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/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

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File: 1709664963081.jpg ( 70.73 KB , 450x359 , beware-the-banksters.jpg )

 No.479520

>all wars are bankers wars
And other such myopic oversimplifications about the world. Views are frequently paired with goldbuggery and delusions about cryptotokens.

I think we can all agree that finance capitalists are scum. Even feudal lords and slave masters had regular power struggles with finance capitalists trying to control society through usury. The problem is some right wingers think they're the only problematic capitalist and have difficulty broadening their scope to a more systemic social critique. How we we get these dumbos to see the bigger picture?
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 No.479521

you can't reason with committed idealist you have to throw them in sinkholes
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 No.479522

>>479520
Finance capital is the combination of money capital and industrial monopoly capital, when it gets big enough it turns into imperial finance capital and that does tend to be the main driver of war under capitalism. Although not all wars.

How you define a "bank" is ambiguous, technically a bank doesn't have to be owned by a capitalist. Banks can also be public or state-run. Some banks are cooperatives. Most banks are not involved in wars, and just offer various types of accounting services.

>Even feudal lords and slave masters had regular power struggles with finance capitalists trying to control society through usury.

"Usury" has a religious connotation, a better expression might be predatory-lending or debt-peonage. While finance capital does that too, that's far from the worst thing it does, especially when it's imperial finance capital. What has to be said is that while the feudal-aristocracy and the slave-merchants were opponents of finance capital, they weren't better. Just the other evil, that incidentally also had a tendency for warmongering.

>The problem is some right wingers think they're the only problematic capitalist and have difficulty broadening their scope to a more systemic social critique. How we we get these dumbos to see the bigger picture?

It's unclear who "some right wingers" are, or exactly what political stance you are referencing. But it has to be said if you can successfully suppress imperial finance capital (which is what socdem reformers tried to do) that probably would eventually result in society becoming socialist.

>Views are frequently paired with goldbuggery and delusions about cryptotokens.

There are fears about weaponized financial systems being used for political, cultural and geopolitical battles. These fears are not entirely unfounded there have been cases where that happened. Some people are seeking to avoid the potential of getting victimized by weaponized finance by using gold or crypto. Bankers for that matter are also afraid of the prospect of weaponized finance because it will spook their customers and erode trust. At least on that particular point bankers, gold-bugs and cryptobros may have common cause.
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 No.479523

If you really want to speak of the germ of war beyond vagaries, "all wars are bankers' wars" would be the necessary starting point. There is no war without a war chest and some means to fund your army, so that the army can be a going concern rather than some vague aspersion summoned from chaos as a just-so story. There is a whole process with Germanic philosophy to steer what starts as a reasonable supposition - that banks pull strings to adapt to and guide the actions of armies - to a story which conveniently elides everything aristocracy did to foment the war cult, glorify this stupid faggotry to kill more poor people, and drag people into their ritual sacrifice. Behind that you would see the true motives for war, which almost never have a material origin. Material incentives would tell someone that war is a terrible business proposition from all angles, in which wealth is burned for the most ridiculous purposes and called "military efficiency". War is not profitable - it is the exact opposite of profitable, and would not be undertaken out of some sense that it is economically viable or desirable for its own sake. Only Germans are perverse enough to suggest that this was the case, because they can't into economics. Most cultures made no bones about the truth that war was bullshit to get poor people killed, but that for one reason or another, it happened like shit happens. For most of history, those who wrote and guided history did not suggest anything they did was for "the people", "the nation", or anything that the vast majority of humanity should ever take part in. For most of humanity, the war cult in total is nothing but a terrible calamity that sucks them into fighting because they must, while for aristocracy and nobility, war is a great game and a sport in which other peoples' lives and money are sacrificed. For those who benefit from war, war is a freeroll, utilized for purposes that suggest something about what humanity is, what it considers spiritually relevant to its existence. If not that, then war is something every society would have to acknowledge as possible, or else it would not withstand the first malevolent actor. The origins of war are in the malevolence which presses constantly at some nerve that humans find appealing or significant, and cults devoted to this malevolence find every niche they can inhabit - but their behavior does not universally conform to war as a practice. Many times, the ardent pacifist is still evil and malevolent, and most avowed pacifists in history were constitutionally evil beyond the norm of humanity. Cicero is evil. Gandhi is evil - very evil, as a facilitator of what the British wanted. Hinduism and Buddhism are profoundly evil religions and recognized as such compared to the norm of values in their society. So, the concept that war is the result of a peculiar malevolence that is the monopoly of a particular race is wishful thinking of those who would instigate war and find their re-direct. War is hardly ubiquitous in the world or foundational to what it is for humans to exist or create states. The conflict that war entails can be carried out by means other than war, and very often the conduct of war is far removed from stories and theories written about it. War as a "total exercise" of the sort that is often invoked only exists in theory. Had humans carried out the struggle war entails with anything approaching efficiency, the dictum of war would be indiscriminate slaughter and the establishment of a despotism that ends forever any pretenses humans establish to "make the peace" which prepares for another war. If war were truly total, the objective of all parties would be to end it once and for all, and any insinuation that "war is eternal" or other such stupid koans would be silenced. Whether this claim for a true "final war" reaches this goal does not change that the objective of the war would be to end it, and this would not be a theoretical fiction. Such a war would only be initiated when it becomes clear that the hitherto known practices of war are no longer wanted or needed, and the objectives of war could be carried out in peacetime and regular order.

