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/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

"The anons of the past have only shitposted on the Internets about the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
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 No.477302

I couldn't think of anything specific to say, and I just wanted to share this fantastic recent exchange between Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson on the subject of China's imploding housing bubble and recent global political economy. Enjoy, anons.

https://inv.vern.cc/watch?v=uS4ewq1R9ps
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 No.477303

Sometimes Wolff starts to sound a bit like a stuck record on his own program, but when the subject comes to economic history (which Michael coaxes out) he really has a lot of interesting things to say.
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 No.477603

>>477302
I absolute love how Wolff has rebranded scary communism into democratic ownership of the workplace. What the movement needs is easily accessible ideas that the workers can rally around instead of this theoretical circle jerk hobbyism.
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 No.477620

>>477603
>ownership
Actually Wolff goes to great lengths to stress that "ownership" is not enough. Owning shares in the company you work at counts for very little if a boss is still telling you what to do. What matters is democratic control over work.
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 No.477622

>>477620
>democratic control over work.
This is rather vague. If workers own 100% of the shares its democratically controlled and the boss works for workers.
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 No.477625

>>477622
Oh, you mean like when the workers owned the means of production in the Soviet Union but a bureaucrat from Moscow still ordered them around?
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 No.477633

>>477620
>What matters is democratic control over work.
Just to be clear you want to
<1. take over a successful business
<2. sideline all the managers who made it successful
<3. start making business decisions (despite the fact that you don't know anything about business)
and your expectation is that everything will either stay the same or even improve somehow?
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 No.477635

>>477633
Your premise seems to be:
<the socialist mode of production is exactly the same as capitalism, except without managers.

Of course "sidelining the managers" isn't going to change the fundamental dynamics of capitalism.
Worker owned and controlled cooperatives are harm-reduction, but as long as they operate in the same capitalist system, they're not going to be able to fix the economic problems inherent in capitalism. You're still going to have a crisis cycle, overproduction, a falling rate of profit and so on.

You are correct to point out that this is not a simple problem where changing a single parameter fixes it. We need a hole new system. And you're not wrong to point out that most workers couldn't make sense of managerial stuff. The "economic user-interface" would have to be re-designed to make sense to workers.
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 No.477636

>>477635
>this is not a simple problem where changing a single parameter fixes it. We need a whole new system.
That's convenient isn't it. Socialism doesn't work in the reality we actually live in therefor it can't be falsified. Totally not a religion.
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 No.477639

>>477636
>That's convenient isn't it.
No it is really inconvenient, building a new economic system is very difficult.

>Socialism doesn't work in the reality we actually live in

No capitalism doesn't work in the reality we actually live in.
All the malfunctions of capitalism that Marx pointed out 200 years ago are still there.
All the malfunctions of imperialist capitalism that Lenin pointed out 100 years ago are still there.
Also new malfunctions have been added, capitalism doesn't appear to be able to harness newer energy generation technologies like nuclear power for example.

We have worked out in great detail multiple working models of how to bootstrap a socialist mode of production in current conditions.
There is just one problem we haven't solved. The big capitalists do not tolerate anybody building an alternative system, they try to murder everybody who does. They call it TINA (There Is No Alternative). They aren't just trying to kill socialist economics but also other forms of non-neoliberal capitalism.

It's difficult to have a good defense in the initial stages when your system is small. In the past, many hundreds of years ago when the capitalists tried to bootstrap the capitalist system, the entrenched feudal system took no mercy and destroyed the beginnings of capitalism multiple times, until finally capitalism caught on. That process of trial and error took almost 400 years.

The "capitalist pioneers" that succeeded in making capitalism stick were extremely ruthless. Feudal lords, parts of the church theocracy, basically anything of the old system that got in the way was unceremoniously killed off. Even then it still took them the better part of a century to fully chew out the remaining feudal system and fully replace it with a capitalist state.

The socialist revolution in the 20th century happened when WW1 and WW2 destabilized many of the incumbent ruling classes enough that they no longer could repress their people. Considering that the current capitalist system appears to be repeating something similar, with the increasing number of conflicts that are escalating into open warfare. The looming WW3 could set off a new revolutionary wave, if that one sticks and a socialist mode of production takes over by the end of the 21 century, that would mean the socialist transformation was twice as fast as the capitalist one. (200 years vs 400 years)
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 No.477640

>>477639
>No capitalism doesn't work in the reality we actually live in.
Free market capitalism works everywhere my dude. The biggest black market in the world existed inside the USSR. Even in maximum security prisons and the virtual worlds of MMOs people develop their own currencies and markets and find ways of subverting authority in order to trade goods and services.

>everything i don't like is capitalism also nothing about the economy has changed in 200 years

Ok lol. What did Marx say about fiat money and currency inflation? Exactly. Anyway enough deflation let's get back on topic.

>No it is really inconvenient, building a new economic system is very difficult.

It's definitely convenient for the demagogues who use the ideals of socialism to manipulate you. now tell me why do you believe in a system when by your own admission there is no evidence that it can actually work?
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 No.477643

>>477640
>Free market capitalism works everywhere
The term "Free market" meant a market without, industrial monopolists, big finance rentiers and so on.
That exists almost nowhere.

>The biggest black market in the world existed inside the USSR.

Stop making shit up, the Soviets just had stores where people could buy import-goods. It was integrated into the soviet economic system.

>Even in maximum security prisons

no, prisons have barter systems, you have to put on the ideology really thick to confuse barter with market exchange.

>the virtual worlds of MMOs people develop their own currencies and markets

Lol there isn't a single game that has a working solution that faithfully simulates a market economy. They either crash or they have admins who step in and make it work by cheating, like fudging the price mechanism, substituting supplies or creating fake demand.

>everything i don't like is capitalism

No i'm just pointing out that all the parts of the system that are failing are the result of capitalism, you are trying to pretend that
<capitalism is only the things i like.

>nothing about the economy has changed in 200 years

That's a straw-men i clearly said that it had changed, just that it hasn't fixed any of it's malfunctions.

>What did Marx say about money

In Marx's analysis money is the universal commodity against which the exchange value of all other commodities are measured. Marx also considered money to be a veil that hides the real economy where quantities of material and labor time are the accounting units.

>What would Marx say about fiat money vs gold money

The exchange-value of the pieces of paper used as currency tokens is far exceeding their production costs.
The exchange-value of pieces of yellow metal used as speculative commodities is far exceeding their production costs.
Marx would advice you to produce paper currency tokens or mine yellow metal because the profit margins are outrageously high.

>It's definitely convenient for the demagogues

The demagogues are the ones that keep saying that there is no alternative to their system.

>now tell me why do you believe in a system when by your own admission there is no evidence that it can actually work?

What are you talking about, even the flawed actually existing socialist systems from the 20th century still worked better than capitalism. It's not a leap of faith to think that if you fixed all their shortcomings that they worked even better.
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 No.477659

>>477640
>the virtual worlds of MMOs people develop their own currencies and markets and find ways of subverting authority in order to trade goods and services
In my experience people often fall back into gift economies (without even realizing it) in MMOs when it becomes apparent that the attempt at recreating a Friedmanesque utopia of idealized market exchange has failed.
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 No.477665

>>477659
>In my experience people often fall back into gift economies (without even realizing it) in MMOs
That's kinda nice
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 No.477709

They're back! Another cozy exchange between the Hud and the Wolf.
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 No.477746

<477636
>theories of solution of present problems are religions
>foolsifiety
Off yourself.

<477640

>Even in maximum security prisons and the virtual worlds of MMOs people develop their own currencies and markets and find ways of subverting authority in order to trade goods and services.
This "argument" is based on human behavior in systems of relations with artificially imposed scarcity of resources.
You should kill yourself, now.

>now tell me why do you believe in a system when by your own admission there is no evidence that it can actually work?

Your al-gulique whore of a mother didn't ask such questions to your potential conceviers. Stop pretending like you're not the same equally retarded spawn of hers.

>>477643
>actually existing socialist systems from the 20th century
"Socialism is when the capitalistically operating, profit-seeking corporation-state, & its de facto bueraucratic-managerial owners, the class of collective bourgeoisie (called "The New Class" by the so-called "'left communist'" sissoid braincucks of the past), owns, & gives, stuff. & the more stuff the capitalistically operating, profit-seeking corporation-state owns & gives to its proletarian wageslaves, the more socialist it is. & when the capitalistically operating, profit-seeking corporation-state owns, & gives, all of the stuff to its proletarian wageslaves who work for it by selling their workforce after making a wage contract with one of its enterprises, then, it is Communi$m!" ‒ Kras Mazov

Jesus fucked.

