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"Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature"
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File: 1702537903800.png ( 2.37 MB , 1024x1024 , DALL·E 2023-12-14 02.03.26….png )

 No.12778

Has there been any progress on this?
I was going to post a couple of ideas of how it will function,
how people can generate a public/private keypair, and add their
public key to a chain of trust network that establishes their key as trusted by
someone another person might trust as well.

I was going to brainstorm some ideas about how to verify that work was done and
how much of it for someone to receive a payment (maybe some sort of smart
contract shit? Idk much about that stuff)

But then I realized, that even if we had an app where people have a balance
of money measured in hours, that they earn by working, then could that
even gain traction?

I mean all you would have to do is get it to a point where you tell starbucks
employees to make free drinks for people and instead of checking them out
at the register get people to pay with the app. I realize they would get fired
but most people are already fed up with working there.
>>

 No.12780

>>12778
The problem you are trying to solve is how to make your voucher accounting system contain material goods (coffee beans and paper cups in your example), in addition to labor time.

I doubt you'll get away with siphoning material in useful amounts out of the capitalist system unless you can match the capacity for violence of the capitalist system.

But you can extract material by recycling waste (capitalism is not guarding that and there is a lot of it) Of course you can extract material from nature. That might be enough to bootstrap something better.

I would also advise that you have to factor in the cost of bribing people who can damage your app.
>>

 No.12781

>>12778
Maybe try something less ambitious, by adding labor-time vouchers as a mechanic to a video game.

A game that enables user generated content might work well. Users get labor time vouchers for making user generated content. You could add 1 layer of higher order organization to it with a project feature. Enable people to propose projects and those that like the project idea can donate labor vouchers to it.

You have to take into account that the digital space doesn't work the same as the physical world. Duplicating physical goods has a substantial cost, while duplicating information has a near zero cost. So people don't have to spend labor vouchers to get content that others have generated. People would spend their vouchers on Projects in a vote with your vouchers kind of scheme. Users get vouchers by doing specific content generating tasks for a project.
>>

 No.12785

>>12780
>The problem you are trying to solve is how to make your voucher accounting system contain material goods (coffee beans and paper cups in your example), in addition to labor time.

Yeah that's a good point. Maybe this idea getting traction would mean that proles have seized some means of production already, otherwise you're stuck with simple things like art or small-scale manufacturing/recycling as you said. (which is cool too).

>>12781
Interesting idea. Labour time vouchers can be an incentive to get devs to add feature to the game. Though I would rather make a useful tool than a game tbqh
>>

 No.12787

>>12785
>Yeah that's a good point. Maybe this idea getting traction would mean that proles have seized some means of production already
Yes according to Marxist theory you gotta have means of production first before you can do anything with accounting.

However you could still try to make an aggressive socialist accounting system that eats the capitalist accounting system. Marxist theory doesn't strictly say that is impossible, just less likely. Neo-liberalism kinda tries to be a aggressive accounting system and sometimes they do succeed with that. So there is some precedent for such a strategy.

But be mindful about the fact that you're going to try to eat the lunch of all the people with wealth and power, so that system needs to be extremely tough, because they would try everything to destroy it.

>otherwise you're stuck with simple things like art or small-scale manufacturing/recycling as you said. (which is cool too).

Well if you gain the ability to get resources via recycling, then you could build on top of that, so you wouldn't be stuck. But it would take a very long time before you get a large systemic transformation momentum, because you're starting from scratch.
>>

 No.12789

>>12785
>Interesting idea. Labour time vouchers can be an incentive to get devs to add feature to the game.
In principle yes, but you also have to think a little further than that. Once the devs earned the vouchers what can they spend it on ?
>Though I would rather make a useful tool than a game tbqh
Experimenting in a video-game, will give you some experience, that might prove useful later.
>>

 No.12794

>>12778
You might try to use this with cooperatives, to do a hybrid system.
Between coops you use vouchers.
To interact with the rest of capitalism you use money.
>>

 No.12840

>>12780
>unless you can match the capacity for violence of the capitalist system.
You're half way to unearthing a redpill there. Voluntary communism is impossible because only people who expect to get more out of the system than they put in will sign up voluntarily. To get the people who work more than they benefit requires violence and coercion and stasi and gulags and all the other totalitarians bullshit that comes with every real world communist state that has ever existed.
>>

 No.12841

>>12840
>people who expect to get more out of the system than they put in
That would be the capitalist class.
>will sign up voluntarily
Lol i doubt very many capitalists would sign up voluntarily to communism, maybe some would turn on their class, but not very many.
>To get the people who work more than they benefit requires violence and coercion
In capitalism, the ruling class uses violence and coercion to expropriate surplus from workers. They think that this is the only way for a society to generate surplus, because otherwise they would have to admit to them selves what horrors they have unleashed.

