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Nintendo Kid posted:That's a pretty significant material gain buddy. I'm sorry if you're so bourgeois that you don't view that as real profit. Well, Capitalist businesses can survive for years without actually earning profit from their supposed business model by suckering investors into giving them shitloads of money. Well done, you win a point on a technicality? This isn't actually a useful conversation. Then again when you go full pedantic fishmechin' mode it never is. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 05:36
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HorseLord posted:Well, Capitalist businesses can survive for years unprofitably by suckering investors into giving them shitloads of money. Well done, you win a point on a technicality? Chrysler has survived for nearly a century doing shoddy work and getting regular bailouts. This is basically a core feature of Actually Existing Capitalism, you only need to do a "good" job if you're tiny. I'm glad you've admitted your silly idea that there was no way to profit off de facto owned capital in the soviet union was full of poo poo all along though!
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Feb 12, 2015 05:49
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Nintendo Kid posted:Chrysler has survived for nearly a century doing shoddy work and getting regular bailouts. This is basically a core feature of Actually Existing Capitalism, you only need to do a "good" job if you're tiny. They're still making shitloads of profit though, in actual money form. The work they do to gain the profit is to go ask for a bailout, because after all, you get the Most incredible profit ratio on getting paid for doing nothing. What, you think "profitability" in capitalist terms is anything other than a measure of how much money you can pump from somewhere else to yourself? Nintendo Kid posted:I'm glad you've admitted your silly idea that there was no way to profit off de facto owned capital in the soviet union was full of poo poo all along though! I didn't have that idea nor did I say I did. What I'm saying is the profit is different to capitalist profit because it's not money. If you'll turn back and look, you'll understand I posted in response to the idea that there was any profit a worker could realistically skim in a soviet factory. You can't break into your manager's safe and steal his friendships. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 06:27
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HorseLord posted:They're still making shitloads of profit though, in actual money form. The work they do to gain the profit is to go ask for a bailout, because after all, you get the Most incredible profit ratio on getting paid for doing nothing. No, quite often they make less than nothing in "actual profit". That's why they keep going bankrupt. They're often not even abel to acheive that. Profit being in a different form is utterly irrelevant, this is a basic Marxist principle. A worker could not skim profit from a Soviet factory the same way they can't really skim from an American factory. Good luck breaking into the middle manager's bank account in town, or the CEO's bank account in Switzerland, guy working the paper mill line!
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Feb 12, 2015 06:38
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For some reason you both seem to be talking as if the Soviet Union abolished money. However, it also didn't implement the Marxist program for the dictatorship of the proletariat, whereby profit is distributed according to a labour theory of value in proportion to the labour of the workers.Ardennes posted:I think I am being pretty clear here, how much is Marx responsible for the failures of the Soviet Union? Considering that, how does that "responsibility" impact his critique of capitalism? No, you were unclear both times, but this is clear. Firstly, there's obviously more than one way to be responsible just like there's more than one form of causation. To deal with the last question first, that of Bolsheviks taking grain from individual peasants, it is very difficult to try to blame that on Marx (although that's not necessarily to say that Marx would have had great love for Kulaks. Still, he quite palpably would not have supported their mass-murder). I've touched on your main question a few times in this thread. One thing would be to look at the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marx's attitudes to gradualism and democracy vs violence. To the extent that you regard violent revolutions as a problem Marx is already in hot water. I am not as troubled by this particular criticism as most people. Second, you could look at the kind of semi-teleological aspect of Marxism, re: colonialism for example. Marx has attracted a lot of enemies in the post-colonialist world for his writings on things like British India (though also some friends, particularly since many cannot do away with materialism). Marx, naturally, was opposed to imperialism in terms that prefigure the Leninist attack on imperialism as a stage of capitalism. But there is also the argument in Marx that imperialism is the thing that will create the idea of an independent and separate modern nation of India, replete with the technology and infrastructure that will allow it to begin the process of becoming a modern state. There is always that (semi-Hegelian) theme in Marx - that the poo poo situation you are in may well be one you have to go through to get to a better form of social relations on the other side. In fact, you wouldn't have even thought of that new form of social relations without being in one antithetical to it. It's not hard to see how you go from this to a Marxist-Leninist attitude that tries to deal with the problem in Marx that you aren't supposed to go from an agrarian peasant society to communism without bourgeois society inbetween (he also predicts that this won't happen, which is an empirical failure of Marxist scientism). Leninism obviously tries to address this problem with the idea of the vanguard party and industrialisation policies. Marx's own best friend here is, ironically, his own inflexibility. Marx was tremendously inflexible with his fellow leftists. It's unlikely that he would have approved of the Leninist ideology at all, or have predicted good things for the Bolshevik revolution. But I think the best thing you can do for Marx is to treat him like an ordinary human being, who made mistakes and was not always perfectly coherent or correct and who left ambiguities in his work, and gave very little assistance to people who wanted to try to convert his ideas into a form of practice. I also think the best way to defend or re-assert Marx is to accept these weaknesses or controversies, instead of trying to assert a very doctrinal version of Marx or deny Marx has anything at all to do with Leninism et al. This is a very big topic, and I could go on, but I probably should do some work today at the office.