Now, faggie, try to explain (to yourself) how this ideological s*vkovian retardation of not-yours compares to the notion of our jewish lord & uyghur saviour Marx about the impossibility of rolling back of the present economic system to the previous stage.
Either Marx is a retard & the state management benefactors of the '80-'90s "'counter-revolutions'" know better, or, whatever the fuck the red bourgs were building in there wasn't socialism (as presumably retarded Marx defined it himself) but the same capitalism with %country_name% specifics, where the majority of productive force is, in praxis, still alienated from the society itself, barring this system any kind of right to call itself SOCIALISM. Oh wow, how revisionist of us! Daddy manager is calling his buddies from le people's secret services as we speak! (you better prepare for people's mind & body crippling torture)

>>477659
>>In my experience people often fall back into gift economies (without even realizing it) in MMOs when it becomes apparent that the attempt at recreating a Friedmanesque utopia of idealized market exchange has failed.
Unironically. & whenever a perceived oversupply of even the game currency happens, the participants of this economy fall into negative hoarding state, trying to give somebody their amassed wealth just so it wouldn't rot without any use, which, by still being negative hoarding, even manages to produce conflicts when the receiving side doesn't want to get anything unearned from other participants.
It's like sapienoids understand rational usage of resources better than any specially manufactured status quo-apologetic preachers who are called "economists". & Wollf, by his own admission, was one of such cucks himself. Props to this ancient faggot for craving actual fucking understanding of this present world & real knowledge, what a rarity deez dayz.
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 No.477747

>>477640
You could have at least checked out some basic videos by prof Wolff before posting this cringe here my dude.
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 No.477750

>>477709
thanks for posting the vid
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 No.477767

>>477625
>when the workers owned the means of production in the Soviet Union but a bureaucrat from Moscow still ordered them around
Workers never owned anything in Soviet Union as the entire country was controlled by party elites and not the workers. If workers own 100% of shares of a cooperative they can boss around their CEO and not the other way around.
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 No.477783

>>477643
>The term "Free market" meant a market without, industrial monopolists, big finance rentiers and so on.
You can't just change the definition of a word and then pretend you've defeated my argument. It doesn't matter what label you use. Replace "free market" with "sdflkjsdlkfj" where "sdflkjsdlkfj" means people voluntarily trading goods and services regardless of what 3rd parties want. And like I said in my original post it works everywhere, even in the bloodiest police state in history, even in virtual worlds locked down with hard uncompromising machine code, people find ways around price controls and trade restrictions imposed by 3rd parties.

>What did Marx say about money

You can't just make up your own fake quote and then answer it.
>>477640
>What did Marx say about ""fiat"" money and currency inflation?
These two things dominate our modern economy and simply did not exist when marx was alive. My point being that you trying to understand modern economics by reading marx is like trying to understand modern science by reading aristotle.

>What are you talking about

Earlier you said there is no way to practice socialism incrementally or from within another system (unlike free market capitalism or sdflkjsdlkfj or whatever you want to call it).
<We need a whole new system.
So if there is no way to test the principles of socialism independently or on a small scale then how do you know the system will work after you build it all at once after the revolution?

>even the flawed actually existing socialist systems from the 20th century still worked better than capitalism

You're saying starving 50 million people to death was in fact "real socialism" and was better than living in a contemporary capitalist country? Do you really want to bellyflop onto that landmine? I'll give you a chance to change your mind.

>>477659
>In my experience people often fall back into gift economies (without even realizing it) in MMOs when it becomes apparent that the attempt at recreating a Friedmanesque utopia of idealized market exchange has failed.
Runescape is a good example when price controls were added to the game players invented their own secondary currency based on junk items which allowed them to buy and sell items outside of the fixed price range set by the game. Similar things have happened in other games https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reboot-bitcoin-is-digital-scarcity/id1359544516?i=1000636424128
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 No.477784

>>477746
>theories of solution of present problems are religions
What is it with you guys and fake quotes. What I said was that your comrade admitted that you have no evidence that socialism will actually work until you implement it. Kind of like how christians have no evidence heaven exists until they die. Isn't that the definition of faith?

>This "argument" is based on human behavior in systems of relations with artificially imposed scarcity of resources.

Scarcity is not artificial though. There's only a certain amount of land, a certain amount of water, every person only has a certain number of days to be alive. Pretending that scarcity doesn't exist or shouldn't exist is dangerously detached from reality.

>Off yourself.

>You should kill yourself, now.
lol the "side of empathy".
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 No.477793

>>477783
>the definition
>"free market" means people voluntarily trading goods and services regardless of what 3rd parties want.
If that existed, people could just bypass wall-street, large monopolies and so on.

Just out of curiosity, if you got to build your voluntary trade economic system. How would you prevent consolidation of capital, which enables them to be the 3rd party that fucks with everybody else's trade.
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 No.477808

File: 1705892369871.jpg ( 176.77 KB , 1357x2048 , concentrated-sanya.jpg )

>>477783
>voluntarily trading goods
>voluntarily
lol you don't want to go down that road, trust me uygha

>And like I said in my original post it works everywhere, even in the bloodiest police state in history

why hasn't it worked when the "bloodiest police state in history" was finally transitioning to civilized capitalism?

>price controls

is not socialism, but social democracy

price SETTING is socialism

>Earlier you said there is no way to practice socialism incrementally or from within another system (unlike free market capitalism or sdflkjsdlkfj or whatever you want to call it).

why didn't you "practice" you capitalism inside feudalism then retard? why did you need fucking FOUR revolutions to finally start "practicing" your shit?

>So if there is no way to test the principles of socialism independently or on a small scale then how do you know the system will work after you build it all at once after the revolution?

you can test "principles of socialism" in war economies

good thing that your capitalism is gonna have plenty of those soon, huh?

>You're saying starving 50 million people to death was in fact "real socialism" and was better than living in a contemporary capitalist country?

you mean in a capitalist country like famine-stricken India? you mean in a capitalist country like Nazi Germany?

It wasn't good living ANYWHERE if you were a prole in the interwar period. There was this thing called the Great Depression.
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 No.477812

File: 1705897639637.jpg ( 261.28 KB , 1520x770 , rejection-of-the-red-flag.jpg )

>>477783
Also, please don't cry about the ebil commies wanting to violently overthrow your precious capitalism.

You brought this on yourself, and you have no one else to blame.

This here is the moment when the socialism proper was born - right there with your fucking precious bourgeois Republic.
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 No.477845

>>477793
>If that existed, people could just bypass wall-street, large monopolies and so on.
People do do that it's called agorism. And it's much easier now with the invention of bitcoin and monero to do digital payments with a hard currency and no middleman. The problem is if you skip out on too much tax then nasty men with guns will hunt you down.

>if you got to build your voluntary trade economic system. How would you prevent consolidation of capital

That's like asking if you lived in a desert how would you prevent drowning. You can't have monopolies in a free market because there is no barrier to entry. The biggest player can't just buy out or undercut all competition because there is infinite competition, they would just go broke. Monopolies are the product of political interventions artificially limiting competition through force.

>>477808
>lol you don't want to go down that road, trust me uygha
Not an argument.

>why hasn't it worked when the "bloodiest police state in history" was finally transitioning to civilized capitalism?

What do you mean by "worked"? I would definitely say the people of modern russia are far better off than in the soviet era.

>why did you need fucking FOUR revolutions to finally start "practicing" your shit?

I don't know what you're strawmaning here.

>you can test "principles of socialism" in war economies

This is very key to our discussion so you need to elaborate, you can't just leave it at that and pretend you've won.

>good thing that your capitalism is gonna have plenty of those soon, huh?

War is a waste of resources from a capitalist perspective. The only way to profit from war is to force the costs onto somebody else, like the tax payer. Taxation is not capitalism.

>you mean in a capitalist country like famine-stricken India?

Again I don't know what you're referencing. What makes them capitalist and what famine is this?

>you mean in a capitalist country like National Socialist Germany?

National Socialists were not capitalists.

>It wasn't good living ANYWHERE if you were a prole in the interwar period. There was this thing called the Great Depression.

Which was caused by the newly introduced federal reserve and their attempts to centrally plan the US economy by manipulating the currency supply. Believe it or not central planning is also not capitalism.

>>477812
>Also, please don't cry about the ebil commies wanting to violently overthrow your precious capitalism.
You're missing the point of this sub-thread. Why do you need to overthrow anything, why can't you just practice your superior marxist economics by yourself?
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 No.477854

>>477845
>Bitcoin
is just another finance speculation thing.
>monero
Monero might actually function like real money and circulate in the exchange of goods and services, so props for the Monero people for delivering on what they promised. But it doesn't enable anybody to evade taxes, it's not any different than cash or gold-coins in that regard. States were able to collect taxes just fine when all money was like that.

The primary means of evading taxis is bribing politicians. So how your money transactions work on a technical level may not be that important.

>You can't have monopolies in a free market because there is no barrier to entry. The biggest player can't just buy out or undercut all competition because there is infinite competition.

infinite competition ?
In actually existing markets everything is finite.
So this is a religion then? Like "God is infinite" type stuff.

>Monopolies are the product of political interventions artificially limiting competition through force.

Yes super wealthy capitalists can bribe politicians to rig the game on their behalf. But since politics is pretty much an immovable object. The only way to combat this, is to prevent anybody from concentrating enough wealth to be able to bribe.
So to get a free market you have to prevent anybody from concentrating so much wealth that they can use bribes to buy a monopoly.

So how do you plan on preventing the wealth concentrations that cause monopolies ?
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 No.477857

File: 1705963553994.jpg ( 433.91 KB , 1200x519 , su-strike-witches.jpg )

>>477845
Oh, you're one those, huh? You should put on your ancap badge so that people could see.

>You can't have monopolies in a free market because there is no barrier to entry.

I'm not even gonna bother to ask about natural monopolies (they don't exist, right?).

Capital required to enter the market is already a barrier - proles don't tend to accumulate capital due to their particular class income distribution.

>Monopolies are the product of political interventions artificially limiting competition through force.

When the breakup of the Bell System was mandated by the US court, was that a "limiting of competition"?

>Not an argument.

*Sigh*

Okaaaaay

Define "voluntarily" without collapsing into solipsism.

>What do you mean by "worked"?

Gee, I dunno..

How about not collapsing into the millions of excess deaths and a halved industrial capacity?

Why is the "magic of the market" didn't work, faggot?

