(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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Yeah seems like they took their hand off the pan when they started feeling a burning sensation.
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Dec 27, 2021 18:28
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 08:47 |
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I mean I think that's just them having to grapple with the limited things they can push against at any one time. Honestly I don't see any communist nation in the future doing anything but progressing on social issues. There's simply no room for homophobia in Marx's work regardless of what his own opinions were.
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Aug 12, 2022 03:49
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I dunno but I bet they're gonna do something bad when it becomes expensive to pay for having so many cops.
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Dec 7, 2022 11:39
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But given Chile wasn't exactly a world power, what does it mean if the central power of the world has to use fascism to stay afloat? I'd imagine this screws the pooch for other regimes, since you can't really fascism well if bigger fascists are then immediately sucking up what you were trying to use to stabilize yourself.
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Dec 7, 2022 22:44
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Tempora Mutantur posted:not if the central power exports the tools and training necessary to rule through fear and brutality Okay, but what about the MIC grift? Are they willing to sacrifice some profit to actually make the ends meet if they don't have enough resources to do that? It seems like actively meddling with Ukraine is already stretching current supply chains, and I suspect going global would cause massive issues. Just expanding current production as is when you have shrinking resources and crumbling infrastructure you refuse to invest in wouldn't seem to work, so surely they have to actually moderate to maintain their grip there right (in terms of keeping their grift somewhere other than the thing that lets them grift with impunity)?
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Dec 8, 2022 18:40
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The empire decays due to a lack of challenges. Civilizations have risen and fallen before. The west won't fall anywhere near the same way, but short of some miracle changing it's course it will fall, regardless of who it puts in front of it to fall onto.
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Mar 29, 2023 04:46
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Cpt_Obvious posted:
I dunno I was thinking more that decay was staved off by fear alone of the Soviet alternative. I'm thinking the lack of alternatives causes a decay similar to what I expect in the quality of a business that becomes a monopoly (which preventing them from becoming doesn't stop because profit, but becoming one vastly accelerates). I wonder if the US would be in better or worse shape of it was still having to worry about the Soviets. Edit: Maybe they'd be worse off because they'd still be feeling the inexorable pull of profit and tear themselves apart sooner due to having more stressors? I could see that. Edit2: I'll admit I have a very narrow perspective having lived in a white household in the Midwest whose main jobs are in government pencil pushing/bean counting thechosenone has issued a correction as of 04:58 on Mar 29, 2023 |
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Mar 29, 2023 04:54
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Oh, well then I take it back. Mb. No problem. Does anyone else not like Beau of the fifth column? Like I'd prefer if my dad didn't listen to him because he sounds really dumb. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 29, 2023 05:30
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Say, I remember the idea that the price of something is set by the cheapest means of production, and I'm wondering how that interacts with deindustrialization. Does that mean that if a nation destroys it's capital to try to keep the concentration of wealth going that they lose out to anyone who doesn't do the same since they can still produce with the workers and machines they didn't fire/destroy? Sounds bad for the US and any other capitalist country if trying to destroy stuff leads to them being unable to compete with China.
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Aug 16, 2023 22:23
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So we got Ukraine/Russia, whatever is going on in Africa (I'll admit I've not been following closely there but I recall several nations had action), Israel/Palestine, and now possibly Venezuela/Guyana. Is there anywhere else that could go off? Besides Taiwan/China (because unless the Taiwanese government does something like officially declare independence I think Xi et al are waiting for things to continue to decay for the US to better achieve diplomatic victory)? Assuming these ultimately either result in the relevant lands either being unavailable for Western exploitation/rendered dramatically less useful for such, what does that mean for North America and Europe?* Asking here instead of the ww3 thread since it feels like I might get a better idea of where to ask/a more Marxist explanation here. If this isn't the place I'll go wherever I should instead. Edit:Seems like even if they can spin post hoc justifications and such from the losses it still results in a real loss of resources that would only further complicate maintaining the remaining neocolonial holdings, and the lack of immediate real panic among the capitalist class due to neocolonialism distancing the idea of losing those holdings and the use of the losses to firm up control at home only lead to them being unable to discipline themselves like the Russian Bourgeoisie have. If they don't shape up, won't losing the excess that covered bread and circuses combine with what is almost certainly a security apparatus just as decrepit as that shown in recent conflicts resulting in them struggling to control what could become in short order rebellious sentiment in the heartlands of the US/EU? Fascist or otherwise. *:That is, the loose collection of individuals and organisations controlling them? thechosenone has issued a correction as of 04:48 on Dec 5, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 04:40
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Actually even China has cops right? So it isn't like the concept of law enforcement is incompatible with Marxism, it's just that they end up being captured by whatever economic system they're in and acting either to just generally protect their current way of doing things, beyond infiltration by the right wing to compromise a socialist state.