People under capitalism do not want to give up their surplus because they don't want to toil on behalf of some ruling class, which is perfectly normal because that doesn't benefit them. Given that the ruling class under capitalism also uses that surplus to buy means of subjugation, people have an additional very powerful incentive to oppose giving up surplus, because it is actively harming them. Capitalism has turned virtually everybody into a guarded abuse victim. But that isn't the human baseline for behavior. That is merely human behavior in a capitalist environment.

If you do away with all that abuse from class society, economic surplus in socialism won't have to be coercive. If you give people enough influence over the allocation of surplus, you probably will not have to force anything, because once the surplus is allocated by and according to priorities of the population, contributing surplus will actually be in the interests of the population. If people are no longer turned into abuse victims, the social dynamics will change. Think about it this way, the slave owner thinks that the people he enslaved are lazy and work-shy, but in reality people simply do not want to be enslaved. They're not lazy, they just do not want to work for the slave owner.

The forceful extraction of surplus in the Soviet Union had its roots in the need of building defenses against fascism. Fascism is a capitalist phenomenon, you can hardly blame communists for shit that capitalist did. I think the moral culpability lies with the capitalists who supported and funded the rise of Hitler, after that it's all the intellectuals who promoted the retarded idea that humanity is divided into races. Then the collaborators who signed up to enforce Nazism and so on.

I don't think you can blame the German communists for not having been ruthless enough to kill off Nazism in the crib, while you also complain that Russian communism was too imposing. Stalin ordered a bunch of political purges that killed off Nazism in Russia. Obviously many innocent people got caught up in that as well. And that is something that you can criticize but if you blame Nazism and their effects on the world on communists, you are saying that 20th century communists weren't Stalinist enough. That doesn't seem to be congruent with your theme that you wanted communists to be less forceful.

Imagine the Soviets had been able to develop on their own terms, no fascism attacking and mass-murdering 27 million soviet citizens, no cold-war arms-race shenanigans. The USSR wouldn't have become a militarized society. I think that today it's possible to frustrate fascism with softer methods. The case study is Zionism, that will probably get defeated without having to turn all of Israel into rubble. But at the beginning of the 20th century, they had an industrial bludgeon, and fascism was a problem that could be fixed with a bludgeon. If you removed the Soviet military industrial intervention from history, fascism eats all of Europe and a big part of Russia too. WW2 ends with a nuclear weapons exchange between the US and Europe, in a mutual defeat, and probably 5 times as many dead people. While its correct to criticize the errors of the Soviets, don't ever forget to say thanks for cleaning up about 80% of Nazi-fascism.

>stasi and gulags

A gulag is just a prison. It's pure ideology to make it sound ominous when communist countries do it. The Soviets had fewer inmates in their prisons at the heights of their infamous political persecutions than the US did at their lowest prisoner-count during the entire 20th century. The US has ~5% of the world population but it somehow managed to have 20% of the worlds prison inmates. The private prison complex in the US is still trying to expand that.

The average Soviet incarceration rate was slightly above 1% which is about the global average. While that makes the Soviet Union unremarkable in a comparison. I think that's still too much, i think that we should bring that down to 0.25% With a combination of reducing sentencing duration and also making fewer crimes carry prison sentences.

The STASI couldn't hope to compete with the current Surveillance Industrial Complex. East-Germany managed to surveil at most 2% of the population. The SIC probably manages above 90%. While I agree there was too much surveillance in 20th century communism, what currently happens is almost 2 orders of magnitude worse. There is no historical precedent for the dystopia we live in today. It's so bad that going back to the STASI days would amount to a massive privacy improvement.

In general I agree with you that we have to do away with political persecutions. A recent example would be what they did to Assange, it utterly destroyed the trust in institutions for countless millions of people. Communists have to strive to build better systems than what capitalists did. However complaining about the Soviets has become pointless, for everything that went wrong in Soviet communism, there is an example in present capitalism that's 10 times worse. That's what you have to point the finger at.