>I would definitely say the people of modern russia are far better off than in the soviet era.

Yes, especially those that get shelled in border regions with Ukraine lol.

AGAIN, you DON'T want to go down the road of proving how much better off proles in current Russia are. TRUST ME.

>I don't know what you're strawmaning here.

Oh, of course you don't lol.

I'll ask again: Why didn't you just keep practicing your capitalism in feudal societies? Markets with utility maximizing agents existed since the time immemorial after all.

Why did you need to violently overthrow feudalism in the Dutch, English, American, and French revolutions for your capitalism to work? Why did you need to violently drown Europe in blood in Napoleonic Wars for your capitalism to work?

Why all the violent revolutions, fuckface?

>This is very key to our discussion so you need to elaborate

Principles of economy-wide planning can be implemented in the capitalist war economies.

>War is a waste of resources from a capitalist perspective.

Not if it is used to protect markets and property and paid for by taxing proles lol.

>Taxation is not capitalism.

Wonderful.

Who's gonna fund the police and cia against all the rioting uyghurs and unions tho?

>Again I don't know what you're referencing.

Of course you don't.

I'm referring to the Churchill famine of 1943.

>What makes them capitalist

Labor market lol.

>National Socialists were not capitalists.

Wonderful.

So when they outlawed independent trade unions to prevent monopolistic distortions of the free labor market they were not capitalist?

>Which was caused by the newly introduced federal reserve and their attempts to centrally plan the US economy by manipulating the currency supply.

What about all the crises before the federal reserve tho, when you literally had multiple currencies competing with each other? Were they due to "central planning" too?

>Why do you need to overthrow anything, why can't you just practice your superior marxist economics by yourself?

Look at that painting again, and look at it carefully.

Why did you need to violently overthrow feudalism, why couldn't you just practice your superior capitalist economics by yourself?
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 No.477881

>>477854
>Monero might actually function like real money and circulate in the exchange of goods and services
As long as you can't pay your taxes in Monero, then no it doesn't.
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 No.477904

>>477881
Theory of money is tricky.

Marx appears to have thought that it's money if it's the universal commodity that circulates. So if the monero guys get an economic circuit going, Marx would probably consider it money.

But i know that today most economists including many Marxists think that being a means for taxation is a necessary condition for something to be considered money.

I haven't formed an opinion yet.
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 No.477917

>>477904
Marx is very clear that money referred to ostensibly gold-backed currency that was exchangeable for a precious metal that could not be issued as fiat. When you do that, you've moved to something very different, and it would be self-evident to those who manage this new financial tool that they no longer deal with productive capital, nor need such a thing. Any remaining incentive or purpose to produce anything would be gone, or the incentive to produce and imperative of this situation would be a different one.

You could have "money" without capitalism or general commodity exchange. That is older than dirt. You could have money after capital as such is no longer relevant, but it would have less to do with anything real. You could for example segregate assets - real wealth - from the wage fund entirely, and workers would be paid entirely in chits. That's what fiat money or credit are at a basic level. Or, whatever is used to press labor to work for management is something entirely different, which is what every workable version of socialism entailed. In one way or another, labor will be made to do something that was very much against its interests. It may be a far more benign form of this, or labor might simply be the ruling elite or the ruling elite is drawn from the working class and understands the value of having workers that are useful and healthy. The point is that the money-based economy Marx referred to had obvious imperatives that could not be escaped regardless of what those at the time wanted. Eventually, money as something exchanged for gold or something "stable in nature" would no longer be viable. This is what happened just before WW1, by choice of the oligarchs who needed a new way to pay for their wars, and a new modus operandi for what they really wanted.
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 No.477918

Money to be "money" as such implies that it is shared between assets, capital (liquifiable assets converted to production), and wages paid to reproduce labor of all types. The bourgeois salaryman is paid so that he can convert his salary not to consumed products, but to either assets or capital.

In practice, assets are not entirely "liquid" if they are to be genuine wealth. An asset worth keeping is something substantive and protected with a deed and an interest in the asset for its own sake. For example, land, or vehicles, or slaves, which would be either the point or assets that could be collateral for a bank. The capitalist doesn't view anything in capital as an asset in that sense. The capitalist may possess assets as a proprietor, but his capital is purely something to be deployed or withdrawn for some productive purpose, however that is construed. You can use money itself as capital, and make money out of money (usury), seeing it as a means to an end. Money as an asset is pretty much pointless, unless you like swimming in a money bin of gold coins.
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 No.477919

At heart, though, money is a tool issued by banks or treasuries, rather than a "natural" store of value or universal. Money can lose all of its value, banks can break, states issuing this money can fall. There isn't really a "universal store of value" - just a sense that there is some value in economics which can be exchanged and recognized, an abstraction. What that "value" is does not correspond to money.
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 No.477920

Even if a state issued multiple "money-forms", they would all be compared against each other to find out which is the "real money" and what the pretenders are worth, if anything. The reasons for this aren't entirely particular to Marx, but make sense if you really think about why money would be issued by states and why myths are made about it.

What is really contended isn't money or entries on a ledger, but value in the abstract and the uses that value portends to. In particular, it is the latter that was what anyone competent actually wanted out of this. Having things that are "intrinsically valuable" means nothing.
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 No.477921

>>477904
>today most economists including many Marxists think
Modern monetary theorists/neo-chartalists are still in the small minority among economists, even if theirs is the only theory of money supported by evidence and history.
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 No.477926

>>477921
"Chartalism" is quackery. If you believe governments are good and your friend, then all of the problems of money are obviated - and the favored groups in this society don't care about printing money as long as they remain an institutional fixture and their status is protected over someone else.

If money is indicative of general wealth, then its function is to strip away wealth. Ultimately, the goal of the smart capitalist is to be the bank, and use that bank to strip forcibly wealth from everyone, keeping everyone in hock to the bank. That is exactly what happened. If money is recognizably money - and the ultimate purpose of money, for those who can hold on to it, is to convert it into useful assets or property, or something that they actually care about - then printing more of it doesn't create any wealth, nor does it facilitate anything, because the same assets are available, and the money doesn't magic new assets. Those have to be acquired from somewhere else in the world.

While labor or technology - capital - can create new assets, new things that are useful, that is not what is done with the printed money. All of that money is just taken immediately to pay jacked up rent, or pay off loans that are by design unpayable. By printing money, those who are selected to live are given imperial largesse, and in this way, those selected to die are filtered out, their real condition deteriorates, and they find themselves working 60, 80 hours a week while the favored are granted sinecures and told how great they are.

Money as a tool is opposed to both labor and the proprietors. The proprietors are the first to rail against the evil bankers, because said bankers have wiped them out, just as they feared, and just as Marx would tell you is the fate of landed property - of the old proprietors, and the petty bourgeois who were holding on to what they had for dear life. The capitalist does not exist to be a ball of capital to make things for you. The capitalist uses capital as a tool to get assets, and is forced by the dominant holders of wealth to produce because that is the only thing he has to offer. Banking establishments are not things that are built by anyone with some money to lend, and those who attempt to do so will get a visit from Vinnie the "claims adjuster". Only the king of the mountain survives, and eventually, his wealth is so large that it ceases to be a serious objective. Those at the apex of capitalism have always understood their aim was to use capital, and then wealth and command of banking, to become the king. That's how capitalism began after all - with a few powerful interests that saw what was possible, and saw debris from the older order that contested the rise of new men. Capitalism was no friend of the little guy, if that was your idea. It did suggest there would be a new slate of winners and losers. The victory of capitalism, the thing that made it work, was that it suggested a theory of technology that could be generalized and could discipline labor, where before you had various forms of unfree labor and unreliable guilds and associations that would be propped up by kings and nobles. This stymied those who wanted political equality and believed they had the wealth, intelligence, and means to be just as good or better than the current rulers, and it stymied some powerful interests who made common cause with those who could win in the "bourgeois order", or what gets called as such. Many of the men who came to rule in the liberal revolutions were not given over to any narrative, but believed that because they had money and a stake in politics, they would defend it, and those with a political mind saw that they were as close to being kings as they were going to get, and immediately faced the fear of one of their own becoming king.

If money was something governments print at will, it implies something very different. For one, the government can print itself and its stakeholders a win button no matter how ruinous the situation is, and make others accept it. This is exactly what happened in 2008, and it was openly admitted this is what they did. They have done it again after 2020, and predictably this was done to strip away what they didn't take back in 2008. Russia proceeded to convert to a war economy, now mobilized. The US spent the past 40 years stripping itself bare and utterly demoralized its own people - yay for eugenics. It's not like Russia is much better, and Putin's joke of a government isn't going to take over the world, nor is that the point of what Putin is doing. All of this is about funneling money direct to the stakeholders, and stripping money direct from the workers, without the intermediary of governments, institutions, or any expectation that there will be anything after this.

There is, though, something after this. The cargo cultists need to believe that there won't be rebellion or resistance, and above all, they need the people to not look to each other and despise the institutions in sufficient numbers. That would necessitate a general purge and the maximization of the thrill of torture. This is what has been prepared now, with the onslaught of Zionist death cult propaganda. When Israel goes to shit, they intend to come here and replace us. It's funny really, Jews will indeed replace us - almost as if it were scripted. Of course, many American Jews themselves will be replaced, and the poor sod Israelis will be left holding the bag. As it stands, there are too many interests so obsessed with survival, and the people selected to die have been identified, marked down, and isolated. It's already happening, and we have yet to see the worst of it.