If you think you're going to cajole people into a preferred story about war, that's your problem. A lot of the rightoids hate that and smell that, because they know the cajolers' line and think they're getting a solution to avert that.
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 No.479525

File: 1709689979531.mp4 ( 4.06 MB , 480x270 , Ellsberg-coldwar.mp4 )

>>479522
>Finance capital is the combination of money capital and industrial monopoly capital
It most certainly is not. "Money capital" means nothing, and industrial capital is a recent phenomenon. Finance capital is the simplest form of capital and its own independent thing. It's been around since long before capitalism itself (defined by industrial capital) arose, since nearly the beginning of civilization itself.

It's also entirely wrong to presume that banks are the main driver of war. The cold war (marked by frequent hot wars) was driven largely from the beginning to rescue the profitability of industrial war capital at the end of WWII, not the whims of finance capital. Finance capital is more interested in pushing governments into debt austerity through institutions like the IMF and World Bank, rather than driving direct warfare.

>But it has to be said if you can successfully suppress imperial finance capital (which is what socdem reformers tried to do) that probably would eventually result in society becoming socialist.

This is especially naive. Suppression of finance capital is exactly what occurred in the German Empire throughout the 19th century as state institutions, rather than private rent-seeking banks, were used to finance private industry.
In fact Michael Hudson sometimes remarks that World War I was itself about determining how the future of capitalism would operate: would it be financed through the English banking model or the state financing model of Germany? The English model won. But throughout the 19th century the German Empire's model of state financing didn't magically result in socialism.
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 No.479526

>>479522
This reminds me of what Marx was getting at when he considered Henry George a right winger: if you get eliminate the rentier class you may have a more just society in certain aspects, but you still haven't resolved the fundamental contradictions in how workers relate to production. If you want socialism, the war between workers and industrial capital has to be fought and won. There is no avoiding it.
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 No.479530

>>479525
>It most certainly is not. "Money capital" means nothing, and industrial capital is a recent phenomenon. Finance capital is the simplest form of capital and its own independent thing. It's been around since long before capitalism itself (defined by industrial capital) arose, since nearly the beginning of civilization itself.
You are using very different definitions than marxists do. "Money capital" is a regular marxist theory term for example.

Most marxists consider the beginning of capitalism to be the dawn of the industrial mode of production. The bourgeoisie owned machine capital and they overcame the power of the feudal aristocracy that owned agricultural land. Because machines enabled waged-workers to be much more productive than feudal serfs.

Capitalism has 2 main cycles
C-M-C'
M-C-M'
The first one is the early stage of capitalism where money is a means to accumulate machine capital. The second one is the later stage of capitalism where machine capital become the means and not the end.

I have no idea what you mean with "finance capital", i'm very skeptical about transhistorical concepts. How could it have existed since the beginning of civilization ? (10-12 thousand yeas ago)
For marxists "finance capital" describes a phenomenon that emerges relatively late in capitalism, like in the 1800s and 1900s

I think we have to first agree on common terminology otherwise we'll talk past each other
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 No.479532

>>479530
I'm not sure which "Marxists" you're alluding to, but capital is the self-expansion of value. It's when you start with something, run some process on it, and end up with more of that same thing than you started with. There are three dominant forms of capital:

Money-lending/finance capital
M -> M'

Merchant capital
M -> C -> M'

Industrial capital
M -> means of production + labor -> C -> M'

It's important to recognize that money-lending/finance capital has been around since nearly the dawn of civilization. It actually predates the invention of currency, and originated in palace grain loans to be paid at harvest time. Merchant capital arose not too long after that. I'm not sure exactly when, but unlike finance capital it may have required the invention of money first. It's only industrial capital that arose recently, and that is what defines the mode of production known as capitalism.

