to bear - their bodies. Access to machines can be revoked at any time if any worker is considered a potential trouble source, but actually killing many millions of people, who are ostensibly of your own nation, is not an easy task. The subordinated classes do not have any good reason to turn on each other, and a sense that if an open democide is the organizing principle of human society, they are likely to be next no matter what promises they are given that they're in the know and in the group selected to live. That has been one of the greatest barriers to depopulation - that even the groups selected to live have a sense that this operation is grotesque and not truly in their interest. The great numbers of workers are of little consequence to most people of the middle or upper classes, because many of the upper classes did not have a personal vendetta against the lower classes, and the lower classes are deferential to a fault to their social superiors. All of this depopulation agenda is driven by certain middle and upper class elements that are driven by ideology and a particular ethos, rather than any true incentive for it. Ideology and institutions can perpetuate the cycle of death, but none of this depopulation death and the torture involved is actually helpful or beneficial. It doesn't make us better in any way, and the ideas of depopulation have to invent insane and self-contradictory moral and ethical codes just to get their loyal officers to lock ranks with the program. The middle and upper classes already secured their property against any lower class incursion - the lower classes simply didn't want to seize the property of the rich, because that wasn't really the concern of the lower classes. What the lower classes wanted was not to rule, but to be able to live their life. Actually ruling is difficult because politics, as you might have figured out, is not easy and it is not a sport that weak men can play. That is one problem with making the whole economic system a political matter down to the smallest detail; and that is why in practice, a socialist society would not indulge in obsessive micromanagement, but would mitigate the worst of it. The political struggle largely concerns the oligarchic concentration of wealth, which is predicated on denying to the subordinated classes exactly that which would allow them to live and be secure. It is not that the oligarchy takes literally everything or they're concerned with the paper money. The oligarchy knows that the way to control the subordinated groups is to make them dependent on institutions controlled by the oligarchy, and threaten to remove their means of survival if they offend the oligarchy by merely existing or not conforming to what the oligarchy wants. That means that it is precisely that which workers truly need that is denied to them. They can have however much garbage they want, so long as they don't have quality of life that would allow them to escape the oligarchs. The lower classes simply want that apparatus gone, and they don't care how it is done.

It should be noted that this depopulation isn't done by a tiny cabal that is super-secret. The drive for depopulation has a base supporting it that is class collaborationist. It is not a particularly large conspiracy, and the drivers of the conspiracy - the leaders giving the thumbs-up saying this torture and death is approved - are a small group selected as the vanguard for this task. Many of the people enthusiastically going along with depopulation and eugenics are habitual followers and the shittiest sort of people, who have always found some pretext to attack other people to get ahead. Eugenics selected those people for advancement, and encourages that behavior among people who would see that eugenics does nothing for them. How this is done is a complicated story, but eugenics is able to prevail because of institutional approval, and because it is basically illegal to oppose eugenics in any way that would truly impede its progress and its invasion of private life. Those who truly are oppositional to the system are neutralized or othered, because meaningful opposition to eugenics would run against political principles that are active today, that are not reducible to simply an idea. Meaningful opposition to eugenics would entail something new is possible, and the framework of acceptable ideas was designed specifically so that this alternative is never allowed independence or a way to assert demands in the slightest. You are allowed fake rebellion, even fake revolution, but you are not allowed to actually defend yourself, and if you show signs that you will defend yourself regardless of permission, you will be attacked and isolated. The first thing eugenics did was enforce discipline among the classes that would be tasked with the eugenic doctrine, and even if someone was opposed, there are not that many who will throw away their lives for the residuum, especially when many in the residuum are the Judas goats of their race and among the most faithful soldiers for eugenics.