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Dec 14, 2023 01:34
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Well sure, but given they aren't exactly having much luck producing more even now while they still have many of those holdings to help multiply the value of local production, I don't see that doing anything but hastening the decline in the rate of profit. Danann posted:It's always been acknowledged even in liberal circles that the behavior of the European (and Imperial Japanese) empires of the 19th and 20th century to hold on to their colonies even in prosecuting actual wars produced poor or even negative benefits when seen from the viewpoint of a Paradox gamer looking to maximize their nation power level score. I always feel like financial capital is just an abstraction of where they get their wealth from (in fact I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is + a casino), and not an actual change in where it originates. Financialization seems to me like it just sort of lets capitalists switch their production holdings on the fly, occasionally getting lower level suckers to bargain theirs away so they individually have a larger slice of the pie. This doesn't let them just magic stuff out of mid air, just let's them borrow each other's strength, but that is still expressed in terms of how much labor is commanded. Because of all the hairbrained schemes/counter-schemes they've come up with to get their slice that themselves cost part of the slice to do so, the amount they receive only decreases. Short of finding a way to discipline itself, capital seems unable to avoid either isolating itself from the growing world and reducing itself to irrelevancy or becoming domesticated by Chinese wealth and essentially doing the equivalent of my grand uncle selling the house he lived in/inherited from his mother to the church in front of it provided he could live there until he died.
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Dec 21, 2023 04:48
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That would indeed be a concern of mine. If China's leadership decides to cash in it will then become a matter of time. If the next leader after Xi Xingping doesn't sell out I'll probably have a good enough chance of not seeing China fall on its rear end though. As for the Asian financial crisis, I'd say that was an attempt to basically use the capital they had in those countries to engulf them and integrate them as parts of the financial capital system. Using it to shatter opponents who enter into the system with financial plays is indeed another emergent effect of the system. having failed to integrate and discipline China however it is now much more difficult if not impossible to use, and the abuse of it resulting in more and more nations being cut off and trading with each other has culminated in the opposite effect in Russia: attempting to yank the chain has simply broken it, and taken much physical capital with it that is now Russian owned, often at much lower cost than it would have been to otherwise appropriate it if it was even for sale otherwise. crepeface posted:they currently print dollar bills out of thin air that they trade for goods. As for the use of printed money to buy things, that is part of the redistribution. It doesn't change that the cost of the product is the cost to reproduce the labor that made it, regardless of when or where it was made. The cost of a widget is the cost to reproduce the labor to make it. 'But what if you simply force people to make it at gunpoint until they die' a person could ask? If you think about it, the fat reserves, muscles, minds ex cetera of the worker also represent capital of a sorts, one which is built/sustained by the cost of the labor to reproduce that, which I believe is what Marx refers to as the means of subsistence. Accounting for this and the labor it takes to reproduce the labor required to force this death march of production shows that they still do not make money from nothing, just from the existing capital in their control (and at an extremely large and rapidly unsustainable premium. Doubt you're gonna get many immigrant laborers if you're just funneling people into death camps). Edit: Given the pie is gonna shrink and people are already at subsistence level and there isn't enough excess labor to meaningfully increase profits for even a quarter even if you death marched all of it (and this would only shrink the pie further not keep it the same or bigger) rich people are gonna either have to thunder dome the weaker of their members or have such done for them as their power collapses after being spread to theoretical maximum and then farther. Ergo I believe there will be rich person thunder dome, with the proportion of rich people to poor people decreasing. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 01:54 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 01:34
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Ardennes posted:
What they said. Sorry I'm kinda wracked a bit by waking up to remembering my mother and father will die one day. Goddamn that loving sucks. Probably some people who wish their old man and lady would try to demand to see the manager of a wolverine though am I right!? *Nervously texting as my bowtie violently spins and drags me off the stage* Goddamn I loving hate capitalism. Makes the time I have left with loved ones all that much worse. And goddamn do I love Marxism and Marxists, warts and all. At least everyone here knows the frustration that there's a better way, and I hope we all get to benefit from this sooner rather than later.