Failure to address capitalism as a mode of production leads to incomplete solutions like a state finance system (German Empire), markets replaced with planned distribution (Soviet Union, though not entirely), land-value taxes (Georgism), etc. These things may be all well and good but they don't end the fundamental class conflicts and economic contradictions that arise at the point of production, and accordingly do not deliver a fundamentally different economic system from capitalism.
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 No.479535

>>479520
distinction between industrial-financial capital is a retarded socdem thing, ie Hilberding, Lenin and other faggots

it stems from socdem anti-revolutionary sentiment and their theoretical justification of compromise with "good", "progressive", capitalists

and to have "good" capitalist, you first need to have "bad" capitalists

pretty standard red-brownoid shit that if followed consistently will lead you down Mussolini road
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 No.479536

ie leftoids unironically need to play Railroad Tycoon 2 to learn that industirial and financial capital are two sides of the same coin
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 No.479537

>>479535
>and to have "good" capitalist, you first need to have "bad" capitalists
and obviously "bad" capitalists can be bankers, jews, or whatever other outgroup retarded socdem mind obsesses over
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 No.479538

>>479532
>Money-lending/finance capital
>M -> M'
>Merchant capital
>M -> C -> M'
>Industrial capital
>M -> means of production + labor -> C -> M'
Interesting, i have never seen anybody put it like that.
What i find peculiar is that you only appear to see variations of the M-C-M' and leave out the C-M-C' cycle.

>It's important to recognize that money-lending/finance capital has been around since nearly the dawn of civilization.

So in your terminology finance capital = money lenders ?
Do you have a word for what Marxists call "finance capital" Like big corporatized industrial monopolies that merged with "the powers that dominate wall-street" (for lack of a better word)

>It actually predates the invention of currency, and originated in palace grain loans to be paid at harvest time.

You mean debt ?
Wait "Finance capital" is your word for debt or the people that collect debts ?

>Merchant capital arose not too long after that. I'm not sure exactly when, but unlike finance capital it may have required the invention of money first.

This is so weird, you think finance capital is this really old thing, that has endured for a very long time, while i see no historic continuity for much of anything. I even think that what wee call money today is only a few hundred years old. Marxists define money, as the universal means to command labor-power. And you do not have to go that far into the past, where that wasn't the case. Like for example in the slave mode of production, labor-power was mostly controlled via the master-slave relation.

>It's only industrial capital that arose recently, and that is what defines the mode of production known as capitalism.

Fair enough. Just out of curiosity what do you consider neo-liberalism ?

>Failure to address capitalism as a mode of production leads to incomplete solutions

I agree but I don't see a reason to see harm-reduction as opposition to "solving capitalism completely"
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 No.479539

>>479538
>Like for example in the slave mode of production, labor-power was mostly controlled via the master-slave relation.
NTA, but in a "slave mode of production" slaves were literally traded as a commodity (at least in the classical and ancient Chinese variants).

I think it's no coincidence that fiat currency was invented in China at the time when they had widespread slave trade.
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 No.479540

File: 1709726080682.jpeg ( 27.64 KB , 474x474 , just.jpeg )

>>479520
Also that pic is interesting.

Author does know that interest rates are higher because inflation is higher, right? Author does know that higher inflation is bad for capitalist economy, right? Does author want for capitalist economy to feel bad lol?
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 No.479541

>>479535
>it stems from socdem anti-revolutionary sentiment and their theoretical justification of compromise with "good", "progressive", capitalists
No it wasn't social democrats that invented the idea that capitalism had progressive features (in the classical sense of the word, not the current meaning). Marx did that, he pointed out that industrializing society brought big benefits for people.
Today capitalism has pretty much run it's course and what used to be called progress is now in retreat, but historically capitalism did have some upsides.
>red-brownoid
oh you're not being serious ?
You're engaging in ideological battle rhetoric, using equivocation fallacies.
same for this post: >>479537

>>479536
>ie leftoids unironically need to play Railroad Tycoon 2 to learn that industirial and financial capital are two sides of the same coin
I agree with this if you qualify this by saying that the former turns into the latter over time.

But it has to be said that Marx thought that industrial capital would overpower finance, and subordinate it to the logic of industrial expansion. And in Marx's view that was a good thing, because industrial expansion would mean that society would be able to produce more wealth for a given amount of labor inputs. Obviously this prediction turned out to be incorrect in the western world. But in China something like that seems to be the case. Of course China isn't really capitalist, they're just running a partial simulation of capitalism, and they might simply be using what Marx said as an instruction manual, and then it's not a prediction but rather a self-fulfilling prophesy.
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 No.479543

>>479539
>NTA, but in a "slave mode of production" slaves were literally traded as a commodity
Yes but there is a pretty big difference between just labor-power being the commodity versus entire humans as commodity.