For us, depopulation is encouraged by those who hold the money. You might oppose depopulation, but you're given a story that varies depending on what class you belong to and the interests where you are vulnerable. For the rich and the scientific elite, they style themselves as the rightful stewards of the land in one way or another. For the politicians, they aspire to power in cut-throat competition with each other, in a vain effort to be the leading man or woman in the world. For the workers who are slightly favored, they are told that "they're taking our jobs", as if the jobs were a precious resource to be rationed out. For the lowest classes, the race for crumbs and the celebration of bumfighting is the only life they're told they're allowed to have, and maximum degeneracy is the order of the day. The lumpenized residuum, as mentioned, is seeded with faithful soldiers for eugenics, as many of them are easily influenced and have no principles. If such people are not found organically, trained liars are seeded among the lumpen to goad them into action. This was done to ensure, for example, black gangs would fight each other over the stupidest shit, and drugs would be used as a pretext to heighten the shittiness. If there weren't enough takers among the urban black proles, some asshole in a suit would give the hint and bring some fuckers who are the lowest of the low, and push money around to induce the necessary competition. Eventually, whatever solidarity exists will break, and this was supported by certain white liberals who wanted to see the inner cities turn into cesspits, because that comported with their moral philosophy. Amplifying the death cult from Reagan onward was a new project, and one that could not be done until the time it happened - and make no mistake, the hardliners who imbibe that ideology are basically Satanic and there's no changing them. I've seen people who get into that mindset and it really is beyond the pale. In all cases, men attached to ample pay are tasked with advancing depopulation and given virtually unlimited money to pursue it, while the honest struggle to continue doing anything, because the oligarchs don't want to reward productivity or even sound distribution of the product. The entire point is depopulation, and the economic incentives are set up to reward only that which aids depopulation. That is why the tech sector is boosted - it grants to the oligarchs the machinery it needs to truly suppress a large population, to make the conditions of eugenics fully real and enforceable. This also required time for the eugenic creed to percolate, after a few generations were taught nothing but eugenics and their education was stripped of any historical knowledge of a time before eugenics.

Anyway, capitalism wasn't exactly a planned system that was implemented atop a blank slate. The existence of a middle class was a condition the rulers had to accept, not something they chose. Captialism has been described as a Jewish money making scheme for a reason - the free trade mentality doesn't work towards strengthening the middle class, but encouraging the middle class to fork over their money to stocks, which included the trading companies that really did the work of making capitalism a force in the world. Capitalism isn't premised foundationally on a desire for economic growth. From the start, Malthus wants depopulation and says the poor breed too much, and this is a common aristocratic sentiment. That runs contra to any desire for economic growth. The growth of the system as a whole is less important than what that system does for those who command it. Economic growth was desired only so far as it allowed for industrialization and competition of empires on the world stage. Economic growth was not about making the middle class happier, but because the middle class was invested in these operations, they were going to demand a pay-off for their investment. Some would win, many would lose, and some of the middle class were concerned not with the growth of the system but with ulterior motives. Those who win do not have any solidarity with those who lose, and the same is true within every class.

>>465997
The abundance does not require any new technology. We already possess abundance, and certainly no shortage of labor if there are way too many people. It's not a matter of building new technology that is mysterious and inaccessible. We know we're being screwed and denied basic things, and the rich and those in the know hoodwink and laugh at us because we're forced at gunpoint to accept being shit on like this. Everything about state schooling, especially the social engineering from post-1945 on, has been a direct assault on any basic decency we might have held on to. During the 1990s I'm wondering why the kids aren't ready to riot, because they had to realize that death was coming for them. I suppose many of them believed they would totally win, and enough of them were in the know and were always committed to the creed. The true faithful are raised with that ideology and it is drilled into them in the gifted programs. They don't have any other belief and they brag that they're the only ones who are actually human, while the others are just lumpen. I know exactly how they think because they don't fucking shut up about how great they are.

We don't have a resource shortage now. The people in Africa have known that for decades, and will say this to anyone who is passing by - that the African people are not beggars asking to be uplifted, and that the aid money is just siphoned to some warlord, which is of course the intent of such "charity" from the Empire. We certainly know in America that there is no resource shortage. Countries with resource shortages don't spend inordinate wealth paying for death squads or pay someone six, sometimes seven figures purely so they can tell us how to hate poor people correctly. Countries with resource limitations don't pay athletes millions of dollars for playing sportsball to give the lumpenized masses some prolefeed. We see the services available, then stripped away because the wage fund is slashed over and over again; and as we do, we see a class of murdering murderers elevated and praised and told how great they are, while the honest are humiliated day in and dsy out, and the thrill of seeing the "retards" suffer is everything. After what was done in the 1990s, I knew there was no going back. If I could go back, I would tell 8 year old me to end his life because it really is never going to get better. He already knew it wasn't going to get better, but he let himself hope that something could be different, and that the world could change. The world certainly can change, but people never change. Once they commit to eugenics, they're gone for life. Those who knew what side of the war they were on early are the winners today, until they get got - and when they get got, they never renounce eugenics. They know better than to do that - once eugenist, always eugenist. It's the Hitler Youth of today, and they would have blooded themselves to stay where they are. So did the scum of the residuum who enabled it, often under the threat that if they didn't they'd be relegated to "retarded" treatment. They usually wound up being called retards anyway for all their trouble, but animals are trained to act in certain ways, and they followed their programming.