Besides if you keep portraying the Soviets as these heartless brutal people, you're not actually convincing communists that the Soviet Union was bad, because you're not a moral authority to communists, but you might be convincing communists that they have to become heartless brutal people to overcome capitalism. People look at the Soviet Union as an example of a society that moved beyond capitalism to some degree, even if they didn't managed to reach a self perpetuating socialist mode of production. They still had many successes that capitalism has never reached. The Soviets had near 100% employment, near 0% homelessness, universal healthcare, universal access to higher education, very high social mobility, phenomenal economic performance, extremely steep scientific and technological advances and so on. Communists are asking the question how did the Soviets achieve that, especially the spectacular improvements in social outcomes. So be mindful how you answer that question. At the moment the neoliberal ideological chorus in the western world is saying: The only alternative to suffering under capitalism is Full Metal Stalin swinging a very big hammer to make civilization progress.

sorry for the massive wall of text, but you put pure ideology into your comment

TLDR
It's virtually impossible to get voluntary surplus for waging war.
People will contribute surplus willingly, if there's no ruling class that can take it, and people decide the priorities what the surplus is spend on.
It will only work as long as wealth inequality is low, and living conditions keep improving.
It's possible to build such a socialist system today because the necessary technology now exists.
The current capitalist system inflicts so much damage on people that the non coercive socialist alternative will generate more economic surplus simply because if the people are undamaged they get more stuff done.
>>

 No.12843

>>12841
>People will contribute surplus willingly, if there's no ruling class that can take it, and people decide the priorities what the surplus is spend on.
<Alice picks 50 berries a day and eats 100.
<Bob picks 150 berries a day and eats 100.
That's a great deal for Alice but not for Bob.
<Bob might feel generous at first but sooner or later he wants to leave.
That's when the berlin wall goes up.
<Now Bob is trapped so he only picks 50 berries and stops working.
That's when the famine starts.
Gulags and secret police arrive to coerce Bob into doing more work.

The only reason you support communism is because you are an Alice not a Bob. It turns out you have no problem stealing "surplus value" as long as you are the one doing the stealing. But the Bobs won't stay in such a system voluntarily. That's why if you want your communist system to last longer than the length of Bob's good will then terror and violence is the only way to keep him working. And again, if you read a history book that's exactly what happened.
>>

 No.12844

>>12843
>if you want your communist system to last longer than the length of Bob's good will then terror and violence is the only way to keep him working.
And obviously the way capitalism solves this problem is by simply paying Bob more money for doing more work. No violence needed.
>>

 No.12845

File: 1704583175110.png ( 15.04 KB , 263x300 , communist care bear.png )

>>12843
In capitalism
<The worker picks 150 berries and gets payed a wage equivalent to 50 berries
<The capitalist doesn't pick any berries and makes a profit equivalent to 10.000 berries.

In socialism
<The worker picks 100 berries and gets payed a wage equivalent to 100 berries, and pays 25 berries worth into the collective surplus pot. Keeps 75 berries for him self and get public services worth equivalent to 25 berries in return. That means 50% less work for 50% higher pay and better public services.
<The capitalist doesn't exist, because everybody is a worker in socialism.

There are currently more people dying of starvation under capitalism than during the worst crop failures in 20th century soviet socialism. Western neoliberal sanctions have blocked more trade than the Iron Curtain and the Berlin wall.

You are trying to distract from the debate by attacking my character because you don't have good arguments against socialism or n favor of capitalism. Capitalism doesn't reward people who work, it punishes workers, you are trying to project this onto socialism. Your false accusations are capitalist confessions.

The amount of violence that capitalism is inflicting on the world to keep that racket going makes the Soviets look like cuddly care bears by comparison. Communists self-criticize and have provided many improvements that fix the political and economic short-comings of 20th century communism. New systems that deliver on better democracy, better product options and so on, have been worked out. For an easy digestible example read the cybernetic socialists like Paul Cockshott: Towards a new socialism https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-Cockshott/publication/299519892_Towards_a_new_socialism_Cockshott_and_Cottrell/links/56fd2c7b08aeb723f15d6475/Towards-a-new-socialism-Cockshott-and-Cottrell.pdf

You should try to criticize capitalism first, to get a sense of actually existing realities.
I recommend reading the book Killing Hope by William Blum
https://ia803008.us.archive.org/32/items/KillingHope/Killing%20Hope.pdf
For some actual recent history background.
>>

 No.12846

File: 1704584179012.png ( 28.52 KB , 504x364 , seriouslybro.png )

>>12844
>capitalism solves problem
>by paying more money to workers
Is this sarcasm ?
The only time when workers got more money in capitalism, is when they do class struggle like going on strikes.

