i say swears online posted:

Jon Joe posted:

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

Two points cannot make a circle so beria and Stalin was not a pedophile ring. Next!

R. Guyovich posted:

i mean there is a clear qualitative difference between one guy who eventually got executed and what appears to be a massive group of people who will never see the inside of a jail cell

Lumpy posted:

Is it that the kids they raped spoke different languages?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Beria was arrested, incarcerated, survived to be put to trial, sentenced, and executed.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Beria was arrested, incarcerated, survived to be put to trial, sentenced, and executed.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Beria was arrested, incarcerated, survived to be put to trial, sentenced, and executed.

420 Gank Mid posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuHOBjKueKs

Captain Billy Pissboy posted:

Hilario Baldness posted:

Just finished reading Walter Rodney's posthumously published 'The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World.' When Verso had a 90% off sale on ebooks I got that and 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' since the latter appeared on the reading list from McCaine. It should definitely be added to the master list, it's extremely good.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Sure, but not for raping and murdering women. Beria couldn't really be nailed for being a sex predator because there's no good way to investigate the head of the secret police. None of his victims could come forward because if they did he'd just have them gulag'd on trumped up charges, and all the other evidence was buried in his rose garden. But his aide was keeping handwritten copies of Beria's black book which he ordered him to destroy, and they were building up a case against Beria shortly before Stalin died. The Politburo effectively had to wait for Beria to commit a political crime, and once he suggested giving up East Germany after the Berlin uprising it was enough for Kruschev to organize the conspiracy to oust him. Beria and his clique were all rounded up and charged with being agents of British intelligence and doing other counter revolutionary activities, but never for raping and murdering women and teenagers.

They never charged him for the other stuff because it would've been too damaging to the image of the state if they admitted that they all knew about his serial rape, but didn't do anything about it because he was head of the NKVD.

quote:

In a market, the capitalist can only beat his competitors by selling their product for cheaper

In order to sell product for cheaper without bankrupting themselves, the capitalist needs to maximize the amount of product produced, for the least cost, i.e. "increasing the productive forces of labour as much as possible"

The process of "increasing the productive forces of labour" includes both dividing the production process into simpler and simpler actions (i.e. proletarianization of labour), and then also the mechanization and automation of labour. The simpler the task, the more it can be divided across workers, and the more that machinery can multiply the productivity of workers.

By applying these methods, the capitalist can find a way to produce the same Thing, but with less labour-time. The example that "Wage Labour and Capital" uses is producing a yard of linen with the same labour-time that competitors need to produce just half a yard.

The capitalist could try to keep selling the Thing at the same price that they already do, but they would not do that, because it does not help them drive their competitors out of business, and it does not enlarge their market (i.e. if you stay at the same price, no new customers get priced-in), and they need that increased market-share and that enlarged market to be able to sell all the additional Things that they've been able to produce.

At the same time though, the capitalist also is not going to try to keep selling their One Yard of Linen at the same price as Half A Yard of Linen that their competitors sell at, because that yields zero profit.

Instead, the capitalist is going to undercut the prices of their competitors, but somewhere between the original price, and the reduced cost of his increased productive forces.

Now, if we consider that the price of a good always has to be above the cost of production, then the price is only going to exist within this narrow band: a floor of the cost to produce it, and a ceiling of the price needed to undercut the competition relative to the cheaper cost of production (obtained by increasing the productive forces of labour).

However, whatever advantage the capitalist gains from all this is fleeting: eventually other capitalists will start using machinery themselves, will also divide the labour like they have, and so on, and so everyone will eventually reduce their own costs of production to the point where everyone's cost of production is lower than even the standard set by the that leading capitalist we used as our example above.

And once that happens, then we're back to where we were at the start of this cycle, except everyone is now producing twice as many Things, and everyone needs to sell twice as many Things just to yield the same profit as before.

But the market isn't going to scale like that forever: even if you keep driving prices down, eventually you're going to hit a limit on how low the price can go, and eventually you're going to hit a limit on how many more people can start buying the Thing at the new lower price that they couldn't before.

Once you hit market saturation, you're not going to be able to sell as much (or sell at the same price) as you were before, and therefore your Rate Of Profit Has A Tendency To Fall.

Helsing posted:

That's not a bad starting point for helping someone grasp the basic microeconomic assumptions that structure the LTV but as an actual explanation of real world economic phenomenon it leaves out the most important features of the modern capitalist economy such as monopoly pricing power, intellectual property and regulatory capture.

gradenko_2000 posted:

My take on it:


From here we can also start seeing that the reaction to such a situation is to open up new markets... which then starts leading us down the path of colonialism and imperialism as outgrowths of capitalism.

gradenko_2000 posted:

get a load of this rear end in a top hat

gradenko_2000 posted:

get a load of this rear end in a top hat

Aeolius posted:

This is good.

IMO the simplest point is that the RoP falling/OCC rising are a wholly expected behavior when we're talking about the ratio between a flow (surplus value) that is ultimately bounded by the limits of human anatomy, working population, and the hours of the day, and a stock (capital) that steadily compounds on the basis of said flow.

Usually the sticking point is less about grasping that basic relationship and more about people being unwilling to accept the category of surplus value for some fool reason or other.