I really wish people would stop thinking we need some fancy new technology to solve our problems, when the nature of the problem has always been political will and the existence of this predatory ethos. To do that, though, requires going against the moral philosophy of the eugenic creed, and that is no longer admissible in any serious sense. We can say how stupid eugenics is, but we aren't allowed to envision a world where this doesn't happen, because that would necessitate rooting out all of the eugenists and likely exterminating them before they exterminate us. You're not going to reason with people who are blooded and committed to maximal torture on phliosophical grounds, then confirm their commitment to the cause by oaths and secret pacts made with those in the know. It's crazy to expect the Satan to be anything else, and a decent number of these people really are Satanic - like, when they're around the right people, they drop the mask and brag that they're going to win, and that the honest are retards who exist to be raped. They drop mask with me because they know I can't fight back, and if I try it's just dismissed as "retarded, retarded, retarded". Me fighting back publicly just strengthens the hand of the creed, and that's exactly how they engineered society. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death.

>>465997
Also, oil is the second most abundant liquid on the Earth. Even without speculating for new wells, we have considerable known reserves that aren't extracted because it is not cost-effective to do so. The constraint on productivity is also a constraint on energy use. If you know where the oil reserves are, you want to sit on that monopoly for as long as possible and not let anyone else in on the oil business. Of course, even if everyone got cheap oil or an abundant supply of it, oil isn't terribly useful to people except for what it does for transportation. The oil expenditure per civilian is very low, especially when they don't possess cars, and more Americans will not own cars. They're completely unaffordable for the working class, and the only thing left are very old used cars.

So the "energy crisis" is another myth, as is this idea that we need to build wind farms everywhere. But, oil would likely be phased out because there are alternative power sources that are cheaper. The overall objective is to deprive the people of the power grid, and to make the power grid a servant of the oligarchy. They don't want to remove electricity entirely - they need their surveillance equipment - but they would pass laws making it effectively illegal to use energy for anything other than oligarchy-approved purposes, citing "ecological concerns" unless you could prove your energy use and existence was "socially useful" - i.e., in line with eugenics.

>>466001
Literal nonsense. Oil is decomposed organic matter that forms into crude oil under very specific conditions. It is a finite resource and although the total reserves maybe large, the amount of 'conventional oil' or petroleum grade oil is what is important for cars and is very limited. Oil is classified according to its API-gravity score, the important grades are the ones used for cars, and trucks. Once the oil that is used in those things run out its over for the modern world as you won't be able to run your tractors in the farms. The ERORI is the only number that matters when talking about peak oil. Once its too expensive to pump it out of the well, most of the world won't have cars.

Fusion energy is a scam. Fusion requires extremely rare Tritium, and hence people wish to substitute it with Lithium, but Lithium is also a finite resource. This isn't an engineering problem, its a physics and supply problem which won't go away. Fusion is a pipe dream.

>>465999
demographic changes will bring back the political economy of labor power

>>466020
>Fusion energy is a scam.
No it isn't we already get most of our energy from it.

>Fusion requires extremely rare Tritium, and hence people wish to substitute it with Lithium, but Lithium is also a finite resource.
At present it is indeed easier and perhaps more rational to build nuclear fission reactors, however breeding Tritium from lithium blankets is not a big deal, and it does not use much lithium at all. Any given energy production technique only is a step towards a more advanced technology. Down the line we probably would build more advanced fusion that doesn't use tritium. (Deuterium-Tritium) D-T fusion is the easiest to build, it would allow us to massively expand our industrial capacity and with that we could go for D-D Fusion and eventually even fuse regular hydrogen like the sun.