Look at the economy from the point of view of the masses. If most of the economy is driven by slave labor and slaves never interact with money, then money doesn't really drive the economy yet. The fact that some parts of the ruling class used money in their narrow circle just makes it a fringe phenomenon. It's not really money unless roughly everybody uses it (ignoring the complexities of different currencies).
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 No.479544

>>479541
>No it wasn't social democrats that invented the idea that capitalism had progressive features
lol literally fucking official SPD "party theoreticians" wrote volumes justifying this shit at the end of the 19th century after party politicians got integrated into the capitalist political establishment, while SPD fanboys like Lininoid ate that shit up with open mouth (tho he did break with SPD orthodoxy somewhat later, but still was a retarded socdemoid to the very end)

>Marx did that, he pointed out that industrializing society brought big benefits for people.

lol he literally predicted immiserasion of the working class, you retarded fucking red-brownoid

he pointed out that capitalism brought development in productivity of labor, not that it would necessarily benefit the working class

>oh you're not being serious ?

oh I'm very serious red-brownoid

>You're engaging in ideological battle rhetoric

nah, I'm engaging in some good ol ASS-WHOOPING

>But it has to be said that Marx thought that industrial capital would overpower finance, and subordinate it to the logic of industrial expansion.

Citation fucking needed red-brownoid
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 No.479545

>>479543
>Yes but there is a pretty big difference between just labor-power being the commodity versus entire humans as commodity.
You're retarded.

When you buy a slave you LITERALLY buy his life, ie command over ALL of his future labor time.
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 No.479546

>>479540
>Author does know that interest rates are higher because inflation is higher, right? Author does know that higher inflation is bad for capitalist economy, right? Does author want for capitalist economy to feel bad lol?
Not OP

I think you are getting cause and effect mixed up.
Inflation happens when
-capitalists fail to invest
-capitalists invest a lot into ventures that don't work
-capitalists collectively raise prices on good and services to reduce the spending power of workers (class war)
-if too many economic resources are diverted to military spending, prestige projects, population controle, and so on.

So inflation is the result of the capitalist economy "feeling bad" not the cause.
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 No.479547

>>479546
Yes, I know that inflation is caused by falling ROP.

What I don't know is why capitalist cucks complain about higher interest rates when they are there to offset the effects of the falling ROPE lol.
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 No.479548

>>479544
>tho he did break with SPD orthodoxy somewhat later
correction: NEW orthodoxy

he still was a fanboy of the old socdem orthodoxy, that's why I characterize him as "retarded socdemoid"
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 No.479549

>>479542
>lol literally fucking official SPD "party theoreticians" wrote volumes
I can't say that I have read any of that. Since they murdered Rosa Luxembourg, it seemed like there wasn't much reason to.

>lol he literally predicted immiserasion of the working class

Marx expected the workers to take over the means of production, so in his eyes the industry that capitalists build was progress. What immiserated people wasn't the factories with the machines and so on, it was the economic relation.

>I'm engaging in some good ol ASS-WHIPPING

I'm not sure i want to know about your strange custom that sounds like you might be abusing a donkey.
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 No.479550

>>479549
>>479544
anon double posted and deleted 479542
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 No.479553

>>479549
>I can't say that I have read any of that.
Good. It sucks ass lol.

Kautsky, Sombart, Hilferding, Lenin etc - all one massive fucking pile of shit.

Just read Marx, Ricardo, Smith. Social democracy was a fucking mistake.

>Since they murdered Rosa Luxembourg

Rosa was a socdemoid too lol (kinda). It was friendly fire.

Tho I have far more respect for Liebknecht. Ideal archetype of proletarian politician - influential public speaker without any party institutional resource.

>Marx expected the workers to take over the means of production

yes, Marx expected that immiseration would lead to overthrow of capitalism

he wasn't expecting social democracy lol
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 No.479555

>>479553
>he wasn't expecting social democracy lol
tho I guess he somewhat anticipated it with his critique of Lassalle
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 No.479556

File: 1709735137527.jpg ( 211.85 KB , 1080x973 , 376xc4-368175539.jpg )

>>479541
>using equivocation fallacies.
also, I'm not the first to notice this shit (that classical social democracy is the lowest common ancestor of various fascisms and vanguardisms)

when socdemoids said "antisemitism is the socialism of fools" they didn't understand that the key word here is not "antisemitism", but "socialism" kek

love the irony
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 No.479558

>>479556
>that classical social democracy is the lowest common ancestor of various fascisms and vanguardisms
tho some fascisms take after syndicalism

which is funny as fuck if you think about it - BOTH two main leftoid currents served as a breeding ground for fascism
>>

 No.479560

it is also interesting that later post ww2 fascisms start to take after libertarianism and religious fundamentalism as opposed to pre-war social democracy and anarcho-syndicalism
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 No.479561

>>479553
You are saying lots of confusing stuff. For example Lenin and Kautsky were on opposing ends when it came to theories on imperialism. Rosa and Lenin weren't Social democrats.

>Social democracy was a fucking mistake.