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Dec 23, 2023 12:40
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Okay but if it isn't consequence free then it isn't cost free (and like hell did anyone but the working class take that hit, and I'd say pushing it onto the workers of other nations just kicks the can down the road before it hits us in the shin, probably harder than earlier). If like 99 percent of the printed cash just goes into the dragon hordes of the rich and they use it to just make it easier to ignore the working man then there are many who may not benefit at all. As it is I'm sure it helped some but ultimately whatever gains we got were taken back or otherwise squandered. We don't have a hypothetical non capitalist America to compare to, though now that I use the word 'non capitalist ' I'm absolutely certain we'd have been better off that way. Edit2: Not that this was an option but even less powerful capital would have been an improvement. Edit: come to think i'd take less powerful capitalists and less alienation than whatever scraps finance capital threw at my parents/grandparents to betray the international workers. We clearly adapt to the bread and circuses we have, so even if I'd been born poorer I may have been happier for it. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 15:09 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 15:02
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I'd still rather live in a stinky rear end America that was never able to do finance capital and/or never got to live off the suffering of other nations workers even if it meant I was dirt poor. The more money capitalists have the more they can turn the thumbscrews. To me that means it'd have been a drat better value than the hogfeed we get now. Don't care about whatever my definitions sound like, because the poo poo I ain't good at saying from my head, whether it's just misspoken or mis thought still makes more sense than the words of a non Marxist economist.
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Dec 23, 2023 16:06
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BillsPhoenix posted:It's me. I'm rejecting it, but I'm trying, and failing to do it on empirical arguments, not ideologies. My understanding was when scientists would test a hypothesis against the null (that the hypothesis wasn't true) and failed to find any evidence for the null hypothesis, that they usually considered whatever the hypothesis to be supported by the experiment. Perhaps if you are failing to see any empirical evidence against the Tendency For The Rate of Profit to Fall, you should consider more seriously if perhaps your self admitted ideologically based belief that it is false is itself, untrue? Edit: As it is, it's not something that is dependent on people believing in it. Far as I can tell it makes sense that in an entropic system, you can only have so much energy, and since the practicalities and efficiency of space travel seem to preclude expanding into space, the long-term rate of profit is never going to go above a certain amount, and with the depletion of fossil fuels, new lands to exploit, and with new technology requiring ever more labor to research or develop it, profit can only go down in comparison to before all of that. I suppose until the sun expands and destroys the earth that if you really burned poo poo down as much as possible (like with nuclear war) you could seesaw somewhere between absolute zero and the profit brought back in from going between the lowest point and the upper level of maximum exploitation of solar radiance, but a capitalist version of that would be much lower profit per person than a communism based one, and we are a while hell of a lot farther from that even compared to where we are now, not even getting into whatever other resources we can concentrate/expend that would further reduce profitability of various resources extraction industries. Capital could easily wear itself down so much that unless it's nuked every communist government to complete annihilation that even Cuba could run roughshod over a fully depleted USA in around 200 or so years. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 02:45 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 02:36
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When you think about it (and I edited in a buncha navel gazing in my above post) there's a lot of similarities between the Tendency and entropic physics if you squint. Which means one could draw comparisons to capitalist ideologies that reject it to people who think perpetual motion machines exist lol.