>>466025
>No it isn't we already get most of our energy from it.
<No we are not constrained by the limited resources and declining marginal efficiency (energy required to produce more energy) because of a natural fusion reactor in the sky that took cosmic levels of energy to be there.
That's what arrogance does to a mf.

>Any given energy production technique only is a step towards a more advanced technology. Down the line we probably would build more advanced fusion that doesn't use tritium.
The question is, can your "probably more advanced technology" outset the rising costs of the new energy due to the falling efficiency of extraction (including of rare metals)?
"Probably" doesn't cut it, especially when ITER is a fucking black hole that keeps sucking funds with nothing to show for it, so maybe those funds could be used on a more advanced nuclear fission that actually works.

>>466020
Looks like someone bought the propaganda put out by the oil companies to maintain their monopoly.
Seriously, there is no great oil shortage. The US sits on untapped oil wells, but a rule of empires is that you want to drain everyone else's resources before consuming the resources of the metropole. This is even more true of the Americans, who sat on vast tracts of land and were conscious of their long-term ambitions. Sitting on a strategic reserve is exactly what you would do if you are running the American Empire, back when it was a going concern. Now the strategy is global - you don't want to extract resources to place them in the hands of plebs, and you want to sit on resources for as long as possible.
Just by developing the oil resources in Venezuela you would sit on ridiculous wealth, if you wanted it. The oil extraction there is only partially developed, because the local elites understand the value of what they hold and don't want to sell it for nothing. There is an incentive of everyone who holds a proven oil well to not see new wells discovered, and speculation for oil is expensive once the obvious sources are claimed by the oil barons. There's a patch of proven reserves in the US that could be developed and would dwarf existing oil production, but it makes no economic sense to extract that yet, so it doesn't happen, and we're told of a fake oil crisis.

Leave it to you to get that fusion is a scam, but then faceplant about the reason why. The simple truth is that fusion doesn't work the way the bullshit models of physics suggest, and you're spending a lot of energy chasing after a thing which won't do what you want it to do.

>>466022
The demographic change is that the workers will be completely defanged, and few enough in number that a class of guards and Einsatzgruppen will pick off those who survive at will. Strikes were never a sound strategy for the working class to stage an offensive. They were always a defensive strategy because the workers were under constant attack from the word go, and the strike only works so long as workers can constrain anyone else who would break the strike. Try telling people on the brink of starvation that they shame themselves for being scabs. It's very easy to get high and mighty when you're winning, but the way the scabs were dealt with is that eugenics killed them off in droves. The workers never actually gained much from striking, except a temporarily reprieve when the rulers overstepped what they could do, and couldn't recruit enough guard labor to break strikes. It was far cheaper to co-opt the union stewards and integrate them into the ruling system, and encourage the eugenic impulse among the working class. The workers will destroy themselves and cheer it on, and they internalize the anti-human logic of Malthus and think they're totally winning. It's pure Boogaloo shit.

>>466025
Also the sun works because of the gravity of enormous amounts of matter.
Now you need to explain to me how are you gonna cheat nature and produce the same amount of energy while requiring almost none of the matter of the sun.
This all sounds like another perpetuum mobile delusion. Those ITER faggots literally said that it requires "too much energy" to keep plasma from melting everything by using the magnetic field. WELL NO SHIT! MAYBE YOU SHOULD REPEAT YOUR THERMODYNAMIC COURSE, IMBECILE!

>>466030
You are making a straw-man argument.
Fossil fuel energy is mostly prehistoric plants that grew by converting energy from sunlight and that's still fusion energy with extra steps.
>efficiency
Fossil fuel has terrible efficiency. The first step in the process of generating fossil fuel was photosynthesis of ancient plants, and that's typically less than 1% efficient. Then you gotta wait a really long time for geological processes to turn it into fuel. Compared to that, direct fusion power is a big step up.