It depends on the situation, you should always side with social democrats over neo-liberals. Social democracy is objectively better for the working class.

>read Marx, Ricardo, Smith.

that's a pretty solid suggestion.

>yes, Marx expected that immiseration would lead to overthrow of capitalism

No, Marx said that workers should try to overthrow capitalism, because they had the power to do so and because advanced means of production would enable a better society. There were slave revolts and peasant revolts that overthrew they rulers, but those always reverted back, because the means of production couldn't sustain a higher social organization.
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 No.479562

>>479561
>For example Lenin and Kautsky were on opposing ends when it came to theories on imperialism.
lol Lenincel was fanboying over Kautsky like a little cringe faggot when he was still in RSDRP

the only real disagreement they had was a political one about bolshevik-controlled soviets vs right SR controlled constituent assembly

>you should always side with social democrats over neo-liberals

lol I'm not gonna side with any of you faggots

>Social democracy is objectively better for the working class.

no it is not lol

actually existing social democracy caused most of the harm to the working class in the 20th century

>No, Marx said that workers should try to overthrow capitalism, because they had the power to do so and because advanced means of production would enable a better society.

No, he said that workers should overthrow capitalism because "they have nothing to lose but their chains".
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 No.479564

File: 1709741122759.jpg ( 728.33 KB , 3307x1999 , 1777699c99ed1ccda5caf5be86….jpg )

>>479562
>workers should overthrow capitalism because "they have nothing to lose but their chains".
which is a pretty profound thought on the part of idealist young Marx tbh

that's why I say that war would be the end of capitalism

from the dawn of time all social revolutions came from the army - soldier in all times had more to gain than to lose
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 No.479565

>>479556
I don't understand why you think antisemitism has any relation with socialism. Antisemitism has never been anything other than a scapegoat used by ruling classes. Socialists have always been the first to see it as such. It's like you're living in some kind of strange upside-down world.
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 No.479566

>>479565
lol I literally said "antisemitism" is not a key word here, idiot

what is it with socdemoids all being retards?
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 No.479569

File: 1709742477623.jpeg ( 130.61 KB , 1200x630 , pic.jpeg )

>>479564
>from the dawn of time all social revolutions came from the army
and the navy of course

sailors are the ACTUAL revolutionary vanguard of the proletarian army (most educated, most organized as a unit, stationed in the rear close to the big urban and industrial centers) that lenincels can only dream to be lol
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 No.479573

>>479564
>from the dawn of time all social revolutions came from the army - soldier in all times had more to gain than to lose
that's why the main question for me is not why this or that cringe vanguardoid shit fails, but why army revolts in one case but not in others?

for example, why didn't Iraqi army revolt in the course of Iran-Iraqi war?
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 No.479576

>>479573
kind of ironic that the most successful revolution of all time was a cooperation between the revolutionary masses, the revolutionary vanguard and a navy.

>for example, why didn't Iraqi army revolt in the course of Iran-Iraqi war?

I'm going to admit that i had been asking my self that question as well. From the reports i've read they just ditched their weapons and walked out.
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 No.479577

>>479569
>sailors are the ACTUAL revolutionary vanguard of the proletarian army
which is also indicated by the fact that sailors were the ONLY section of the army that openly CHALLENGED political status of lenincels as a vanguard
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 No.479579

>>479576
to me it was no more successful than any other

successful would've been if navy had actually killed the leninoids, not the other way around
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 No.479580

File: 1709748894614.jpg ( 776.87 KB , 2333x1497 , navy-formation.jpg )

>>479579
tho more like "successful"

still would've failed anyway

too backward, too early

man I wanna see what a navy revolt in modern military would look like lol
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 No.479583

>>479539
Commodities are freely reproducible. Slaves are not. If you want slaves, you have to capture them or impose forced breeding. Forced breeding requires cradle to grave education and a society capable of enforcing total control over life at all levels, otherwise those who are born as the product of such an organized rape will see what they are and see that this has no ending. That's why every slavery in human history allowed manumission, redemption, and a concept that this was wrong - something which made clear that forced breeding that would make slaves freely reproducible implies something about humanity and its project that would dominate all that it does. It would imply something far more disastrous than any slave society history knew, except one - the slave society of eugenics.

Even in eugenics, slaves are not a freely reproducible commodity when considering the conditions eugenics must operate in. A fully eugenist society would establish conditions of socialism or communism of a curious sort, in which thinking regarding the commodity would no longer apply - this would no longer be the value sought in economic activity, and the imperatives of general commodity exchange and the conditions that allowed it would no longer be worth pursuing.