I said almost 4 years ago, I keep wondering why leftypol thinks we're not living through depopulation. I expected at least tens of millions of excess deaths in the US, and based on what I'm seeing, that is basically what has happened. The bottom is falling out - not in the future, not as a hypothetical. It's happening now. The only thing that awaits is the deep end of the abyss.
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 No.477927

I'm guessing the worst of it will come in the second half of this decade, based on escalation and the willful embrace of the eugenic cult among a critical mass of faithful. How bad it will get… I don't make predictions any more. But, every government in the world is embracing general slaughter, either because of a deep desire to or because they're going to be at war or forced to comply. I have no doubt new weapons will be deployed for population control, once the remaining fetters on states are dissolved for a war situation and the true believers can march forward with their "Jehad". I see that the honest and decent are being baited and "trapped", tracked and prepared for liquidation of Potential Trouble Sources, to use Scientology language. There's not going to be a real way out. There won't be any more faking ignorance or pretending, and there will be few places to hide. The pressure to comply will be too great. Nazis learned what worked last time and what didn't, and have been planning for this since the start.
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 No.477928

My guess is, at some point, this breaks, when enough of them learn they aren't actually going to get a place on the lifeboat, and this movement was promoted by the worst Satanic fags the human race has ever been cursed with. I doubt they have demoralized enough people, and so, there will be war - a war planned and instigated by the eugenists, by the liberals, who believe they will surely win. Almost immediately, the factions will reconcile in private, be assigned their kill zones, and make sure everyone who wants no part in this faggotry is crushed under a boot. After a pitched and sharp global orgy of death, the reconciliation will be made official, and those who survive will be left with nothing. Then the enablers of this, mostly on the rightist side, will be gradually liquidated, turned against each other. They know what they are and they're too pigheaded to do anything different. Even if enough of them had a brain, there really is no course of action available to them.

I suspect there will be some form of "reconciliation", but those who didn't get with the program, those who survive the onslaught, will have nothing whatsoever. Failed race.
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 No.477938

One: a respected economic thinker who has real-world relevance
The Other: a red-liberal charlatan
you can decide which one's which
(but it should be obvious)
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 No.477939

>>477603
>LE COMMUNIST REPUBLIC OF WALMART
i hate this timeline..
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 No.477947

File: 1706038684953.jpg ( 47.75 KB , 392x500 , do you expect me to read t….jpg )

>>477926
>>477927
>>477928
Didn't read, lol
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 No.477949

>>477854
>Bitcoin is just another finance speculation thing.
>Monero might actually function like real money
What do you mean by "real" money. Dollars/euros/pounds are not backed by anything at all, a small cartel of bankers literally print it out of thin air and give it to themselves. That's why the wealth gap is so huge and keeps growing.

The point of bitcoin is that scarcity is guaranteed by math. A group of politicians or bankers or warlords or whatever cannot just print new bitcoins out of nothing and give it to themselves, that's why they hate it. And if the billionaire class hates something then you should at least be a little curios instead of just dismissing it out of hand.

>So how do you plan on preventing the wealth concentrations that cause monopolies?

I already told you this question doesn't make sense. Free trade does not create monopolies, free trade kills monopolies.

>In actually existing markets everything is finite.

>So this is a religion then? Like "God is infinite" type stuff.
It sounds like you've ran out of arguments and just being petty now. Go away and think about it. I sincerely hope I was able to open your mind a little.
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 No.477950

>>477926
>This is what has been prepared now, with the onslaught of Zionist death cult propaganda. When Israel goes to shit, they intend to come here and replace us. It's funny really, Jews will indeed replace us - almost as if it were scripted.
Calm down Adolf, nobody is replacing the milk with juice, the breakfast buffet will have both.

Zionism tried to displace Judaism, and it's failing, because it's too openly fascistic.

Also stop equating Jews with Zionists, that's anti-Semitic. The silent majority of Jews around the world is opposed to the Palestinian genocide, by equating the two you are unjustly making Jews responsible for Zionist crimes.
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 No.477951

>>477881
>As long as you can't pay your taxes in Monero, then no it doesn't.
Why do you want to pay taxes? You want to overthrow the 1% but refuse to step an inch outside the financial-political system they control. Take a minute to think about how stupid that is.

>>477917
>Marx is very clear that money referred to ostensibly gold-backed currency that was exchangeable for a precious metal that could not be issued as fiat.
That's simply what money was when he was alive.
>>477640
>What did Marx say about fiat money and inflation? Exactly.
My point was that marx died before the federal reserve was established. He didn't write anything about completely unbacked fiat money and inflation because those things simply didn't exist.

The economic system we live in now is so completely different to what marx was writing about that trying to understand modern economics by reading marx is like trying to understand modern science by reading aristotle.

>>477857
I'll get back to you another day. Consider writing less text, brevity is the soul of wit.
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 No.477952

>>477951
Money is defined by its means of sovereignty, which by its issuing by the state, has the right of returning notes to itself in taxation.
This is why decentralised tokens of value can never be money proper. The circulation of money intersects in its sovereign body.
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 No.477953

>>477951
Marx did speak however on the viability of paper money being a symbol of Value, since the Value of gold money took away from its ability to be issued due to its scarcity.
This is why gold causes depressions but fiat causes inflations, because fiat is able to represent more wealth in its operation.
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 No.477958

>>477949
>What do you mean by "real" money.
I'm not entirely sure how to define money exactly, but at least you have to be able to reasonably use it to buy/sell stuff with it. Bitcoin does not work as a practicle currency, it's easier to barter using a bottle of whiskey than a bitcoin. Bitcoin works as a financial speculative asset.
>Dollars/euros/pounds are not backed by anything at all, a small cartel of bankers literally print it out of thin air and give it to themselves.
That's kind of true, big finance sort of does print money into it's pockets with a few extra steps. Tho the US, EU and UK do produce goods that sort of back those currencies, with a basket of goods.
>That's why the wealth gap is so huge and keeps growing.
It's one of the factors that makes the wealth gap worse but, even if money couldn't be printed, there still would be a rising wealth gap. Goldcoin economies had a lot of wealth concentration as well.

>The point of bitcoin is that scarcity is guaranteed by math.

That's not entirely true, people immediately created new crypto-coins to get around that.

>I already told you this question doesn't make sense. Free trade does not create monopolies, free trade kills monopolies.

Maybe we are talking past each other.

You think that market competition can compensate for monopoly formation. To an extend that is true, some monopolies indeed were defeated by competition. Sometimes it's governmental intervention that enables competition like the EU forcing apple to use a standard charge cable instead of the propriety monopoly cable.

My thinking goes like this: Monopoly-formation has been inherent to all existing market economies without exceptions. The simple explanation is that the most profitable strategy in a market economy is to corner the market.

I want you to think beyond compensation mechanisms:
I'm asking you to change something fundamental about how market economies work to either
<make seeking out monopolies undesirable / a bad strategy
or
<outright make it mathematically impossible to create a monopoly.

In your words, i don't simply want you to "kill monopolies" i want you to negate the possibility of them existing in the first place.
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 No.477960

>>477950
There's a belief that the status Jews took as a result of Israel's existence and threat to the world can be kept without the unpleasantness of Israel, as if the Arabs were a subdued people and the "genocide is done" as with the Indians in America, for whom revanchism wouldn't even mean anything in their current status. The Jewish liberal has certainly been a beneficiary of the status quo where Israel exists and its effect on spiritual enemies - which includes the Christians as well as the Muslims - forces both to attack each other. It's very easy to take the high road when you're distant enough from consequences and the target is not on you, and for understandable reasons, liberal Jews really do not want a target on them. So, you see - and they're not the only participants in events doing this - an effort to have their cake as they please, one way or another. So many view the situation in Palestine as a vehicle for their very personal agendas and don't even pretend it's anything else. Certainly the Pals are tossed aside by everyone as soon as they are not useful as a foreign relations prop, which is why the Muslim world is difficult to unite. The last time the Arab world ganged up on Israel for a big war they got fucked pretty hard. Now, though, the faith in "conquering the inferiors with technology" no longer applies. The Arab/Muslims have much of the same technology as the Israelis and the Empire, or counter-measures to imperial technology and no shortage of engineers and scientists among their own. The implications of this - that the mythology of "industrial war" and the narratives of history no longer apply - scare the shit out of classes and interests in society that make their entire business model about cajoling others to do their bidding.

The entire liberal order, Jew and gentile, is clearly guilty of aiding and abetting Israel's existence in one way or another, and see it as a tool far away to do with as they please. If they were at all concerned about anything on the ground there, there would be a drive to get rid of the Zionist Entity and make peace with the Muslims as far as possible. Unfortunately, Bush threw that away so he could go a-conquering for Jesus and bring on the Rapture. The liberal world order was happy to allow this because their theories of history and modus operandi required them to believe they were the smartest people in the room, and they were going to manipulate and brainwash everyone to love their slavery.