If you look at this from a narrower perspective of human economic activity. The energy returns on energy investment is higher for nuclear power generation than for chemical power. If you build a state of the art generation4 nuclear fission reactor with liquid nuclear fuel, you get 230x the energy out than you put into it. The best oil-well had about 100x, but those golden-age oil-wells are gone and the currently exploited wells have considerably less energy-returns than that. (the worst are oil-sands with 5x return and the best regular oil is at 60x)

Large scale fusion reactors of the magnetic confinement type (which currently are the most advanced type) can realistically have 500x energy returns. We are talking about reactors the size of offshore-oil rigs that so large that they can only build on the ocean, and produce so much power that 3-5 are probably sufficient for earths energy needs

The only reason this isn't pursued is because those technologies a very capital intensive to build and have a very long run time. A typical fission reactor you would build today would probably run for 60 years. A really large scale offshore fusion power generator that's optimized for ultra low cost utility power, probably has a runtime of 200 years. Private investors don't have that kind of patience. And most capital is still in it's neo-liberal phase, they don't want to invest in a big utility, they want small stuff that requires low capital investment and turns a profit in 18 months.

Those technologies have problems being realized by the current political and economic structures.
But it's not scientific or technical barriers.

Let me stress this again, you principle argument is false, if you go to higher technological levels of power geneeration, you get much more energy out for every unit of energy that you put in.

Obligatory post on the peak oil myth.

>>466031
>The demographic change is that the workers will be completely defanged, and few enough in number that a class of guards and Einsatzgruppen will pick off those who survive at will.
Ok maybe some countries will turn to fascism, and kill off workers, but those societies will just collapse under the weight of a murderous parasitic ruling class.

The countries that will grow strong and powerful will be those that best manage the scarce workers resource they have. (meaning workers have to be treated better). Those will be the countries that will shape the future.

Fascism has no future, it's not a operational model, it's usually an artifact of an imperial bourgeoisie throwing away a country for imperial ambition.

The fact is that if there are fewer workers they become harder to exploit, your doomer posting not justified.

>>466033
<big physics words
>little physics understanding

Yes you can do fusion via a big gravity well, but you don't have to, you just need to supply enough energy to overcome the coulomb barrier and make two light nuclei touch -> bam fusion energy.
Fusion power is not violating the first/second law of thermo-dynamics. WTF why do you think that ?

The ITER reactor is a research reactor meant to study plasma physics, it's not meant to be a power-plant.

>Those ITER faggots literally said that it requires "too much energy" to keep plasma from melting everything by using the magnetic field.
They probably didn't because the purpose of the magnetic field is to prevent the plasma from touching the side-walls of the reactor, causing the plasma to cool off below the temperature where it can undergo fusion. The purpose of the magnetic field is to keep the plasma hot, it's not preventing the reactor from melting.

>>466037
So the workers will be well-treated pets. Congratulations, you won the class struggle by liquidating 90% of the working class and ensuring the remainder are under lock and key. But, out of some altruistic sense, the slaves are better off than the workers anyway.
You DO realize how workers are disciplined, and what limits a manager has to disciplining billions of people, when they face difficulty finding people who will be enforcers in the first place? The entire project has been to kill off anyone who is not habituated to slavery, so that a managerial society can run the world into the ground. It's the same mentality of the Southron slave masters, except even they had more humanity than the eugenists.

>>466039
>the workers will be pets
what the ?

In the 1970s the neo-liberals began outsourcing production from the core into the periphery.
They did that because it increased their accessible labor-supply, which destroyed the political leverage of the working class in the imperial core and periphery alike.
The conditions for the workers in the imperial core began to worsen as exploitation was increased when industry was off-shored an the reserve army of labor started to grow. Imperial capitalism was also able to exploit the workers in the imperial periphery harder because those countries did not have the necessary development to defend them selves against imperialism.
On the hole the working class got the ass-card as capital began draining more life out of them. The result of that was of course the demographic decline.

As brutal and inhuman as all of this was/is, it has a silver lining for 2 reasons:

1. The reason why the big bourgeoisie became so powerful, was the abundant labor supply.
Since the demographic shift (that the neo-liberals caused) is going to undo that abundance of labor-power, it will also undo their strangle hold over political power. Labor will be able to regain political power.
2. The periphery had industrial development and is now beginning to produce the means to defend it self against imperialism. The wages in the periphery are rising and as such the wage-bottom is rising too.

the effects will vary and some countries will have
-a successful reformist movement that reforms out of capitalism with a more effective version of Rosa Luxemburg
-a successful revolution that imposes a full class dictatorship of the proletariat.
-a new variation on social democracy
-a socialism with regional characteristics model like Vietnam or China
-a state-capitalist model
but
Some countries will go
-fascist hard and fast collapse
-something resembling a "neo-feudal rentier capitalism" slow(er) collapse

Overall the working class will gain a lot of political power as many new socialist governments and perhaps new economic experiments will form. The reason the workers will be treated well is because they gained the political power to change their conditions. I don't know where you get the idea of benevolent slavers, i haven't found slave societies that treated their slaves well. You can find some anomalies of individual slavers having compassion, or like in the roman empire when some people freed them selves from slavery in material terms but still technically counted as slaves in idealist administrative terms.