>No violence needed.

So all the violence in capitalism, that's just shits and giggles?
>>

 No.12847

>>12845
>You are trying to distract from the debate by attacking my character
It's not meant as a personal attack it's just the plain truth. There are millions of people in africa living on $1 a day. If you care so much about equality then there is nothing stopping you for giving half your money to them.

The truth is you don't want a system that helps people poorer than you. You want a system that forces people richer than you to share it. And that's why such a system can never be voluntary. The only way to implement such a system is through violence and terror. Which is why in reality every real world attempt at communism could only survive by turning into a totalitarian police state.

I don't know what "debate" you think we're having here, that has always been my one and only point >>12840

>>12846
>The only time when workers got more money in capitalism, is when they do class struggle like going on strikes.
Under a market economy with healthy competition you literally just sell your labor to the highest bidder. It's as simple as signing the new contract, telling your old boss to fuck himself and then getting paid to do nothing for a few weeks before you start your new job with a higher salary. If your productivity is so low you can't find a higher bidder then that's your failure not the system's.

>So all the violence in capitalism, that's just shits and giggles?

The state stealing 50% of my income and using it to bomb children in the middle east is not "capitalism" my dude. The sad thing is when the state uses the threat of violence to take 50% of my income and uses it for socialized healthcare instead you are 100% in favor of that. So clearly you are not actually against violence or stealing the surplus value of labor as long as you think you'll benefit from it.

Just like the first guy, you support socialism because you're an Alice not a Bob. It's not meant as an insult but if you recognize that it's not a good thing then that's an important first step.
>>

 No.12848

>>12847
>people in africa living on $1 a day because of you
Africa is poor because of Capitalism.

Part of it is the legacy damage done during the era of colonial imperialism. Most of the conflicts in Africa that prevent them from forming a coherent economic block that can effectively defend it's interests on the international scale, goes back to borders drawn up by the British empire, the French empire and so on.

But there are current reasons as well. Capitalism doesn't do industrial investment in African countries because they are rich in resources. Capitalists do not want resource extraction and industrial production in the same place. Capitalists want to be the go-between and play the workers who dig resources out of the ground against the workers who convert the resources into products. Masses of poor workers in Africa are also used as low wage competition to drive down wages of the workers in the west.

So what we have here is Africa being under-developed and over-exploited by capitalists withholding industrial development. This is sometimes called "post-colonial" or "finance imperialism".

If Africa were to get industrial development, wages in Africa would rise accordingly and a bunch of low wage pressure in the west would disappear, western wages would go up. If Africa fully industrialized, they would be able to dig out those resources much more efficiently and that would lower commodity prices.

This arrangement is detrimental to me but advantageous to big capital. Now why would you try to make me responsible ?

By the way communists want the means of production, you know the workers owning the stuff they build. It's not about capitalists sharing their wealth it's about capitalists returning what they took from the workers.

>The only way to implement such a system is through violence and terror.

Capitalism is a system implemented through violence and terror, unfathomable mind-bending amounts of violence and terror.

I agree with many criticisms of political violence in the Soviet Union, from a humanitarian point of view.
But if you contrast the Soviet Union with global capitalism. Capitalism is so much worse, it's not even a contest. There simply is no way to make an argument for capitalism on the basis of being less violent. Not against the Soviet system, and certainly not against the political system proposed by the Socialist cyberneticists like Cockshott, which has none of the vulnerabilities that caused the purges in the USSR. Seriously read his Book towards a new Socialism At least try to make a case why sortition democracy with surplus allocation priority polling would require violence ?

Stop linking that comment about the capacity for violence, which clearly talks about capitalists attacking communists for trying to build a new system. It doesn't support your argument. Very peaceful, non-coercive and democratic Communists tried to build a cybernetic system in Chile in the 70s, when imperial capitalist financed Pinochet to do a brutal murderous regime change operation.

Are you simply ignorant about how capitalists run their system ?
Are you hung up on that story where you're supposed to imagine capitalism as a bunch of people peacefully exchanging money for wares in a market-place ? That is a fucking illusion. Anything that has higher stakes than a yard-sale or a second-hand-flea-market is a power-struggle.
>>

 No.12849

>>12847
>Under a market economy with healthy competition you literally just sell your labor to the highest bidder.
In this idealized market economy where capital competes for labor, workers would have more leverage and the system would gradually reform it self into socialism. Capitalism is predicated on preventing this. Technically you could say that capitalists "conspire" to manipulate the system so that they don't have to compete for labor and instead labor has to compete for employment.