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Feb 8, 2024 02:47
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Yeah if nothing else since it's mostly based on our actions it's much closer to being malleable than the Tendency. Like if everyone worked together we could probably solve it (or hell if everyone who doesn't just eats poo poo due to having extremely short sighted administration such that they become a drop in the bucket compared to the efforts of those who do it'd probably still work then), but even if humanity suddenly became a eusocial organism it'd only delay the inevitable lowering of profit, and would in fact just make the Tendency probably more evident by virtue of the measurements of the system becoming much less erratic due to less motivated reasoning/noise from inefficient behavior.
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Feb 8, 2024 02:52
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BillsPhoenix posted:I currently believe capitalism is essentially inevitable. There's a lot of serious flaws to capitalism, causing an environmental Armageddon is one of them. The Tendency doesn't require capitalism or Communism or anything to prevail, and it doesn't really care about short term increases because it's a tendency. Mines run out, and even if you go to another one the next will run out eventually too. Tools wear out, and you either replace them or lose the efficiency of them and your profit lowers. The value of the mines product also trends downwards as you either have bunches of pre refined material around, or as population and efficiency peaks, and the consequences of the mining and any other economic process proceed (and trying to make someone pay for those instead just means you pull from the pocket of those who are to pay you for the mined product one way or another). The very best you could hope for even in a spherical cow situation of perfect exploitation by a eusocial organism consistimg of all human life working with the singular goal of maintaining the rate of profit would be stagnation slowly trending down towards some oscillating function with solar radiance until said radiance began to inhibit work as the sun reaches the end of its lifespan. Considering that would be a dramatically more efficient state than even communism itself and it could not maintain profit, I don't see how the West is going to maintain profit while tearing it's high efficiency physical industry apart and intentionally lowering the number of beneficiaries for this as close to 1 as possible, while also slowly being kicked out of nations as it shutters it's ability to repel any sort of armed resistance against this and loses more places to extract resources.
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Feb 8, 2024 03:06
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FirstnameLastname posted:*on trampoline* look like gravity a lie
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Feb 8, 2024 03:11
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Monosodium Glutamate is also quite nice. Only difference is no chlorine! Edit: Also all of those interventions have their own cost, which further takes from them, as does the presence of old Washing machine parts allowing extended use of old Washing machines, people sharing washers, or even just doing it by hand if prices are too high. The more detail you add the more powerful the Tendency, but even in the most simplistic situation it still comes through (and is if anything more apparent as said). thechosenone has issued a correction as of 03:26 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 03:23
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That tends to happen when you start from the assumption of profit being able to increase without bound, which is incoherent. Salt, and indeed everything in a finite system has an ultimate maximum for how much can be sold, and since each unit has a fixed cost to it (labor), and the development of methods to improve efficiency by lowering costs that aren't fixed also have fixed cost (labor), there is a point where any amount produced over that would ultimately actually reduce profit, and there's no getting around it. Eventually you have enough salt, and making more won't make you more money, but will cost you money. Edit: Epic High Five posted:I'd argue that a civilization or economic mode that cannot supply its people with salt is tough to study because it would immediately collapse. That too. Any society that can't get people salt is not much of a society. Trying to keep people from salt (for the purpose of profit for example) is one of many things that would absolutely bust any nation today, tomorrow or in the past almost immediately. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 03:48 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 03:46
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Maybe they're an English speaking ex-pat living in China and a coconut dropped on their head? 'I see absolutely no sign of capitalism falling apart. Why, look at this amazing company called the 'CPC', which seems to be only expanding it's holdings and buying out competing businesses. It's practically a nation all it's own! '
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Feb 8, 2024 23:12
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v61dgvN81n0& Talk about CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), which may help induce de-dollarization and stymie cryptocurrencies. Thought: Global financial capital relies on hegemonic control of finance to maintain itself. Won't that mean de-dollarization would be a threat to that? If capital is pushed back along national lines, but socialist government's like China aren't, doesn't this look bad for capital in general? Seems like since World War 1 and probably earlier if you look capital has kept getting bailed out by big event after big event, whether it be technological revolutions, world spanning wars, or pulling the ripcord of neoliberalism. Without a new technology, with the ability to prosecute war all but sold off completely, what exactly is big enough to borrow time for capital now? If anything, it seems like we're fit for a spatter of facshist temper tantrums, that just bring their nation from being able to control immediate neighbors to not being able to even control their own populace, and then fall apart since they won't have a powerful backer somewhere far away to put their thumb on the scales with infinite money.