The countries and places that come closer to socialist economics will likely halt their population decline and maybe even start nudging the trend back upwards (takes at least a generation to manifest). Those countries will also become the primary industrial and technological powerhouses of the world. The reason for that is that if an economy can exploit neo-liberal type cheap labor it has no economic incentive to develop and deploy more advanced technology for the sake of increasing labor productivity with superior tools.

The places where the ruling class holds on to power and rides society into the ground, those will fade away as will their influence on the history of humanity.

>>466035
>You are making a straw-man argument.
I'm not, because you pointed to the Sun as an example of an actually working fusion reactor.

>Fossil fuel has terrible efficiency.
The thing is, fossil fuels are an already conserved energy that can be easily freed by burning. It doesn't matter that fossil fuel engines are far less efficient, because the fossil fuel is abundant. Majority of work has been done by the nature already.

>Large scale fusion reactors of the magnetic confinement type (which currently are the most advanced type) can realistically have 500x energy returns.
dude, tokamak reactors were known from the 50s, most advanced my ass

there were numerous experimental reactors that only confirming that to keep high-energy plasma from melting the walls and cooling down you need to expend more energy than you would get out of the reactor

If you don't see a comparison here with the perpetuum mobile - to try and cheat nature by creating energy out of nothing - then you're blinded by your techno-utopianism

The fact is, after more than 70 years of experimentation STILL the only working thermonuclear reactor is a gravitational one - the Sun.
Maybe it's time to take a look in the mirror and stop daydreaming.

>>466038
>you just need to supply enough energy to overcome the coulomb barrier and make two light nuclei touch -> bam fusion energy.
no retard, you "just" need to keep the reaction going and not melt the fucking reactor
which requires comparable amounts of energy that you would get out of the reactor

hmmm… I wonder the laws of thermodynamics have to do with this..

>The ITER reactor is a research reactor meant to study plasma physics, it's not meant to be a power-plant.
It still should be fucking able produce more energy that is required to keep it stable

>They probably didn't because the purpose of the magnetic field is to prevent the plasma from touching the side-walls of the reactor, causing the plasma to cool off below the temperature where it can undergo fusion. The purpose of the magnetic field is to keep the plasma hot, it's not preventing the reactor from melting.
It is both to keep the plasma how AND to prevent the walls from melting
what do you think fucking happens to the walls when the plasma "cools down"

>>466040
The working class only had the leverage they were allowed after the post-war settlement. Neoliberalism was only reasserting what the settlement was from the start, rather than a sudden reaction, as if the state were passively responding to events instead of actively planning a generation ahead. Everything that was done in education between 1945 and 1970 was preparing for such an event, and the last piece of the act was to reconcile with China and abandon the idea that they were going to eliminate the CCP outright. This is what could have happened from the start, because there were forces in China that wanted to reconcile with the US right away and a faction in the US that didn't have any problem dealing with Mao. Eventually, cold warrior Nixon goes to China to do what should have happened during the 1950s, and they sell it with the line "only Nixon could go to China". None of this is reactive, like the rulers are some evolutionary flotsam at the whim of the superior minds.

Everything you're writting is in the passive tense, like all of this just sort of happened, or was the result of some diabolical and ahistorical perversion of the natural order. States, by nature, are active creatures rather than passive ones. So are the people at the helm of states. They only sell the fiction of a passive state after the fact, to naturalize their very deliberate intervention into society. It's always worked that way, but it could only realize its control in certain ways. After the war, the state's invasion of private life would proceed according a general plan, escalated every generation. This is when the marketing geniuses created the idea of naming each generation not according to their organic development, but in accord with the general plan for societal development. Therefore, there would be a "new normal" for each generation and an overarching plan for how the common stock would be disposed, and this idea would be sold.
The number of workers in China was less relevant than the generational plan proceeding and calling for depopulation. Had there not been reform in China and 1 billion workers weren't added to the rolls of the capitalist workforce, depopulation and degradation measures would have continued regardless. You saw what that would look like with the confusion around Ford and Carter, and Reagan "saved" the situation by reassuring certain elements that they could just exploit China, or Mexico, so long as they embraced Reagan's ideology and a stupid final confrontation with the USSR, thus opening up Russia.