>It's as simple as signing the new contract, telling your old boss to fuck himself and then getting paid to do nothing for a few weeks before you start your new job with a higher salary.

This is a wholesome story, and workers having the ability to change employers makes it better than feudal or slave society, but if you look at the facts, wages correlate with class struggle, strikes and so on.

>The state stealing 50% of my income and using it to bomb children in the middle east is not "capitalism"

The capitalist state taxing you to fund imperialism on behalf of the imperialist bourgeoisie is part of capitalism. The Zionist billionaires as well as Israeli spy-agencies bribing and blackmailing western politicians is part of capitalism, the military industrial complex making profits off the bombs that fall on the heads of Palestinian children is part of capitalism. The oil capitalist lobbying for war with Iran is part of capitalism. Communists have to own the mistakes that the Soviets made, but capitalists have to own what capitalist states do too.

The capitalist economic base builds the capitalist political superstructure, that includes states. If you have trouble conceptualizing this. You can't have capitalism without a state that enforces property claims, market relations and so on.

While i appreciate libertarians for their anti-war stances, their opposition against copy-monopolies and so on, but they do not understand what states do. If you just deleted the state and try to have capitalism without a state, mega-corps would rush in to fill the power-void by creating mercenary armies, and you'd get a replay of the feudal age competition between fiefdoms until one becomes dominant enough to recreate a state that forces all the others to dismantle their forces. I'm having doubts that arming McDonalds with MCnukes would be an improvement over the current situation.

>violence and socialized healthcare.

You don't understand the political intention for socialized healthcare. It's not primarily about everybody sharing the burden of caring for the sick. It's about taking away the incentive for malicious people to intentionally do stuff that causes others to get sick. If everybody is part of the same health-care-system, it's in everybody's interest to not act in a way that causes other people to get sick. Think about people like Thomas Malthus, who during the 1800s famously advocated for promoting unsanitary conditions in the places where the poor people lived so more poor people would die of "pestilence". It's also a good incentive to keep people from dumping toxic sludge in the river. Universal health-care is a little bit sharing is caring but it's mostly about protection from attacks via weaponized environments. You have to realize that violence isn't limited to somebody punching you in the face, there are also less direct types of violence.
>>

 No.12852

>>12848
>people in africa living on $1 a day because of you
You made up a fake quote and then wrote a whole post debunking it.
This is the actual quote if you want to try again:
>There are millions of people in africa living on $1 a day. If you care so much about equality then there is nothing stopping you for giving half your money to them.
The point being that you don't care about equality you just want to get free stuff for yourself.

>Capitalism is a system implemented through violence and terror, unfathomable mind-bending amounts of violence and terror.

<you do work
<they pay you
<you stop working
<they stop paying you
Where is the violence?

>>12849
>In this idealized market economy where capital competes for labor, workers would have more leverage and the system would gradually reform it self into socialism.
It's understandable that Marx hypothesized this 200 years ago but we have enough evidence now to say this is completely false. The happier the workers are the less they give a shit about political revolution. Even 100 years ago Sorel wrote about how class warfare could never win in industrialized countries which is what prompted Mussolini to leave the Italian Socialist party.

>if you look at the facts, wages correlate with class struggle, strikes and so on.

The facts are you get a pay raise by building experience and skills which increase your productivity and then either getting a promotion or getting another job (or better yet starting your own business). All this class struggle and strikes bullshit is just a cope for the lazy and incompetent.

>Communists have to own the mistakes that the Soviets made, but capitalists have to own what capitalist states do too.

I don't own anything. The federal reserve trying to centrally plan the world economy by manipulating interest rates on paper money is not capitalism. Nobody calls it capitalism. They don't even call themselves capitalists. They are keynesians, the bastard offspring of marxism and liberalism.

>If you just deleted the state and try to have capitalism without a state, mega-corps would rush in to fill the power-void

What if I told you corporations are the state. They are legal fictions which derive all their power and legal immunity from state interventions in the economy. If you delete the state and still have corporations then you've done the first step wrong.

>You don't understand the political intention for socialized healthcare.