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Feb 12, 2015 12:27
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I think people like HorseLord should remember or be made aware that the guy who coined "creative destruction", Joseph Schumpeter, also believed that the rise of professional managers and the decline of entrepreneurs was killing it and this would result in the destruction of capitalism. Of course, it's since been made mainstream, but pretty much everyone would agree that creative destruction as a phenomenon is rare, though mainstream types would argue that it's due to market regulations etc. more than Schumpeter's arguments or Marxian ones.
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Feb 12, 2015 14:50
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Nintendo Kid posted:No, quite often they make less than nothing in "actual profit". That's why they keep going bankrupt. The people running these companies are taking home huge salaries. Given the only purpose of a business enterprise is to pump money from literally anywhere it can, to the personal bank accounts of the company's designated Important People, I'd say it's working quite well. lol if you think it's anything more than "gently caress bitches get money". There's people who's entire role in business is to make money by deliberately cratering companies.
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Feb 12, 2015 17:56
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Effectronica posted:I think people like HorseLord should remember or be made aware that the guy who coined "creative destruction", Joseph Schumpeter, also believed that the rise of professional managers and the decline of entrepreneurs was killing it and this would result in the destruction of capitalism. Of course, it's since been made mainstream, but pretty much everyone would agree that creative destruction as a phenomenon is rare, though mainstream types would argue that it's due to market regulations etc. more than Schumpeter's arguments or Marxian ones. Creative destruction isn't rare. What sense are you talking about?
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Feb 12, 2015 18:34
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Disinterested posted:Firstly, there's obviously more than one way to be responsible just like there's more than one form of causation. To deal with the last question first, that of Bolsheviks taking grain from individual peasants, it is very difficult to try to blame that on Marx (although that's not necessarily to say that Marx would have had great love for Kulaks. Still, he quite palpably would not have supported their mass-murder). I don't necessarily actually disagree here, and in that sense, I think Marx should be treated like any other philosopher or economist of the 19th century who had tremendous influence on the modern world. His proclaimed followers may like to paste his name on what they are doing a lot more than others but in that sense I don't think he has personal responsibility for whatever happened after his death. This is why when you get to examples such as the Soviet Union, a discussion of what is "communism" and "Marxism" needs to happen before you talk about Lenin or Stalin ie what they were originally compared to what Lenin and Stalin called them. In all likelihood, Marx would have thought Stalin was a bizarre madmen trying to make an agrarian state into an industrial one by chewing through human lives and that the Soviet Union was no where even closer to ready those type of changes. Of course you have to say Lenin was influenced by Marx, but at the same time, I think Marx himself would have thought Lenin had twisted most of his ideas out of recognition and the project of the Soviet Union was doomed was the start. Then there is the other point though that the decisions of the Bolsheviks/Soviets were often heavily circumstantial, and our discussion of the Soviet Union itself needs to be heavily grounded in history and fact as much as possible. Causal discussions of the Nazis if anything are usually less of an issue because at least there is a consensus on many if most of the main events of their period in power, this doesn't seem even near the case about the Soviets. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 19:56
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Ardennes posted:Discussions of the Nazis if anything are usually less of an issue because at least there is a consensus on many if most of the main points, this doesn't seem even near the case about the Soviets. Well, this is the other great famous paradox of totalitarianism. As Zizek says, Nazis say they want to do bad things, and do bad things. It is a less mystifying concept for that reason. Communists say they want to achieve human emancipation and have nonetheless achieved the deepest level of jacobinism under Stalin. That is a moral failure that is still being heavily mined.