You'd have to believe the rulers are completely passive to think that they'd just-so treat the workers better if there are fewer of them. The only thing keeping the working class alive is their sheer numerical superiority, and the unwillingness of many of their number to comply wholly with technocratic dictates. If depopulation happens, the logic of depopulation consumes the whole society. There won't be the assumption of even the form of democracy continuing, and that is happening now. The advocates for this have been salivating since the 1990s for a general purge, and they got what they wanted. That's locked in now.

The working class' true strength was always in their numerical superiority, so long as they retained any of their wits. That is why the depopulation project entailed large-scale poisoning and degradation of the human spirit, directed squarely at the residuum. The workers would be segregated into grades of civic worth, and encouraged to attack each other by caste affiliation or some superficial marker. The powers behind the throne would of course be sacrosanct, and anyone calling this what it was got the purge. Those who mystified what this was would be promoted to create a wholly fictitious world-system for public consumption. That's what you are living in - a lie and a story constructed for you. That's how you can see the world as something passive, reproducing the logic of the state in your own brain. That's how you can adopt this strange thinking that if the working class is utterly destroyed and degraded, they will somehow be stronger because of evolutionary psychology and the virtue of "struggling for life" - while the workers are choked to death and have a knife pointed at their throat at all times. Under such conditions, there is no working class agitation. There isn't even the bargain with organized labor that has been permitted. You don't know at all what you are up against, and prefer to live in a narrative where you can still win, any day now. You've been programmed to fall for that narrative and continue failing.

All throughout the history of capitalism, the rulers of the system have bemoaned the existence of too many people. If their belief favored population growth, you would have seen natalist policies and aid given directly to stable families, rather than premising assistance to families on utter destitution and the state's invasion of private life encouraging the breakup of families. Every policy of the capitalist state has been for depopulation and winning the class war by killing their enemy. There are many trivial things that could be done to reduce the death rate, like not rationing out medical care in this absurd militarized system that is designed to decide who lives and who dies according to the dictates of eugenics. If the ruling class was committed to population growth, such eugenics would not be tolerated at all and would have been ruthlessly purged as a clear and present danger. There would be heads on spikes, given what the eugenists represented and their stated fanatical commitment to depopulation and social engineering. Of course, certain people proclaim the vicotry of eugenics as a socialist victory, which begs the question why the actual people would want socialism.

>>466042
Holy fuck. Now comrade dunning kruger is fission energy expert! Lool

>>466044
>no arguments

still no working fusion reactor that actually produces energy. After 70 years. Not even an experimental one. nuff said.

>>466042
There is very little mass in the fusion plasma so it can hardly store any thermal energy, hence it can't impart much heat-energy to the reactor wall by touch. If the fusion plasma touches the reactor wall it just vaporizes the topmost layer of atoms from the reactor wall surface, and that doesn't matter, because that's an insignificant amount of wear and tear compared to everything else.
It won't melt the reactor, because the instant the fusion plasma goes out of vacuum and touches anything it will cool down below the temperature it can sustain fusion and it will instantly cease to produce heat.

Basically if the plasma touches anything the fusion gets extinguished and then it's just an incredibly thin gas.

On the off chance that you are interested in learning why you were wrong, you could read about the difference between thermal energy Q and temperature T.

>>466045
>still no working fusion reactor
didn't get enough funding.

>>466047
This is mostly due to people freaking out about nuclear energy with no understanding of it. Things are changing.

>>466148
no
this is simply because there are cheaper, easier and financially safer ways to produce energy in the short-term
its just le "market forces" at work

>>466173
Well, there's that too, but, also what I said. It's multifaceted like all things. The anti nuke movent did play a large role in fear mongering about nuclear energy.