My point was that you've got no problem with surplus value being stolen from workers as long as you think you'll benefit from it.

>It's about taking away the incentive for malicious people to intentionally do stuff that causes others to get sick. If everybody is part of the same health-care-system, it's in everybody's interest to not act in a way that causes other people to get sick.

I see your point, socialized healthcare is a tragedy of the commons so the incentive structure is to minimize other people's consumption in order to maximize what's left for you to consume. It's still a stupid and inefficient system though. You understand that monopolies are bad because they increase cost and lower quality but for some reason you think it will be different when unaccountable government bureaucrats are the ones running the monopoly.

The free market solution to that problem would be with insurance companies. If someone is polluting the river and a bunch of people get sick then the insurance companies who have to pay the medical bills now have the resources and incentive to extract compensation from the polluter and make it financially unsustainable for them to continue polluting.
>>

 No.12854

>>12852
>Where is the violence?
There is a tremendous amount of organized direct violence, where people are terrorized to submit to capitalist logic. However most of the violence in capitalism is structural. Structural violence is less dramatic, but it is destroying a huge amount of people, none the less.

The more egregious examples of structural violence are perhaps best exemplified in the game where big multinational capitalists bribe politicians of powerful countries like the US to impose sanctions against smaller weaker countries. They do this in order to make live unbearable for the population. To punish people for not electing leaders that allow those big multinational capitalists to plunder countries and maximally exploit the population. On a more local level there would be something similar that is called austerity economics, those lower living standards of people, which has destructive effects on the well being of people. That is violence too, even if it isn't the pinkertons gunning down striking workers.

You have to be realistic, capitalists could neither control so much means of production, nor could they extract large profits without violence. When ever workers try to claim all the wealth they produced the capitalists call on the state to brutalize the workers, sometimes the capitalists hire mercenary groups to do that.

Another very obvious thing that cannot exist without violence are the insane wealth concentrations, it's not possible to take so much wealth from the people without violence, and it's also not possible to keep people from taking it back, without loads of violence.

You also have to stop pretending that capitalism is a voluntary system. You can't claim that people had a choice when there's only one economic system to choose from. People who try to build alternative economic systems that bypasses capitalism get murdered sometimes by the millions like in Indonesia 1965-1966. Literally every socialist country that tried to build another economic system got invaded by capitalist powers, usually more than once. The Soviets suffered 14 invasions. But also people that tried to build alternative systems within capitalist countries get attacked viciously. I'm not talking just about communists building networks of communes and such things. But there's also other non socialist alternative economic projects. For example the various alternative-money schemes. Local-circulation-currencies, used to have a fairly big movement 40-50 years ago, they were successful too, and all that ended because it got outlawed and shutdown with copious amounts of violent police force.

In the 1970 when neo-liberal capitalism sought to displace social democratic capitalism, they hired death squats to kill off political opposition. I'm not talking about some 3rd world country, this was happening in the UK under the ultimate girlboss Margret Thatcher. Even today labor-organizers sometimes get disappeared.

There also is a lot of capitalist on capitalist violence. Especially the period of the oil-barons was astonishingly brutal. Remember last year, when the fracking-gas capitalists in the US blew up the pipe-line of the natural-gas competitors from Russia. It was like that but more frequent and with more casualties. There's also the endless variations of "unofficial methods" that large corporate monopolies use to destroy smaller competitors.

I have barely scratched the surface, the topic of the use of violence to impose capitalist economic relations is vast.

>free stuff

I assume you are talking about Wall-street getting bazillions in bail-out money.
>>

 No.12860

>>12852
>It's understandable that Marx hypothesized this 200 years ago but we have enough evidence now to say this is completely false.
What the fuck are you talking about. Marx's theories have largely been proven correct. The falling rate of profit turned out to be true. And there were massive socialist revolutions in the 20th century.

The only theoretical point Marx seemed to have gotten wrong was about industrial capital usurping financial capital in terms of political power. When neo-liberal capitalism took off in the west, financial capital was put above industrial capital. However if you look at the world economy, you can see China prioritizing their industrial sector over their financial sector, and they are winning on economics.

>The happier the workers are the less they give a shit about political revolution.

You are a fucking clown, workers aren't happy at all, and capitalism is using brutal repression against revolutionary or reformist politics.

>Even 100 years ago Sorel wrote about how class warfare could never win in industrialized countries

Who ?

