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If I were to make a list, I think I would go with. 1. Productive power must be able to be divorced from ownership of land area. e.g there must be a difference between a field and a factory, if you cannot build a factory (something that allows you to use capital to create more productive capability where it did not previously exist) then I don't think you can have capitalism because your options for growth are more limited to controlling more land, of which there is a finite amount and which historically has been difficult to efficiently administrate over wide areas prior to the invention of the things that let you also build factories. Productive capacity and the power it confers is more zero-sum in that case, as it is harder to build than it is to take a share of it from someone else. 2. There must be a practical monopoly of force to guarantee the right of ownership of capital. e.g you can't have capitalism without a state, because the state (or something that functions as the state, being a monopoly of force that can empower or disempower people across a sufficiently large geographic area) is what provides the legal basis for ownership. An owner of a factory cannot own things unless he can call the cops to enforce ownership, or his own private security force perhaps but generally those also operate with the blessing of the state in one form or another. Basically there must be some extremely powerful system, ultimately backed by force, that affords the capitalist his power. Basically if people can own things, and owning things can allow you to own more things at a sufficiently rapid rate, then you have the conditions for ownership of productive capacity to become the dominant political force in the world quite quickly.
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# ? Sep 10, 2021 23:27 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 02:53 |
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That makes a lot of sense, yeah. I was contemplating more like a third addition to your list: 3) There must be a stable ecology where unlimited taking of resources from the environment can be presumed and factored into future growth (interest) calculations. The capitalist system assumes that the investor is able to leverage the future earnings of a business against present assets, to obtain the investment or loan capital to invest in productive capital. The premium on the time value of money is the interest rate. Therefore, if risk and uncertainty is high (for example, if the risk of extreme weather events, war, and so on is high), and take-able resources are finite and decreasing, the calculations become such that presently existing capital is worth more than the expected value of future returns, thereby undermining the credit-investment-profit loop necessary for capitalism to continue. That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more?
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# ? Sep 11, 2021 14:12 |
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What's the difference between capitalism and older societal structures like ancient Egypt? Aside from things like, the Egyptian elites were not just metaphorically but literally deified.
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# ? Sep 11, 2021 15:23 |
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From a theoretic perspective a distinct feature of capitalism is commodity fetishism. That is the fact that objects are primarily defined by their market value, as opposed to their use value or labour value/production cost. There are some others, too. From an activist perspective, the main distinction of capitalism is that the factory-form allows cooperation between workers on a scale that wasn't possible between serfs or slaves. I have been recommended this old soviet textbook by some goons but still haven't gotten around to reading it. It has a chapter on pre-capitalist production and how they were different: https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/index.htm
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# ? Sep 11, 2021 16:11 |
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DrSunshine posted:That makes a lot of sense, yeah. I was contemplating more like a third addition to your list: emphasis on time structure of investment in productive capital is a very austrian take; if you poke around in those corners you'll find more usually when we speak of a market society however, we don't mean specifically the money market, but markets in general, especially commodity markets - 'in buying food we worry about taste and cost, not marriage alliances or the need not to alienate our grocer lest he not stand with us in the next feud', to quote CR Shalizi's paraphrase of Gellner. The social revolution is in the devaluation of non-market social relations, like reciprocity or allegiances. Polanyi, Gellner, James C. Scott, etc. conversely, production on expected future remuneration itself long predates modernism. Nanni bought shoddy copper from Ea-nasir on credit. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Sep 11, 2021 |
# ? Sep 11, 2021 16:34 |
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DrSunshine posted:That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more? I haven't read it myself but IIRC something similar to this is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. PerniciousKnid posted:What's the difference between capitalism and older societal structures like ancient Egypt? Aside from things like, the Egyptian elites were not just metaphorically but literally deified. One of the biggest differences is that in a feudal system your labor was socially determined. You do what you to because of who you are in relation to the nobility. Born to serf parents? Barring getting into the clergy or marrying above your station, you were going to be a serf. You farmed a plot of land and the local nobility got whatever excess you produced beyond what you needed to keep yourself alive. Under capitalism, though, your labor is determined by the market. After the advent of liberalism you're no longer socially bound to a structure of nobility, you're an independent actor with rights that can enter into contracts with whomever. Unfortunately, if you don't have anything to sell aside from your labor your life isn't going to look much different (in broad strokes) from the serf, but your fate isn't nearly as determined. Capitalism does actually pull a great deal of people up out of the mean conditions of serfdom as it incentivizes new technologies and logistics structures and specific market relationships -- the problem, though, is the wheels fall off when you run out of resources to exploit.
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# ? Sep 11, 2021 17:05 |
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ronya posted:emphasis on time structure of investment in productive capital is a very austrian take; if you poke around in those corners you'll find more ea-nasir!!!!!
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# ? Sep 12, 2021 13:16 |
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V. Illych L. posted:ea-nasir!!!!!