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Feb 12, 2015 20:01
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Disinterested posted:For some reason you both seem to be talking as if the Soviet Union abolished money. However, it also didn't implement the Marxist program for the dictatorship of the proletariat, whereby profit is distributed according to a labour theory of value in proportion to the labour of the workers. I'm not, he is because he's apparently not aware of how the actual country functioned. To be clear, I'm making the point that you can retain the ability to extract excess profit from merely de facto owned capital in the Soviet union. HorseLord posted:The people running these companies are taking home huge salaries. Given the only purpose of a business enterprise is to pump money from literally anywhere it can, to the personal bank accounts of the company's designated Important People, I'd say it's working quite well. Actually plenty of the people "running" them take modest salaries. You're a loon.
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Feb 12, 2015 20:38
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asdf32 posted:Creative destruction isn't rare. What sense are you talking about? The sense Schumpeter uses wherein capitalism continually revolutionizes its means of production, its markets, its ways of doing business by entrepreneurial innovation. The portion of the economy where this happens has steadily shrunk over the course of the twentieth and continued to do so into these first two decades of the twenty-first.
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Feb 12, 2015 20:52
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Disinterested posted:Well, this is the other great famous paradox of totalitarianism. As Zizek says, Nazis say they want to do bad things, and do bad things. It is a less mystifying concept for that reason. Communists say they want to achieve human emancipation and have nonetheless achieved the deepest level of jacobinism under Stalin. That is a moral failure that is still being heavily mined. There also simply that there isn't much of a consensus of what exactly happened under the Soviets or Stalin to the same extent as the Nazis, some of this is that the archives have only been open so long. How many people did Stalin kill? Was it 2 million, 20 million, 100 million? In comparison, we cite numbers about the amount of each group that died in Nazi death camps. In addition, in comparison what counted as murders? People who died in the GULAG system we have records for? People we know were executed? Everyone that died in the 1931 famine? It is still very much wide open in the field. But you have made another issue apparent, how much is Stalin the culmination of "Communism" or "Marxism?" Those deaths are moral failures on his part and his regime, but there is an another entire debate about how wide of a brush you can paint on entire political philosophies with those crimes, and that width seems to vary quite wildly based on political motivations. Does Stalin crimes show the ultimate failure of all forms of Marxist-Leninism, all forms of Marxism, all forms of socialism and all forms of leftism? Where is the line where you can draw "this way of thinking was responsible for Stalin?" Ardennes fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 21:22
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Nintendo Kid posted:I'm not, he is because he's apparently not aware of how the actual country functioned. Where is all this nonsense about me thinking they abolished money coming from? That's a rather different thing than just being aware of the fact it was a goddamned planned economy where literally nobody cared if any business had a working cash flow or not, never mind actually making a financial profit. Nintendo Kid posted:Actually plenty of the people "running" them take modest salaries. You're a loon. Modest salaries like 14 million dollars? http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/10/gm-ceo-barra-akerson-pay-compensation/5374869/ Feel free to launch into the most pedantic of all rules-lawyered derails ever about the definition of "running". I won't be bothering to entertain you again. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 22:10
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HorseLord posted:Where is all this nonsense about me thinking they abolished money coming from? The planning of the economy in practice had little to do with actual conditions on the ground. Hmm yes we sure pay factory foremen 14 million dollars in this country.
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Feb 12, 2015 22:14
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Effectronica posted:The sense Schumpeter uses wherein capitalism continually revolutionizes its means of production, its markets, its ways of doing business by entrepreneurial innovation. The portion of the economy where this happens has steadily shrunk over the course of the twentieth and continued to do so into these first two decades of the twenty-first. Where has this shrunk.
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Feb 12, 2015 22:32
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Do y'all think that the positive associations a good portion of the post-Soviet bloc population have with the Stalin era contain the implication of renewed sympathy with Communism as historical project? "[J. Arch Getty] told a story of being in the Soviet Union as a young scholar and talking with a taxi driver. When he got into the drivers car, hanging from his windshield was a little icon of Stalin. When Getty asked, "how can you have an icon of a mass murderer on your mirror," the driver pulled over and said, "my grandfather was born without shoes, my father couldn't read, and I am an educated engineer that drives a taxi on the side for extra money, Stalin and socialism gave me that."