Anyway if you look at the workers movement in the west, in the post WW2 period. The only reason why the Neo-liberals were able to reverse the progress the social democrats were able to achieve, is because they could outsource industrial labor, and destroy the bargaining power of the western labor-movement.

But it turns out that de-industrializing the west, and offshoring industry to the periphery of the capitalist imperial system meant that, the periphery could catch up to the core. Now the big imperial capitalists that initially funded the neo-liberal politics are loosing their ability to extract imperial profits from the world.

It turns out that Marx was right again. Industrial production does correlate with the empowerment of the labor movement. And given how much the west is loosing in the Geo-political competition on account of de-industrializing. It turns out that Neo-liberalism didn't overcome class struggle it just postponed it.

>which is what prompted Mussolini to leave the Italian Socialist party.

Why do you even care what Mussolini did, that guy sucked at leadership, he picked the loosing side in WW2 and Italian-fascism/corporatism is a retarded economic/political system. It's basically "lets organize the entire country like a mafia clan", which failed, really really hard.
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 No.12865

>>12854
>There is a tremendous amount of organized direct violence, where people are terrorized to submit to capitalist logic.
Such a tremendous amount that you can't even name one example.

>However most of the violence in capitalism is structural.

I expect "structural violence" is as meaningless a term as "structural racism".

>The more egregious examples of structural violence are perhaps best exemplified in the game where big multinational capitalists bribe politicians of powerful countries like the US to impose sanctions against smaller weaker countries.

When the government does stuff that's socialism. You know that.

>You also have to stop pretending that capitalism is a voluntary system.

It sounds like we're talking about different things then. We both hate the current system, the difference is you think the problem is not enough government and I think the problem is too much government.

>words words words

Since you've probably forgot my original point I'll repeat it.
A pivotal step on the road to communism is the eradication of property rights, which means you have no way to materially reward workers which means the only way to maintain productivity is through violence. That's why every country which started on the road to communism turned into totalitarian hellholes with no exceptions.

>I assume you are talking about Wall-street getting bazillions in bail-out money.

There are parasites at the top and the bottom. I want to throw bankers out of a helicopter as much as you or any national socialist does but for different reasons.
>>

 No.12867

>>12860
>there were massive socialist revolutions in the 20th century.
All in agrarian countries. Once a country industrializes the living conditions of workers skyrockets so fast that class war is effectively off the table for the foreseeable future. That was the whole point Sorel was trying to make (read a book). And that's why 21st century socialism has replaced class war with race war and environmentalism as methods of stirring up revolution.

>When neo-liberal capitalism took off in the west, financial capital was put above industrial capital.

Again, technocrats at the federal reserve trying to centrally plan the economy by manipulating interest rates on fake paper money is not "capitalism".

>if you look at the world economy, you can see China prioritizing their industrial sector over their financial sector, and they are winning on economics.

Just like how the USSR was the world's largest steel producer and yet couldn't feed it own citizens? China's central planners using their own metrics to beat America's central planners is like the kid with one arm beating the kid with one leg at cross country running. There is a much bigger picture you are missing.

>The only reason why the Neo-liberals were able to reverse the progress the social democrats were able to achieve, is because they could outsource industrial labor, and destroy the bargaining power of the western labor-movement.

What "progress" are you referring to? You've got an ever rising minimum wage, it's impossible to fire unproductive workers unless they literally break the law while working, you've got a full featured welfare state giving the unemployed a comparative standard of living to the working poor, fully socialized healthcare. You're not so deep in your echo chamber that you pretend these are all wins for capitalism are you.

>But it turns out that de-industrializing the west, and offshoring industry to the periphery of the capitalist imperial system meant that, the periphery could catch up to the core. Now the big imperial capitalists that initially funded the neo-liberal politics are loosing their ability to extract imperial profits from the world.

The reason the west is struggling to extract imperial profits from the world is because they've overextended both their paper money and their military. Not because china is better and building up and tearing down ghost cities.

>Why do you even care what Mussolini did

Because he was right about why marxism would never succeed in italy.

>that guy sucked at leadership

And yet he still did what your side couldn't do which is lead a successful revolution.

>It's basically "lets organize the entire country like a mafia clan", which failed, really really hard.

All socialism fails really really hard. It doesn't matter what the reason is, class war, race war, nationalism, environmentalism, you give up all you wealth and freedom to a centralized bureaucracy and then are shocked pikachu face when the bureaucrats use all the power and money to pursue their own interests instead of yours.

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