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# ? Sep 12, 2021 14:17 |
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DrSunshine posted:I'm interested in learning about the necessary material preconditions for capitalism's existence. Have any writers identified what environmental states must exist in order for capitalism to exist, or written extensively about the relationship between capitalism and the underlying physical world? digging up this post I made in another thread from a long time ago: gradenko_2000 posted:I just finished "The Origin of Capitalism", by Ellen Meiksins Wood.
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# ? Sep 13, 2021 01:21 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:
That part doesn’t really make sense; is there a part of the argument skipped? Any landlord already has an incentive to raise rents, because more money. There is no equivalent of company shareholders who will force management to accept a hostile takeover because it will end up as more profitable. So what is the actual change supposed to be here?
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# ? Sep 13, 2021 11:28 |
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Ruzihm posted:Even in the early 20th century, Marxists recognized that an individual person will not necessarily fall into exactly one class. The importance is the distinction between class interests - those of labor and those of capital. And an individual person's actions are driven by these interests as they are objectified by the capitalist mode of production. I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind: quote:The essence of the political economy of capital is the exploitation of labour, the maximization of surplus-value for capital. But whereas capital defines wealth in terms of the maximization of surplus labour, for workers "wealth is disposable time and nothing more." The Ten Hours Bill, like more than a century of subsequent working-class struggle internationally, demonstrates that workers strive to limit the time in which they are subject to the dictates of capital, to win time for their own free self-development. For workers, "free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for the free activity which - unlike labour - is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose."23 The "making ... labourers into their own capitalist" line appears fully in "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production," in Capital III, which frames cooperatives as something more advanced than the factory system from which they sprouted, but nevertheless still a transitional form.
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# ? Sep 24, 2021 05:17 |
Aeolius posted:I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind: thanks chum
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# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:49 |
Aeolius posted:I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind: Just happened to run into this video that touches on the topic. I think we covered it well here but I think the video is worth a share anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMdgD1qnbQw
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# ? Nov 9, 2021 04:07 |
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I just thought of the phrase autoerotic exploitation and now I can't stop laughing at the libertarians.
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# ? Dec 22, 2021 18:18 |
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Wrong thread
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# ? Dec 22, 2021 19:12 |
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Does anyone have some good writeups they can link thst might break down the Ukraine situation using Marxist analysis but maybe a bit simpler for newbie dummies like me?
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# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:36 |
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The Wealthy are fighting about who gets to exploit particular persons and materials.
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# ? Feb 24, 2022 16:53 |
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It seems unfair to me that when the wealthy fight amongst each other, it is the commoners who bleed and die. Someone should do something.
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# ? Feb 25, 2022 03:30 |
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Harold Fjord posted:The Wealthy are fighting about who gets to exploit particular persons and materials. which wealthy? putin is a super billionaire but the president of ukraine seems to be "owner of a used car lot" upper middle class. It seems like an invasion, not two equally matched foes being used as pawns under capitalism.
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# ? Feb 25, 2022 13:25 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:which wealthy? putin is a super billionaire but the president of ukraine seems to be "owner of a used car lot" upper middle class. It seems like an invasion, not two equally matched foes being used as pawns under capitalism. I think the "other wealthy" here juxtaposed against Russia is the West
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# ? Feb 25, 2022 14:37 |
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Small time capitalists underpaying their car salesmen are still capitalists. But yes I was generally referring to broader global capitalists vs Russian capitalists and who gets to profit from the extraction of minerals. Either way it's not gonna be the Ukrainians who do the extracting that profit
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# ? Feb 25, 2022 14:58 |
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I wonder what value the sanctions on Russia will have. I assume they will make life even more miserable for the Russian working class, and not have much effect on the richest. The elections are so rigged that there's no way to democratically remove Putin, militaries seem to always veer really far right these days so I assume there's no chance of a military coup, modern military technology is so overwhelming now that a "people's uprising" probably isn't possible anymore, etc.
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# ? Mar 2, 2022 09:56 |
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There's no chance of a military coup motivated by a leftist ideology, but there's a reasonably high chance of a military coup now that their whole economy has been set on fire and thrown in the toilet
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# ? Mar 2, 2022 10:17 |
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02-6611-0142-1 posted:I wonder what value the sanctions on Russia will have. I assume they will make life even more miserable for the Russian working class, and not have much effect on the richest. The elections are so rigged that there's no way to democratically remove Putin, militaries seem to always veer really far right these days so I assume there's no chance of a military coup, modern military technology is so overwhelming now that a "people's uprising" probably isn't possible anymore, etc. “Sanctions have no effect on rich people” always feels like it’s partially rich people propaganda
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# ? Mar 2, 2022 12:24 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:“Sanctions have no effect on rich people” always feels like it’s partially rich people propaganda It's really not. The sanctions that countries are willing to do have no effect on rich people. Under capitalism, the only real crime is loving with rich people. Like I said; if you wanna seize the property of Russian oligarchs, half of London's skyline would be nationalised.
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# ? Mar 2, 2022 14:50 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 02:53 |
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Would that it were so.
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# ? Mar 2, 2022 17:06 |