Naturally, when this fails, the backup plan is to push all of the responsibility and war guilt on to the people, and say it was their fault and their moral failure, and that they always resemble the worst versions of themselves. If you are an Israeli with dual citizenship and Israel is no longer viable, where do you acquire property to live? The dispossession of the Americans, who they always hated, is great for this. Everything being done to Palestine either has already been visited on the American people, or is threatened if they refuse to comply with more seizures, more backsliding of basic decencies. That is the main reason for this nonstop torture cult since the 1980s, the glorification of human ugliness far past anything the Nazis ever accomplished. And of course, liberal Jews can say what they like about opposing Israel, but they're not going to sacrifice their position if they can hold on. The situation in the former US is designed to pit all against all in an orgy of unprecedented malice and human sacrifice. It's a special Hell, and so far as I know, it's only happened here and in the Anglo countries so far as it can be pressed. No one else is brainwashed enough to accept it, and nowhere else does imperial eugenics have such a hammerlock on all institutions. In that situation, the only thing will be for everyone to pick whatever provincial interest and alliance they can - and anyone who would be decent or see the futility of agreeing to this philosophy of selfishness has been selected for failure already. Only those who supplicate to eugenics can survive. The rich and favored classes, the favored interests of the world to come, are most conscious of what they hold and the sacrosanctity of their institutional chokehold, and what would happen if those institutions were railed against. A psychological and medical inquisition cannot drop their arms. They will fight to the death, and the thrill of torture will only increase the longer such professions are allowed this hammerlock on life.
It went on too long. The possibility of a different world is gone, and the sickest thing is that few will diagnose the nature of the problem. Those who do, hilariously enough, are those who see no reason to end it, who will just say - brag, even - about what they got away with, because the damned selected to die have nowhere to go. I don't blame them. I blame the enablers who follow it without thinking.

>>477951
>That's simply what money was when he was alive.
He's pretty clear that this is what makes money recognizably "money" that is relevant to the situation he is describing. Currency in precious metal issued by states is ancient, and commodity-money without the stamp of state issuance is older still, but neither of these are money with the same functions as the money of merchant banks, and do not fulfill the role money fills in capitalism. It's still money, and nothing prevented ancient and pre-ancient finance from making loans, doing usury, or managing their operations as if they operated in price-setting markets and their operations were a going concern. The currency's backing from precious metal, or some other substance whose existence isn't questioned, is one defining quality of money as opposed to credit or company/government scrip - that, whatever the claims of any institution, money is understood as something transferable across them, for the purposes money can command. Property-holders in land, industrialists, workers, and beggars all comprehend what money is and whether money is worth anything, but credit or scrip is either of dubious value, or explicitly recognized as valueless or hostile to them in its entirety, and will not accept scrip in place of something regarded as money, or follow the government's command to value everything as the face value of coins or paper notes represents. Money can be debased - coins can contain nearly no gold or silver - but no one doubts that the coin is meant to represent some store of precious metal or be exchanged as such. When that breaks down, all of those bank IOUs are worth nothing, or their worth is qualitatively something else.

>The economic system we live in now is so completely different to what marx was writing about that trying to understand modern economics by reading marx is like trying to understand modern science by reading aristotle.

Except this is basically what Marx said would and should happen - not as the goal, but as a means to whatever end those who seize the state and the bank had. Inflation as a concept was not alien to economics - it was the inflation of so much gold and silver entering European markets that brought about an investigation of what economics and value really meant, and gold and silver were never "intrinsically valuable" or had any special claim to be worth anything. Neither was the state's ability to dictate value ever a question, or the issuance of fiat money or credit or scrip at various periods of history. Marx was certainly aware of what something like the federal reserve would result in, as were the people who started the project. None of these people are operating blindly and doing whatever feels good - it has always been carried out for deliberate purposes and with considerable knowledge of what economic activity occurs on the ground.
While it's true that you couldn't read Marx to know exactly what this "is" - it wasn't germane to the topic Marx was writing about - it's not as if this outcome were unknowable and totally fooled everyone. When the federal reserve happened, anyone with an investment knew they were defeated. That's one reason why the timidity towards the new imperial doctrine and its efforts to push people to go to war with each other. Those who knew what money was knew they lost, and this is the result.

The economic situation today is indeed very different, but not in the way you probably think. Quantities of value were displaced by selection of specific qualities and general schemes by which they could be selected. Money and property were steadily displaced with a view of technology and the modus operandi to both make new technology, and direct its development so that messy things like "democracy" no longer interfered.
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 No.478002

File: 1706125214141.jpg ( 96.24 KB , 534x534 , sub-buzz-28789-1537217336-….jpg )

>>477952
>money is whatever the state says it is
This doesn't work at all because you can't pay taxes in japan with dollars and you can't pay taxes in the US with yen. You can pay taxes in ecuador with bitcoin though. So by this logic either they are all "money" or none of them are.

>>477953
>Marx did speak however on the viability of paper money being a symbol of Value
What marx didn't anticipate was that a cartel of bankers would be able to convince the government to let them print as much fiat as they want and turn themselves into the new ruling class.

>>477958
>Bitcoin does not work as a practicle currency, it's easier to barter using a bottle of whiskey than a bitcoin
I have to be blunt with you, you have obviously done zero research into this topic so that fact that you don't know something just means you've done zero research.

This argument doesn't even make sense in theory because before normies found out about it and started treading it as a "financial speculative asset", as you put it, the only use for bitcoin was to actually buy and sell things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

Now that it is mainstream you can buy just about anything with it.
https://cryptoexchange.com/marketplace
https://bitify.com/
https://bitpay.com/

>Sometimes it's governmental intervention that enables competition like the EU forcing apple to use a standard charge cable instead of the propriety monopoly cable.

Apple is not a monopoly. It is not even the most popular phone vendor.

>i don't simply want you to "kill monopolies" i want you to negate the possibility of them existing in the first place.

It's always possible to have short term monoplolies, for example you're the first person to create a working steam engine. But that monopoly status creates an enormous incentive for somebody else to be the second person to figure it out. And once the secret is out it's not a monopoly anymore. Another example is you could lower your prices until all your competition go broke and quit. But you can't hold your breath forever, as soon as you raise prices to be profitable again then new competitors will appear. I've given you more of an answer than you deserve because I can't prove a negative this is on you to explain how you think monopolies can sustain themselves indefinitely without state interventions.
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 No.478003

File: 1706125982574.jpg ( 96.24 KB , 534x534 , sub-buzz-28789-1537217336-….jpg )

>>477960
>He's pretty clear that this is what makes money recognizably "money" that is relevant to the situation he is describing.
It's not relevant now though is it. Now you work 40 hours per week for paper tokens that the banks print out of thin air. And then you wonder why it's getting harder and harder to buy anything with it. If you're angry at your employer for making $2 and giving you $1 because they're "stealing your surplus value" or whatever. You should be 1000x angrier at the banker who printed the $2 out of thin air in the first place and gave both dollars to himself.

>gold and silver were never "intrinsically valuable" or had any special claim to be worth anything. Neither was the state's ability to dictate value ever a question, or the issuance of fiat money or credit or scrip at various periods of history.

The scarcity of physical gold and silver in the earth's crust put a cap on how much fiat money banks and governments could create out of nothing before they trigger a bank run. Since 1971 there is no cap it's just a race to the bottom to see who can print the most money for themselves before the currency collapses.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

>The economic situation today is indeed very different, but not in the way you probably think. Quantities of value were displaced by selection of specific qualities and general schemes by which they could be selected. Money and property were steadily displaced with a view of technology and the modus operandi to both make new technology, and direct its development so that messy things like "democracy" no longer interfered.

You write so much text and demonstrate zero comprehension of what I said. The current ruling class have a monopoly on money creation, they are rich because they simply print money out of nothing and give it to themselves. This ruling class and the source of their wealth/power did not exist when marx was alive. This is a major blindspot for people who get all of their economic information from marx.

>messy things like "democracy" no longer interfered

Democracy is not a bug it's a feature. It's not an accident that the rise of central banking and "making the world safe for democracy" happened at exactly the same time 100 years ago. You can't sell a 10 year loan to a king who fully intends to still be king when the loan comes due. But you can sell a 10 year loan to a president who knows he will only be president for 8 years. Not only will it be somebody else's problem to pay back the loan it will probably be somebody from the opposition party.

Biden takes out a loan to pay off Trump's loan, Trump took out a loan to pay off Obama's loan, Obama took out a loan… That's why it doesn't matter who you vote for the masters stay the same. And that's what's behind the evangelicalism for democracy that started 100 years ago. You can't sell exploitative loans to saddam hussain but you can sell them to the endless stream of short term democratic leaders that have followed him.

And the best part is the money is not even real the central banks just prints it out of nothing.
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 No.478004

File: 1706127608365.jpg ( 96.24 KB , 534x534 , sub-buzz-28789-1537217336-….jpg )

>>477857
>Capital required to enter the market is already a barrier
It's not because there are these things call loans.

>When the breakup of the Bell System was mandated by the US court, was that a "limiting of competition"?

You can't be a telecomm without explicit government approval. That's how competition was artificially limited and Bell became a monopoly in the first place.

>How about not collapsing into the millions of excess deaths and a halved industrial capacity?

Still don't know what you're talking about. You need to work on your communication skills.

>Yes, especially those that get shelled in border regions with Ukraine lol.

>AGAIN, you DON'T want to go down the road of proving how much better off proles in current Russia are. TRUST ME.
You know the holomodor happened in ukraine right.

>I'll ask again: Why didn't you just keep practicing your capitalism in feudal societies? Markets with utility maximizing agents existed since the time immemorial after all.

>Why did you need to violently overthrow feudalism in the Dutch, English, American, and French revolutions for your capitalism to work? Why did you need to violently drown Europe in blood in Napoleonic Wars for your capitalism to work?
>Why all the violent revolutions, fuckface?
I don't have to defend something I didn't say. What is your point here anyway, that freedom and property rights made people significantly better off post-feudalism. How is that a dunk on me?

>I'm referring to the Churchill famine of 1943.

>Labor market lol.
More strawmans. An imperial power failing to keep a colony on the other side of the world fully provisioned in the middle of a world war has nothing to do with anything I've said.