A Germanic view of fake history - what leftypol preaches and recapitulates by enforcement of its moderators - makes this understanding inadmissible. Makes it impossible to speak of what slavery really is and why this capitalist situation exists at all, or what the capitalist actually wanted and thinks about. "It is replaced with this self-serving, autistic narrative to goad losers to a fake "revolution" which feeds into Nazism. It's fake and gay.
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 No.479587

>>479583
>Commodities are freely reproducible. Slaves are not.
How are they not lol? You yourself said they can be bred. And they actually were bred, down to fucking science. Like cattle. You wouldn't say that cattle is not reproducible, right?
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 No.479588

>>479587
If you were to produce slaves like industrial goods, in factory conditions, you are saying something about human society which makes a theory of political economy altogether a moot point. It wouldn't be a slave society where you can superimpose the logic of capitalism - it would be a whole other construct, where the wage fund no longer exists. Humanity wouldn't just be slaves - they would be livestock, owned cradle to grave, and the idea that it could be different would no longer exist. It wouldn't even be "they're trained to love their slavery" or "they're too stupid to know they're slaves". It would mean that human existence itself is no longer relevant. The livestock would be purely animals, pushed by some nerve to obey absolutely. It would necessitate a Satanic world and nothing else could exist, and that is only the beginning of such a horrorshow - what would be necessary to create such a world. Otherwise, the would-be slaves treated in such a fashion would have no reason whatsoever to comply, would die in droves, commit to unlimited suicide attacks. The only way to keep such a condition alive would be to lie to the people about what they are, which involves an expensive pretense, but all of those lies have been exhausted, and those lies never had so much power over the will of men. The only thing keeping the workers alive is the hope, however dim, that some part of the world would be theirs. Slaveries, as I said, always allowed manumission, or at least lenient treatment. The Southrons were far more humane than the eugenists, who never stopped screaming for a Final Solution in America and extending slavery to most of the white race.
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 No.479589

>>479587
And the point here is that when you get into agronomy and extractive economies from the land - and the herding of livestock happens in conditions of that sort, because there's not an assembly line manufacturing cows out of raw material - you're talking about something very different from the industrial commodity, or the raw material like gold that was mined from the earth and didn't need to be worked too extensively. That has always been a weak spot in political economy - that the land was dismissed far too much because it was not pertinent to the moral philosophy and imperial strategy free trade entailed. It doesn't take a new theory to figure out that wealth is in some way drawn from the land. Malthus' theory was entirely premised on that, as was Darwin's, and Marx acknowledges the role of the land as a store of natural wealth and makes explicit the distinction between wealth and the value that he is critiquing. For Adam Smith, the management of the land is not a mathematical matter or something that directly relates to the moral claim he made. He would presume that rational actors would be aware of the lands they hold and what resources exist in them. Adam Smith's thinking was very much thinking about Britain's colonies and the Americas and how this trade policy would be great for interests in the empire, not the least of which were his own interests. What's really being described in Wealth of Nations is more than a crude "let's exploit labor to the max" religion. That was the utilitarians, and the stupider of them at that, who dismissed the ideas of a liberal society where people were expected to be rational at all.
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 No.479590

And all of that just makes clear that as the imperial utilitarians, Fabians, and eugenics take the forefront, much of the thinking on value or ecology for that matter changed for what the managers of the empire - of large firms, trusts, and the world - wanted out of any of this.

I don't know if this concept is admissible to you - probably not. But it explains a lot of what happened between Marx writing Capital and the events of the 1930s.

This reductio ad absurdum where basic definitions are played with and treated like eternal Platonic forms we "must obey" is trivial to dissect, but it repeats ad nauseum because certain assholes figured out they can just keep doing this to disallow anyone to say no to them.
I'd also argue in my own thinking that "freely reproducible commodities" are not really so freely reproducible, but in the classical political economic thought, the intelligence didn't have a set limit of how many widgets a mind could produce, and that was what was valued - what was really being paid for, rather than "labor-power" or an essence of labor in a contract that could be taken as a gratuity from the world. Labor itself is a type of machine, a technology, which must develop and operate on its own power, even as a slave. And so, the most and absolute abject slavery you imagine would be so onerous that the slaves would cease to be able to do anything. Such thinking is not about having a "perfect slavery" at all. It's about killing off the slaves and believing that the slaves will march in orderly fashion, welcoming this euthanasia. It cannot produce a viable or productive slavery and it is not intended to. The genuine slavery is worked out by mechanisms far different, which would no longer operate on the basis of political economic incentives, but on a new moral incentive of fear, conditioning, manipulation, and a whole game that has been developed over the past century.
>>

 No.479591

Basically, if you have a factory line, your only concern are raw material inputs which you can find as commodities, and in principle it doesn't matter if there are 1000 or 1000000 tons of iron in the earth. Your capacity for iron has no direct relation to the wider environment, because the factory is a particular machine, and it only processes so much iron at any given time, based on the technology available in it. The human labor power in of itself doesn't "generate" anything in this machine, but is part of it - this is what Adam Smith's pin factory is, where the factory is an operation that has to operate cooperatively to do what it does. You would have to pick apart the laborers, their life, and manage their operations, and that wasn't directly Adam Smith's point - that work would be carried out at the lower level. Marx investigates this process in the abstract as a general rule - and I've said before, this is Marx giving an answer to the Machine Question in classical political economy that leads to interesting results, if you know what to look for and see it that way.