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Feb 12, 2015 23:31
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http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/poll-finds-stalins-popularity-high/476342.html This is an awful and condescending article on the study that the Carnegie endowment conducted so if you want to skip straight to the meat http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/03/01/stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion/fmz8
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Feb 12, 2015 23:42
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TheIneff posted:http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/poll-finds-stalins-popularity-high/476342.html I think the second link is more awful. With the tone it takes basically being "oh no, these stupid ivans think something I don't, how terrible" it throws all objectivity out of the window.
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Feb 13, 2015 00:09
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TheIneff posted:This is an awful and condescending article on the study that the Carnegie endowment conducted so if you want to skip straight to the meat quote:Analyzing the Results Incredible. Funny how they're never "confused" when we need them to recount how their grandfather was arrested in the night. But the pensioners in Georgia forced to choose between heat and food, or the poor people in Armenia still living in rusted tin domiks from the earthquake of '88, they just don't know how good they have it now. On a lighter note: http://sputniknews.com/art_living/20141225/1016237641.html Aeolius fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 00:17
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Aeolius posted:On a lighter note: This kid is great.
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Feb 13, 2015 01:20
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Aeolius posted:Incredible. Funny how they're never "confused" when we need them to recount how their grandfather was arrested in the night. But the pensioners in Georgia forced to choose between heat and food, or the poor people in Armenia still living in rusted tin domiks from the earthquake of '88, they just don't know how good they have it now. I think if anything it speaks to a lack of acknowledgement of exactly what the breakup of the Soviet Union meant to its losers and now the answer seems to be that their culture is "defective" or they are just "confused." The study does talk a bit about Yeltsin and the rise of Putin, but very briefly and seems to want to avoid an discussion over economics in favor of state policy. quote:The difficulties Russia encounters in defeating the myth of Stalin do not stem from a lack of knowledge about Stalin’s crimes, but rather from the fact that people do not regard the Soviet system as having been criminal. The Russian people do not see any alternative to Putin’s authoritarian model because they simply do not know how the state could be ordered any differently. Russian society today lacks figures of recognized moral and intellectual authority who are capable of making this diagnosis. I think this is anything sort of shows a lack of consideration of Russians in general. Even if there is truth that Putin has manipulated the public, simply depriving them all of agency as basically unthinking robots that don't know better is more or less attacking their existence as actual humans. If anything I think is way too easy a strategy of narrative building to simply say "oh they just don't know better and can't know better unless we tell them." You can still think Stalin was murderous and also that Russians opinion is more complicated more recent history than their seeming nature as automatons. Basically, it is passing the buck for the 20th century.
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Feb 13, 2015 02:16
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zen death robot posted:The answer is yes, Marxism is dead It isn't as long as capitalism lives.
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Feb 13, 2015 03:36
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asdf32 posted:Where has this shrunk. How many car companies have been founded in the last decade? How many retailers? How many fast-food chains? Hell, how many online companies that aren't social media? How many of them are genuinely new and entrepreneurial?
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Feb 13, 2015 03:57
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Effectronica posted:How many car companies have been founded in the last decade? How many retailers? How many fast-food chains? Hell, how many online companies that aren't social media? How many of them are genuinely new and entrepreneurial? Well according to Mitt Romney, creative destruction is just hollowing out business after business.
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Feb 13, 2015 04:23
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Effectronica posted:How many car companies have been founded in the last decade? How many retailers? How many fast-food chains? Hell, how many online companies that aren't social media? How many of them are genuinely new and entrepreneurial? Tesla was founded in 2003. Fast food chains probably lots. Retailers probably lots. Online companies lots. How many are genuinely new and entrepreneurial? That's pretty subjective but probably tons by any reasonable definition. The more you dig into the questions you asked the more you're going to find that lots of things have been happening that you weren't aware of.
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Feb 13, 2015 04:44
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Effectronica posted:How many car companies have been founded in the last decade? How many retailers? How many fast-food chains? Hell, how many online companies that aren't social media? How many of them are genuinely new and entrepreneurial? Statistically its declined but currently roughly 8% of firms fail and 8% of firms are less than a year old. That's not small by any means. That not the only measure though. Consider how many products disappear front the shelf and are replaced by new things. How many things have the internet and smartphones affected. SedanChair posted:Well according to Mitt Romney, creative destruction is just hollowing out business after business. Please don't unironically repeat campaign propaganda.