>So when they outlawed independent trade unions to prevent monopolistic distortions of the free labor market they were not capitalist?

The first thing they did was abolish the stock market, outlaw all small businesses and forced the remaining companies to join a cartel run by the nazi party. There was no free market in nazi german. The whole economy was centralized under a single political power structure for the supposed benefit of the german people. That's socialism. It's not your ideal socialism. But national socialism was a form of socialism.

>What about all the crises before the federal reserve tho, when you literally had multiple currencies competing with each other? Were they due to "central planning" too?

No that was due to fractional reserve banking. Hard money + fractional reserve banking = bank runs. In 1913 the bankers convinced the US government to make hard money illegal instead of fractional reserve banking and we the people have been paying the price ever since.

>Why did you need to violently overthrow feudalism, why couldn't you just practice your superior capitalist economics by yourself?

Again I never said feudalism had to be overthrown. I don't have to defend something I never said. Free market principles worked during feudal times and they worked better after feudalism was abolished.

Now something you did say: why can't you prove that the principles of socialism work on a small scale or without "your side" controlling the entire political structure?

>Principles of economy-wide planning can be implemented in the capitalist war economies.

Elaborate. Just repeating it over and over doesn't make it true.
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 No.478005

>>478003
There are gold and silver deposits to extract if anyone really wants them. It's not a natural limit, like the Earth said "no more precious metal, guess nature says you can't do money any more!" Abandoning currency in precious metal is a choice. The governments of the world want fiat and have always wanted that, because that way governments can fund unlimited wars and gigantic social engineering projects, which are properly understood the same thing.

> The current ruling class have a monopoly on money creation

And always have. The reason for selecting precious metals in the first place was because ordinary people couldn't acquire them. Precious metal doesn't have any intrinsic value that makes its demand unlimited. For most of history, the majority of humanity was largely disconnected from the monetary economy, and their participation in it was entirely against their interests. What the people generally wanted, and what the rich have always wanted, is land and independence from the price system altogether. Nobody thought that the shinies were the point unless they were tremendous fags. The only reason any of this is tolerated is because mercantile activity and management could become a class unto itself in society, and the point of being a mercantile producer - whatever form it takes - is to acquire property and land so that you, the merchant, can become a noble or respectable to noble houses.

*

Now see, you dumb leftypol piggas, this is what a reactionary sounds like - a belief that symbols have power all their own because they evoke the s'pos'das, where none of the symbols have any history or meaning and cannot be expounded upon. And yet, he's shown more interest in reality than you leftypolers who spend all day spouting retarded memes.

*

The point here, though, is that none of this stuff happened accidentally. The right-wing parties love selling this meme because it keeps the flock believing their salvation is easy if they just make the Bad People go away, and winks to those who know what this is that they can get in the lifeboat and kick off the undeserving. By now, the right-wing parties don't even pretend the purpose is anything other than creating wholesale slaughter, stopped suggesting there was anything to the government except the parts that kill or torture people. The liberals and leftists either followed suit, or were always there and can freely mask off. It's not wise to encourage them in their stupidity.

I'd also make clear that introducing coinage was itself destabilizing and destroyed the older society where clans and tribes were the institutional basis, and states were weak and primarily existed as the warlord and his court extracting tribute. With coinage, it's a lot easier for states to collect taxes. That's the only reason why any of this exists - so that the state can collect taxes and requisition things. When the money is no good, they revert to forced requisition, debasement of currency, or just printing scrip and telling people this is all they're going to get. What was done with central banks was not unknown to history, but never had it been done with a goal of displacing the old currency system which was no longer useful and entailed people clutching what money they had left. So they build a new economy where you have to be a university graduate to be anything, and after recruiting enough true believers for a couple of generation, jack up the going rate to be valid and watch as they fork over all of their wealth and labor for the approval of institutions. Many of the "dumbs" saw this for what it was, then died off without preferential treatment or became enablers who were promised a better death if they turned on the other "dumbs" and became jackals.

>>478004
I don't even know where to begin with this. Looks like someone bought the Austrian School memes.
Here, read the OG:
http://eugeneseffortposts.royalwebhosting.net/texts/The%20Project%20Gutenberg%20eBook%20of%20An%20Inquiry%20into%20the%20Nature%20and%20Causes%20of%20the%20Wealth%20of%20Nations,%20by%20Adam%20Smith.htm

If you are a believer in "free market principles", currency debasement and fiat was the entire purpose of the free market. What they didn't expect is that the rulers would autocannibalize anything productive or useful for nothing more than their hatred and contempt for the people. It's not that the rulers "have" to govern so poorly. The poor are not overthrowing them and didn't want that until the powerful declared open war against them and glorified the atrocities. Even then, the poor have always only fought so far as they must to survive, because world-historical missions are not a thing the poor or workers indulge in, especially when they are so obviously ruinous as the version of "revolution" being sold to them after 1945. The bankers are literally who dictated that free trade was going to pass, because it aligned with their interests.

The bigger mindfuck is that, if you believed free trade was meant to result in anything good or productive or useful, people would freely choose a rational socialist plan - if only such a thing were allowed to exist without disruption, or that met anything most of humanity wanted at all. The moment that became not just possible but clear to a critical mass of humanity, was the moment the idea was made intolerable and inadmissible, and the interests of the proprietors would be weaponized and turned against them.

If you're talking about a world where everyone was nice to each other because it felt good, that was never on offer and never even a thing that would result in the good anyone wanted. If you wanted people to be happy, you'd give them their entitlements and stop whipping them to produce more while making themselves poorer and weaker in the process. They'd receive land, and then the people would have what they want and have no further reason to participate in such a failing society, since the society's institutions clearly aren't interested in peaceful coexistence. If you wanted that world where everything worked, it starts with the institutions of society, not with "me wantee" or fickle desires. That is the noted problem with humanity - humans cannot or will not make institutions worth a single shit and insists that they can't fail - only be failed.
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 No.478008

>>478002
>This doesn't work at all because you can't pay taxes in japan with dollars and you can't pay taxes in the US with yen. You can pay taxes in ecuador with bitcoin though.
I had a similar thought. Most definitions of money only really work at the level of nation states or economic zones that share a common currency. On the global level there isn't unified money. Dollars to some extend work as reserve currency, which is a type of intermediary money, tho with the US's propensity for sanctions that seems to be a declining feature. The BRICS economic block also have a similar "financial thing" that's based on a goods basket produced in BRICS countries.

>I have to be blunt with you, you have obviously done zero research into this topic

cough
There has been a development, certain individual bitcoins have become tainted for some reason or another.
https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/
What ever the intentions may drive this development, it basically disqualifies BTC as money. Money don't spoil.
It appears that moneros do not become tainted, because of some technical feature.

>Apple is not a monopoly. It is not even the most popular phone vendor.

In Marxist economics it counts as a monopoly when a company can charge monopoly rent. Popularity is irrelevant. Monopoly rent occurs if a company can set prices above market exchange value.

Apple was able to charge monopoly rent on charge-cables because it was using a proprietary plug. You could only use cables from apple or vendors that payed (you guessed it) monopoly rent to apple to be granted "proprietary plugness". Apple is also able to collect monopoly rent on app sales, i think it's roughly 27%. There's other stuff as well.

You have to be a bourgeois economist to confuse your self enough to not see that apple has a bunch of monopolies. Even regular people have started calling it the "apple tax".
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 No.478012

File: 1706136674023.jpg ( 16.7 KB , 594x366 , EptfirwXYAc7O_M.jpg )

>>478008
If there's a global state based on property, that state doesn't need money. It only makes sense as a tool when the state faces competition from other states who would challenge its monopoly. With a global monopoly, the state will always choose forced requisition in one way or another, and has no obligation whatsoever to the subjects. They'd have nowhere to go where they could "vote with their wallet". More than that, money's existence would be a giant opening for revolution. The state's monopoly on money is the only reason why money was ever encouraged. If banks not under the control of the state rose in prominence, those who hold said banks would challenge the state treasury. Better to just circumvent this by doing away with money and exercising the state's monopoly to make the society produce and distribute as the holders of the state want.

The money accounts of the elite have been insolvent for a long time - because not only is the money not real, but the worse the economic situation, the greater the crisis, which always strengthens the hand of those who hold the state and a big fucking army. They do not want a working economy. They've been going overboard to engineer a global economic crash for 50 years because they're done with capitalism or the pretenses it entailed. The rulers - and most of the proprietors - are perfectly happy converting capital into assets for the next thing.
For those that would rebel against the present situation, money is an extreme inconvenience. So far as the monetary economy exists, it exists entirely to depress wages and disrupt any distribution mechanism outside of it. If you, small time off-the-grid business person, decide to live off the land, well, that's poaching the state's monopoly on literally everything that they can declare any time they wish. Why, it's so scandalous, it's STEALING! If you don't have the bank's magic CBDC - and putting Trump's face on the CBDC doesn't change its purpose - you're going to get a visit from Vinnie, Mr. Globalization's "claims adjuster". If you play ball, you are in hock to whatever conditions they place on you. The almighty contract then gives even more excuses, and Vinnie and his friends have a lot of work, which the banks so generously mechanized to make Vinnie's job as easy as sending the mafiabots to do their thing. If you are Mr. Globalization, Vinnie, or anyone else in this situation, what purpose does money serve? Money is not just a poor measure of any quality money could purchase - it's a wildly contradictory one which can be manipulated by a million means available to those who control the currency, as we have seen for the past century.