To the worker, his wage is very important. To the capitalist, the wage fund is certainly important. All of the technology, all of the commodities that come into the industrial process are foundationally the products of labor, since we have abstracted away the natural world and suggested that however much exists in the natural world, it only arrives at the factory when a human extracts it. When the conditions of full and total enclosure are established - when the conditions of eugenics are established - the logic will have to change, because control of the entire natural environment would be a given. It would no longer be accepted - and this is recapitulated endlessly on this forum - that you could have "infinite growth in a finite world". The slave breeding factory, due to directly producing labor-power, would not only change the calculations of labor as a source of economic value - free labor would never compete with such slave labor and they know it. To realize that condition would make any of the assumptions about human intelligence no longer operative. It would also make technology no longer operative. The thinking ultimately leads to one conclusion, inevitably and inexorably - "failed race". This, if you haven't figured out, has been an imperial cult tenet this whole time. They think they are actually space alien gods, and if you get into their secrets, they tell you this and do not consider themselves "human" - or rather, we are not "human", and every time they say "human rights", they laugh that they are getting the fools to accept their own slavery.
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 No.479592

Yes, you could produce slaves and sell them as commodities, but they are a limited commodity - you're dealing directly with the social relations, and this is a different thing from value in the abstract. This was a contention with the slave institution - that it was ultimately incompatible with free trade not because free trade was good for the people or entailed political or personal freedom, but because the slave system would taken to its logical conclusion make clear that free trade was unworkable.
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 No.479593

>>479588
>>479589
>>479590
>>479591
>>479592
Do you really think your thoughts are worth all that text?
>>

 No.479594

>>479593
Do you think you're anything other than a fag? Go away. You have no insight and no one is intimidated by the snark any more. That worked during Obama, but the masses have adapted. Resistance is futile.
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 No.479595

>>479545
think about it this way, if money flows through all of society it can command labor-power and collect surplus value. In a slave society the slave masters command labor power and collect surplus value.

>>479587
>And slaves actually were bred,
No, slave-societies never managed to breed slaves, they had to keep catching new ones. One of the reasons why feudal societies could beat slave societies was because peasants reproduced. Slave population have extremely low fertility, nowhere near population replacement levels.
>down to fucking science. Like cattle.
Also No. Cattle are the result of breeding via artificial selection. That only works on a few rare species like cows, dogs, pigs, sheep, horses, etc. Most species can't be bred, including humans. Humans like most species lack the biological features that make that possible. Humans also have a very long reproduction cycle, so even if it was biologically possible, it would take too long.

It's probably possible to breed Elephants from a biological standpoint (there is some debate about it, still) but elephant reproduction cycles are also very long, and that's why elephant breeding isn't really a thing. Nobody wants to invest and wait a thousand years for the returns.
>>

 No.479606

>>479595
People, including myself, have tried to explain these things to this retard for weeks, even months, on end and he never listens. At worst he will log off and rage quit for a while then come back. At best he will just ignore everything you say and just keep repeating to same stupid debunked talking points over and over again. He just wants the attention.
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 No.479616

>>479539
No, the difference is how the labour-power of the slave was treated in comparision to a proletarian. The slave is entirely tied to their labour-power, selling the slave is selling their labour-power once and for all to be used by the buyer. The proletarian has to sell his labour piece by piece on the market on which he entirely depends upon to sell labour-power as a commoditty (something exchanged only because it has no use-value and the receiever has some use-value out of it).

The slave is not tied to the irrational market, the proletarian is. The slave's existence as lifetime labour-power is guaranteed by his buyer. The proletarian existence has none of this security even when selling of labour-power
>>