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Feb 13, 2015 04:54
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wateroverfire posted:Tesla was founded in 2003. Fast food chains probably lots. Retailers probably lots. Online companies lots. How many are genuinely new and entrepreneurial? That's pretty subjective but probably tons by any reasonable definition. Okay, so zero car companies, and nothing else that you can name. This is a pretty good example of how entrepreneurship is important in American business today, that nobody can even remember the names of these brave new companies. That's before we get into the "destruction" part, and have to ask whether Tesla really counts for Schumpeter's definition, since they have not revolutionized the automotive industry, nor are they likely to. Hell, in terms of numbers, and cutting ourselves off at 2007, new business startups (a larger number than entrepreneurial startups) dropped from 17% of total firms to 10% in 30 years. Clearly, creative destruction is as vital a force as ever.
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Feb 13, 2015 04:55
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asdf32 posted:Statistically its declined but currently roughly 8% of firms fail and 8% of firms are less than a year old. That's not small by any means. How many of these are economically active? How many of these are businesses that are intended to expand, as opposed to local developments like restaurants or mom-and-pop stores? How many of these are companies that operate franchised businesses? Those are not Schumpeterian creative destruction. A managerial firm developing new products does not count under his definition, because it's dependent on enterpreneurial innovation displacing the old, revolution instead of reform.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:00
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Effectronica posted:How many of these are economically active? How many of these are businesses that are intended to expand, as opposed to local developments like restaurants or mom-and-pop stores? How many of these are companies that operate franchised businesses? Lots of old things continue to be replaced by new things in 2015. That's creative destruction. Like a lot of individual historical figures I have no particular reason to care about this guy's definitions and I think your distinctions are meaningless. The Chinese resaurant which serves breadtolls on paper Chinese calendar placemat getting replaced by "Asian Fusion" is creative destruction regardless of whether it's a franchise or whether you think it's going to expand.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:29
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asdf32 posted:Please don't unironically repeat campaign propaganda. It's in his own goddamn book.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:33
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asdf32 posted:Lots of old things continue to be replaced by new things in 2015. That's creative destruction. Okay, so in other words, I was overly optimistic when I said that the idea had been mainstreamed. Instead, the name was pilfered and the ideas left to rot. Ho ho ho. By the way, I have now redefined "Fordism" to refer to a system of management where the manager regularly physically assaults the employees. EDIT: I don't know how you have the balls to insist that capitalism is the only system in which things change, but maybe you're just really, really loving stupid?
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Feb 13, 2015 05:33
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Effectronica posted:Okay, so in other words, I was overly optimistic when I said that the idea had been mainstreamed. Instead, the name was pilfered and the ideas left to rot. Ho ho ho. I asked what you meant. You answered. I replied. Capitalism has been better at it. Particularly in the consumer sector.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:44
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asdf32 posted:I asked what you meant. You answered. I replied. Your replies are loving stupid. They're built on prideful ignorance. It's frankly absurd that someone like you can exist and post the way you do without falling dead from extreme irony overdoses.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:46
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Read his post history in this thread. It's magical.
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Feb 13, 2015 07:02
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Basically the only reason I post here in full everybody-gets-gulag mode is because of people like asdf32. I could give my views in a more nuanced and reasonable way but when there's people like him lowering the tone of the discussion I might as well just enjoy myself instead.
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Feb 13, 2015 07:37
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zen death robot posted:So you're an idiot because someone else is. That's, well, interesting. First we must be worthy of his message.
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Feb 13, 2015 10:10
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Effectronica posted:Your replies are loving stupid. They're built on prideful ignorance. It's frankly absurd that someone like you can exist and post the way you do without falling dead from extreme irony overdoses. With the main points of ignorance being what? HorseLord posted:Basically the only reason I post here in full everybody-gets-gulag mode is because of people like asdf32. I could give my views in a more nuanced and reasonable way but when there's people like him lowering the tone of the discussion I might as well just enjoy myself instead. Pretty uppity of me really, to post in D&D sub forum and not be nice to the Marxists. Confusion and "Gulags!" must be the entirety of my opposition. The psychology of tone arguments is sort of a fascinating. Have you actually read my posts? I'm pretty reasonable on the tone scale of D&D posters. I suggest the perception otherwise is not actually due to tone.
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Feb 13, 2015 16:29
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You can lower the tone of a discussion without necessarily having an aggressive tone.
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Feb 13, 2015 16:35
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asdf32 posted:With the main points of ignorance being what? You said it yourself and I'm not going to sully my lips with your words, asdf32.
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Feb 13, 2015 17:09
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