>Apple

Who the fuck uses Apple except nerds who are too stupid to use literally anything else that is better? I have never met an Apple product that wasn't overpriced and didn't do the thing I wanted, which I could find on any other machine. Apple's "thing" is its imperial largesse which allowed it to speculate on a few novel inventions' UI, but Apple didn't have a monopoly on phones for long, and encryption means shitall against any competent government sending its lawyers, who Apple will gladly serve. Said competent government isn't going to be so competent to know literally everything - if you thought Apple's encryption would magic away the feds' evidence against you should the feds decide to show you how this shit works, you're really dumb. There are ways to avoid detection, the most obvious being "don't do shit that attracts the feds". But, that only works until they can impose society-wide lockouts.
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 No.478013

The way the global elite get around being insolvent is that they own the state, so they gave themselves a win button and bragged to your face that you can't ever stop it. Adding trillions of dollars of fictitious money to say they won effectively made all of the liquid assets worthless, except that which those who hold banks consider worth keeping. Everything they've done for the past 50 years has been total Darwinism, and you see how "natural" the selection is when Galton's shriveled and filthy hand points its finger and shouts "DIE".
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 No.478014

Having an infinite money cheat code doesn't mean the elite automatically own the world and truly command reality at all levels. It does mean that money as any sort of thing you should morally value is not only irrelevant, but the idea that we're even talking about this since 1947 should be insane. Money was basically worthless then, and it's totally worthless now. I always wondered when the rest of humanity would stop telling me how I'm worthless because I didn't value monetary economics as they did. It's funny because the people who always said that shit were the ones who sucked at business, squandered their money on drugs and hookers, and then were the first to kick down. The smart people either quietly converted their money to something that would survive the shit we're in now, or their intelligence meant nothing and they were sacrificed, with the stupid and venal enablers as the jackals who tore down the smart-but-decent as much as possible, and claimed their low cunning made them the smartest humans ever. It's all so retarded.
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 No.478019

>>478012
>Who the fuck uses Apple
Apple made the headphone plug go away on most phones.
You used to be able to just plug in the thing and it worked. Now you have to fumble around with a usb-dongle or remember to recharge your blue-tooth head-phones, that won't even let you replace the battery. You don't have to buy apple products to have their ways forced upon you.
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 No.478023

>>478019
The true governing power decided that, just to remind the user that they're about to be used and can't control something that didn't need to be locked out. It's not an accident. It would be trivial to engineer a proper headset jack, cheaper than what they're using. Would also be trivial to allow users to disassemble the damn thing for self-repair. Can you actually manufacture the parts, obtain the material, though? Monopolizing industry lets people shittify the products, and that has been inherent to neoliberalism's approach. Everything to enclose
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 No.478027

Can you please stop shitting up my thread with your mentally ill blog posts? I'm asking nicely.
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 No.478029

File: 1706144927205.jpg ( 19.09 KB , 250x300 , unnamed.jpg )

>>478002
Lets start with first principles:
Taxation is the rent of the state - its the interest put out on the use of currency which is ISSUED by the state. Otherwise the state collecting taxes would be straight theft - but its just a recalling of its own tokens. The relevancy of its "interest" function is about politics and market activity - if we draw from general keynesian understanding - we see that if the private sector is "booming" then the taxes should be lower because there is a circulation of money, but in a market "bust", taxes are raised and money is injected into the economy to correct market failures. Taxes in this case does not "fund" the stimulations, it just re-orders distribution, because all busts are born from a concentration of wealth (often by a dissolving of assets and investments), and high taxes are incentives or economic signals (a man with a gun) promoting the rich to continue what they were doing before they got too greedy.
This gives meaning to taxation as a necessary aspect of currency, which is held by sovereign ownership in a state, where fiat currency competes with other states and the economies they represent. Too in pre-fiat development gold was money, but it was not money proper, because money must be represented by a state, or central authority. There have been the trade of shells and even the ancient blockchains, but they only have value as a medium of exchange within those communities. Thats why you cant pay US taxes with yen, because the monetary representation is different.
But this is why marx's whole goal (imo) is about perfecting the medium of exchange to accord with Value (SNLT), like labour vouchers tried to do. This would universalise the medium of exchange and would be like your bitcoin in ecuador example - a true horizon of "world money".
>You can pay taxes in ecuador with bitcoin though. So by this logic either they are all "money" or none of them are.
Can you give sources on this please? because youre right that my definition of money is false if taxes can be directly funded by bitcoin.
>What marx didn't anticipate was that a cartel of bankers would be able to convince the government to let them print as much fiat as they want and turn themselves into the new ruling class.
So we should go back to a limited supply of money? Which in my analogy of taxes is just a high interest rate put on the creation of money.
The issue with this is that if we look at the history of the bimetallic standards we see that in different times gold and silver competed based on how common they were, where the commonness of the material edged out its "universal" functions (like the incorruption of gold). So money in a limited supply only works in a limited economy. Today we are only able to be so wealthy (in macroeconomic terms) because of paper money, because it costs nothing to create. But youre right too that this brings corruption for the money-creators, but thats just life imo.
Being a purist about economic security is equally as counterproductive.
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 No.478032

>>478014
>money is worthless now
Depends what money. A dollar can buy you a chocolate bar which 1 nigerian naira cannot, yet both are paper. Money's value is about the economies it represents, not what is latent within its own material - thats a false way of thinking that adam smith debunked. Wealth is in the social as a whole, which is mediated by money. You can only be rich in a rich society and poor in a poor one.
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 No.478033

>>478008
>I had a similar thought. Most definitions of money only really work at the level of nation states or economic zones that share a common currency. On the global level there isn't unified money.
Yes exactly. Same way microsoft points and playstation points offer different markets based in competition. Money is a closed system by its operation, and as one of its contradictions, that it opens up markets as it closes others from itself. Think of how you need to convert your cash into a foreign currency to buy foreign goods. Poorer countries often incentivise tourism because the inflow of cash in the economy strengthens the nation.
>>478003
>It's not relevant now though is it. Now you work 40 hours per week for paper tokens that the banks print out of thin air. And then you wonder why it's getting harder and harder to buy anything with it. If you're angry at your employer for making $2 and giving you $1 because they're "stealing your surplus value" or whatever. You should be 1000x angrier at the banker who printed the $2 out of thin air in the first place and gave both dollars to himself.
Its not out of "thin air", its in relation to the amount of goods that the money represents. The issue is that we are printing more money than what can be represented by market activity and so it causes inflation. Its different markets that matter too. Inflation in the west was caused by closing off trade with russia causing money held in circulation which was unspent.
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 No.478034

>>478033
>microsoft points and playstation points offer different markets based in competition.
Not sure if those exist, but mega-corp coupons are not money, it's not market competition unless the mega-corp has to compete.
Lol, the sneaky bastard trying to sell a walled garden as market competition.
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 No.478035

>>478032
The chocolate bar is basically worthless in the sense that money translates to an asset. Every time money is spent on a consumer good of limited durability, it's like burning it in a bonfire, from the perspective of those who issue money - banks and treasuries. They see war and consumption effectively as the same thing - a drain on what they believe money should represent and should be commanded to create, which is their rule.

So far as money has value, it is because states are beholden to other states by some standard that is exchangeable. The base of a given society, anything productive, does not need "money" as such to represent anything. The value that money appropriates usually consists of things that would have been produced or done if money weren't the objective. Everything money purchases and commands is something that was useful to someone, in order for them to part with this money which is scarce for everyone except those who decide what money really is. If you had a credit unit of value that had nothing to do with money, then that would be different, but no one who issues money has any interest in allowing that to exist. Breaking the price system was once upon a time understood as the goal of socialism, until it for some "mysterious" reason wasn't.

What you say is the exact opposite of reality. The Nigerian dollar-equivalent buys more in the Nigerian market than it would in an American market. You see a lot of poverty in rich countries. It is the weakness of Nigeria as a geopolitical actor, and its subservience to globocorp, which makes the Nigerian currency worthless internationally. All of the Nigerian money means piss and shit when competing with oligarchs, and an America who wants to move to Nigeria or some other poor country will find their dollars are worth a lot and suddenly the locals mostly love them - until the money and private security dries up and you see urban slums living under depopulation regimes and bitterly resisting it. America's wealth isn't all it's cracked up to be - it's nearly all fictitious, and nothing is produced here. Rents here are outrageous to the point of unpayable. When you tell Americans how rich and spoiled they are, more than half of th4e country wonders what world you are living in, and if they're rich, it seems like the rest of the world's conditions are incompatible with life… which begs the question how they're living, and just how rich they are when everything they have is built on mountains of debt and lies. The reality is that the hcolonial economies are contained by the design of those who have a stake in keeping the world order much as it has been. They are subjected to foreign trade on the terms of the dominant powers - now transnational corporations - and the overarching aim is to bring conglomerates in private hands to buy up all the land. This is what the conservation drive in Africa has been doing openly, driving the people off land they've inhabited for centuries and finishing off the farmers who have nowhere to go. The entire setup of the colonial apparatus is directed towards different purposes than the imperial core apparatus. The imperial core is given over to eugenics, recruiting death cult soldiers while the getting is good, and basically throwing the imperial core "citizens" into a wood chipper to make them all whores. By now you can see the people who matter think of themselves as a global elite, and if they don't like it some place, they can take their pedigree, honors, and wealth to another country. The particular countries are almost nakedly run as plantations.

It's like every time these threads happen, leftoids have the full retard takes that are entirely divorced from anything that actually happens. It's a race to see which of the left or right are worse.