 No.479622

>>479616
When farm laborers were kicked off their land and entered the cities, it was understood to all that their condition was effectively slavery. They had no legal rights, no legal standing, nothing at all that the bourgeois city had to respect or regard. The only distinction is that there wasn't formally a deed saying this person is property in total of another person - but what is an employment contract and the worksheet every worker was obligated to show to receive pay? What is their condition if they are obligated by contract to police their entire life on and off the clock to conform to the dictates of the city and their boss? In an economic and moral sense, the proletarian was considered devoid of any more rights than a slave, and would be treated accordingly. You might convince proletarians to spit on slaves or nigras, or sell them some ideology, but no one is confused about the nature of their relation to society, and what their lives have been. Usually the behavior of slaves is that they don't want this situation to be worse, because existential wank is not a condition laborers in general care for. That's always been an aristocratic vice - and it is an aristocratic vice rather than a bourgeois vice or the vice of producers or technocrats. The typical middle class bourgeois man is not a frilly pissant, but someone thinking how he can make a buck, swap his wife at the parties, and play the part of the game he is allowed to play. Usually the bourgeois man is practical rather than given over directly to fetishism by some blind and unknowable impulse. The reasons why middle class people buy into fads are not difficult to discern if you are allowed to make comparisons with reality, and disregard the mythology regarding social class and what this really is. No middle class person, bourgeois person, is unaware of his own situation and relations to others of his kind at a basic level. It would be impossible for him not to be, and the bourgeois man is more acutely aware of this than any other class, precisely because the bourgeois life is a precarious one by the standards of history. We didn't always have a stable population of city-dwellers with this particular concept of civic participation, where they adopted a very alien manner of speaking compared to what humans had been doing for centuries in the same sort of social position.

Also, slaves are tied to a market - slavery was big, big money. Slaves are collateral, are souls which the master can own for all intents and purposes. A master can do to a caged and chained slave far different things than he can to a proletarian, and this is not a result of a sentiment or legal fiction, but because the slave is chained, whipped, beaten, and this is expected in society. Free labor may be in a legal sense treated like a slave, but in a social sense, free laborers will not be treated that way unless they are at the very bottom, and those poor souls are either abject slaves of a different sort, or in the residuum which is by objective reckoning a much worse social rank than slave. The example to discipline the proletarian wasn't the slave, but the workhouse - and if you know anything about the American South, the workhouse and forced labor camp was the fate of poor whites who didn't get with the program. That forced labor, by the way, did not end with the civil war. It remains a part of the South's "culture" to this day. They make it clear that if you don't make it as a white man, they see you as a race traitor at the least. That's your Southern hospitality for you. It was the workhouse and the fate of the condemned that kept workers fearful more than anything else. Legal slavery was a condition very far from the white proletarian's existence, barring imprisonment for crimes that were regarded as the fate of bad people, or military conscription which will always be seen as a terrible slavery of its own sort. It was not so removed that the prospect of enslaving outright the white man was unthinkable, but before it came to that, large parts of the white race would have been pushed into the workhouse, marked as invalids and already broken through a process understood to be lower in civic and moral worth than slavery. This is what happened with black Americans after the civil war - intended beforehand as a "soft Final Solution", while the eugenists were screaming harder than anyone to go turbo Nazi on them and never gave that up for a moment.

When you think the distinction between slavery and freedom is a legal abstraction or a fiction of no consequence to "civilized times like ours", you have all sorts of funny ideas that are entirely inverted from what workers and slaves alike have seen their entire life. This has been understood by anyone honest the whole time. It wasn't until 1970 and a huge PR offensive that the idea that it wasn't this was promulgated widely. Liberals had their smug bubble for a while in the post-war order, but they always knew when push came to shove what the class war really was and their position in it. More often, the liberal believed that there was a technocratic fix to class struggle - that's what communism entailed, a technocratic fix to claim you can resolve the struggle by reason and being the right sort of person, rather than a blind impulse and rage like some retard screaming at the world impotently. This is where the Germanic Nazi ideology regarding "freedom" and wordplay really took off, and insinuated that we had to accept that as the "default" even though so many people knew this was insanity. That's where you get these funny ideas that the class struggle pertains to these abstractions, rather than a struggle in the world we actually live in with genuine stakes. For the low of today, they know they lost. The people are beyond defeated - they have been literally decimated and are about to get worse. That's what the humiliations of Germanic schooling are - a more obnoxious and pervasive form of the Roman practice of decimation, except the Romans knew decimation from archaic and fucked up. The teachers have a quota to set aside so many children as failures and publicly expose their status and humiliation, to make it clear just what this is. The quota works out to roughly 10% - that's how many are consigned to the failure track of maximal humiliation, Epsilon caste programming. This, by the way, lacks any of the disciplinary function that decimation would have had for the Roman legion, and the legionnaires were in war and the military cult - and decimation of a legion was a very exceptional punishment, when a legion really, really fucked up. It wasn't something you did to project stronk - any general who has to resort to decimation is probably a shitty general and has to do this to restore order to a near-mutinous legion and make it clear just what war is. The idea that decimation would be an institutionalized, ritual, and regular feature is a Germanic perversion. The full horror of Germanism is yet more pervasive, since the whole point of the Germanic way of life is to uphold their perverse fantastic racism and tell people they are what they are not. Romans were never this impractical. They hated the sort of person who would bray like a faggot about being stronk and that is not hard to see.

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