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Feb 21, 2024 11:21
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crepeface posted:i posted that in the de-dollarization thread along with a bloomberg article: That would be a very devious plan for them to enact. Shame it seems they are unwilling to actually redevelop their industry or military or economy in general to gear up to do so in any meaningful way. Like yes I suppose if everyone hands them the key there they are, but given the general movement seems to be of them losing power in one nation after another in terms of hard power and also soft power as dedollarization proceeds, and the fact that even if they invest in something it's never going to be the same as when they were actually holding the purse strings, I don't think their efforts can do much unless they intend to offramp by just letting BRICS associated countries redevelop the west in an ironic inverse of colonialism. EDIT: Also yeah I am almost certain I got it from you then if I didn't see it in someone's repost.
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Feb 21, 2024 11:58
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Then I can only hope they are cut off from as much of it as possible. Honestly at this point if it would stop them from being able to ignore as much I can't see it doing anything but helping, because at this point it seems like they're creating hell on earth with infinite money, so anything that stymies that means they at least have to put effort into it (a thing they seem notoriously unable to do). EDIT: As it is, if US institutions resist it but it successfully spreads it will actually hasten the dedollarization, as they will end up cutting themselves off from large amounts of investment opportunities if they refuse to do business with them.
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Feb 21, 2024 18:18
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mila kunis posted:Ya I think this is crucial. If it wasn't for IP and trade secrets and anyone could just copy ASML's poo poo and hire a bunch of their designers to replicate what they do, they wouldn't be nearly as profitable as they are. IP based rentierism, consolidation and cartelism, are crucial to maintaining profitability - in the presence of true competition, prices would trend downwards towards the cost of production and each individual player would ultimately be ruined. I dunno seems like they can manage to go down even with that, it just blocks a simpler way for it to happen. Actually a lot of Marxist thought seems physic-y to me. Like if you had labor replaced with energy/work or something I don't think it'd be that hard to make sense of it. Machines and all are just more efficient than some ways of doing things (but not necessarily, similarly to how only certain structures do something well, and others don't even if they take a lot of energy to form). Like how bikes can let people travel farther. I dunno I think I am pretty naive because everything kinda looks reducible to labor to me. Not like easily but it isn't like a spreadsheet does anything if there isn't labor attached to it (and the spreadsheet even needs someone to update it, to make the program and environment it runs in, the hardware that operates on, the power the hardware needs to run, etc into a big drat web of labor and crystalized labor).
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Mar 13, 2024 02:13
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 08:47 |
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SKULL.GIF posted:I feel like you're responding to a lot of stuff that might be tangentially related to what I posted but isn't actually in my post. I didn't mention Africa, or "making them stop" or Ukraine or anything. I'm happy to respond to you but I'm not going to just wildly shoot sentences out there if I don't know what I'm actually responding to. Skull.gif in the DoomEcon thread made me think of the comparative wealth inequality of France vs now. Given how much money has to go into an American worker, how would we manage that level of inequality? Is it even possible in the west without basically having to return to similar levels of tech or basically turning into a pure extraction economy that just buys everything from places like China to sidestep the lack of willingness to invest in the production of the tools themselves?
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Mar 21, 2024 04:59
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