So many stupid takes in this thread that fail to understand basic shit about what money is. Everything Adam Smith mentioned did not consider "money" worth anything other than what the state makes of it. It was value and the basis for producing things that constitution capital, stock, and useful things that money would like to command. Smith's view is almost entirely from the commanding heights rather than for the little guy, because that view was more appropriate for describing what states and their officers would see and what they would care about. So too is Marx primarily interested in how this looks from the high perch, and his aims in describing the circuit of capital is explain how this productive process affects the situation of capitalism, to answer some basic questions and make clear that political economy doesn't work for what it purports to do.

When people talk about consumer goods as the point of capitalism, it's the tackiest brainwashing shit. I feel gross every time stupid people even talk about that like it's a serious thing. None of that shit at the supermarket of ideology is worth a fucking thing and anyone who knows what money is and what is really valuable laughs at anyone retarded enough to actually follow this. The people who insist on that narrative just hate humanity and always insult, project, and humiliate. It's the same sort of person who barks at someone they despise and tells them to masturbate. They don't say this to their friends. They say it to shout "DIE RETARD DIE" at you in broad daylight, and you're assholes for enabling them. Basic fucking shit.

But, that's not what humanity is. Humanity is a Satanic race, a failed race.
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 No.478036

File: 1706148581914.jpg ( 94.62 KB , 1280x720 , fifa-23-when-to-buy-and-se….jpg )

>>478034
Money is defined by sovereign issuing by a monopoly which has representation of exclusive markets in which this currency represents economic activity.
A coupon is money if you can only buy goods with it as a means of exchange. Think of arcade tickets. These are money for the goods which you can purchase with them. Think of any in-game currency - you can buy virtual items with virtual money, but its still money. Some people spend hours getting "fifa points" in a videogame, which is perfectly analogous to working a job - except the goods which these tokens represent are not socially-necessary.
Your coupon example only works if you need to convert your cash into coupons to even buy the goods at all. Like how you need to convert your dollars into pounds to buy things in england. Theyre both paper, but represent different economies.
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 No.478037

>>478035
>America's wealth isn't all it's cracked up to be - it's nearly all fictitious, and nothing is produced here
Wealth is the access people have to goods. America is the richest country in the world.
You mention rents and i agree. But get rid of rent and imagine how wealthy people would be.
Adam smith also disregarded rent as a parasite where it is not a "necessary evil", and marx masterfully covers land rents in capital vol. 3 to explain how it is a hyperexploitation of the proletariat which procures it. The only honourable work in austrian thought is in the consideration of homesteading, where rents are unnecessary due to the upkeep done by tenants or workmen on a piece of land.
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 No.478039

>>478036
>sovereign corporations
>nested markets
>nested currencies
Nope, you can't fool me with recursive ideology.

>Some people spend hours getting "fifa points" in a videogame, which is perfectly analogous to working a job - except the goods which these tokens represent are not socially-necessary.

what are you smoking ? people play vidya for fun, that's it.
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 No.478040

File: 1706155310725.jpg ( 80.49 KB , 764x430 , have-you-played-habbo-hote….jpg )

>>478039
If you work for money then it can be called a job. This is also why people convert their cash into virtual money to live virtual lives, like habbo. My concept is holistic and scientific. If not, then what is "money" to you?
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 No.478107

File: 1706297388824.jpg ( 96.24 KB , 534x534 , sub-buzz-28789-1537217336-….jpg )

>>478005
>It's not a natural limit, like the Earth said "no more precious metal, guess nature says you can't do money any more!"
Obviously there is a limit to how much actual gold exists inside the earth. What makes it a good currency is that a politician cannot decide we need another 20 year war in the middle east and magic the gold out of thin air. Actual work and energy needs to be expended to increase the money supply.

>And always have. The reason for selecting precious metals in the first place was because ordinary people couldn't acquire them.

Even 60 years ago government coins contained real silver. Sorry I don't have time for the rest of your post if it's just more of this.

>>478008
>cough
At least defend your original argument instead of jumping to a new topic.

>https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/

>tldr you can trace some individual sats back to shady transactions.
And you can trace basically all dollars back to illegal activity so what's your point.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cocaine-contaminates-majority-of-american-currency/
To make your "bitcoin isn't money" cope to stick you need to think of an argument that applies only to bitcoin. So far the best you can come up with is "the billionaires who control my government refuse to recognize bitcoin as money."

>In Marxist economics it counts as a monopoly when a company can charge monopoly rent.

Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPhone. You guys really are just entitled middle class brats.

>Monopoly rent occurs if a company can set prices above market exchange value.

What does that even mean. The price is whatever people are willing to pay.

>>478029
>Taxation is the rent of the state - its the interest put out on the use of currency which is ISSUED by the state.
>Otherwise the state collecting taxes would be straight theft - but its just a recalling of its own tokens.
Yes I've read Greaber too. The thing is you can do all your trade in yen and the US government will still demand taxes in dollars because you were born on their soil.

>e see that if the private sector is "booming" then the taxes should be lower because there is a circulation of money, but in a market "bust", taxes are raised and money is injected into the economy to correct market failures

What if I told you that "injecting" money into the economy (bankers giving it to their buddies) is what causes these busts in the first place.

>Taxes in this case does not "fund" the stimulations, it just re-orders distribution, because all busts are born from a concentration of wealth

Dude are you fucking high. Taxing all layers of society and then giving the money to wallstreet is literally the opposite of what you describe. Taxation concentrates wealth it doesn't distribute it.

>in pre-fiat development gold was money, but it was not money proper, because money must be represented by a state, or central authority

Again this is ass-backwars 1984 double speak. The whole reason precious metals became the de-facto currency of the pre-modern world was because no central authority controlled it. It allowed you to trade with unknown or even hostile tribes with no trust or debt being involved. What you call "money proper" is just a way for the state to enslave you.

>Can you give sources on this please? because youre right that my definition of money is false if taxes can be directly funded by bitcoin.

My bad it was el salvador not ecuador.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add2844
<El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender; not only must bitcoin be accepted as a means of payment for taxes and debts
Not that it matters, my point has always been that you shouldn't give a fuck what any government says.

>So we should go back to a limited supply of money?

Yes.

>Which in my analogy of taxes is just a high interest rate put on the creation of money.

No. The key difference is that nobody should be given the power to just create money out of thin air. The point is not so much that there is a limited supply of gold, the bigger point is that no political or economic entity can create gold out of nothing. At the very least they need to expend work and energy to find new gold and dig it out of the ground.

>Today we are only able to be so wealthy (in macroeconomic terms) because of paper money

I strongly disagree. Paper money is the reason your parents bought their own house and now you can't afford to. Consider for a second that maybe the people who tell you that fiat money and inflation are "essential" for a modern economy to function, maybe just maybe those are the people who profit from this system.

>this brings corruption for the money-creators, but thats just life imo

Again strongly disagree. These people have destroyed so many lives not just through out of control inflation and wrecking the economy of basically every country but all the pointless wars they have funded. Think about it, a 20 year war in afganistan would have been impossible if bush, obama, trump and biden had to raise taxes 20% every year to fund it. The reason they get away with printing money is because inflation is a delayed effect, by the time people notice rising prices the actual causes is a distant memory.

Will response to other posts another time.
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 No.478109

>>478107
>And you can trace basically all dollars back to illegal activity so what's your point.
This is not about traceability, at least not directly. Some BTCs have become tainted and can no longuer be exchanged , that doesn't happen with other currencies

>Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPhone.

<It's a monopoly if you are forced to buy it, technically you are not forced to buy anything, and therefore monopolies can't exist.
That's a retarded definition.
Marxists define a monopoly by the ability to set prices above market exchange value and collect monopoly-rent. (more explanation at the bottom of the post)
That's clearly the case for apple.

>You guys really are just entitled

<Apple is entitled to it's monopolies, you're not entitle to a free market
I know this is facetious, but you asked for it.
Anyway what Apple gets away with, is what all the other smartphone producers will try to copy, so everybody who isn't a I-zealot still is affected.

>What does that even mean. The price is whatever people are willing to pay.

No even capitalist apologist economists do not accept extortion as a valid price setting mechanism.

Exchange value in Marxism, in a simplified way, means the prices that can be realized in the market under regular capitalist conditions of commodity production, so with lots of competition from equivalent commodities, during times the economy isn't rocked by the cyclical crisis convulsions.
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 No.478121

>>478107
You're not getting it. Money as a concept is not intrinsically worth anything. It exists because states issued coinage, not because people decided for no apparent reason gold or silver ingots were now valuable. Most people have no reason to view anything as intrinsically valuable, or that there is intrinsically a society at all to trade with, let alone a society that would honor the value of anything its members claim. The money could be anything. It was never intrinsically valuable by any law of nature. Money was valuable because there were particular people who decided it would be, whether because it was dictated by them or because there were people who colluded to introduce a new concept of value or how people are to interact with each other. The only laws of nature are that there are human beings who like living - it says nothing about a preferred standard for economic exchange. All of this is just a way to make people do things they really don't want to do, and so money is worthless without armed men to enforce debts. Money and debt regimes have failed in the past, because the things that are really coveted are human labor and technology, and the uses of those things are not freely exchangeable by any natural and self-evident law.
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 No.478122

The point isn't that people don't have bits of gold or silver, but that the mines to provide them could be controlled with far less effort than it would take to lock down all of the farms, all of the trade roads, and monopolize them. The drive to monopolize anything is not something rulers "have" to do, but choose to do.

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