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who the hell put a centrist tag i’m nowhere near the bloody centre
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Alt account confirmed.
I never said I could debunk any and all radical ideas, I said bad ideas. Although it’s extremely telling that you equate Marx with bad ideas. I even specifically asked for the best reasons for white nationalism to prove my point that they can’t gain traction as long as we have free speech. Your lying tactics, such as this, is the reason why I’m no longer debating you.
No, but we regularly talk to each other via Skype.
That would be a correct remark if you hadn’t previously bragged about being able to debunk any and all radical ideas, no matter what. If you make a bold claim like that, the burden of proof is on you to show that you can actually do that.
Back then, I had essentially only picked Marx as an example. It is true that I want to get people interested in Marx’ theories, and that’s why I picked this specific example, but that doesn’t even matter, because it just served as an example in this case. And incidentally, Marx doesn’t just spell out an “idea” (or rather a criticism) in the Kapital, he also already provides arguments, believe it or not. The challenge of course involved disproving the arguments that Marx makes in his book.
Edited
Are you Aristagtle’s alt account?
I never made any claim to winning the argument. It was Aristagtle who tried to claim the moral high ground. I just ended the discussion. And I stopped discussing anything with him because he was just nitpicking, taking things out of context and telling me to “do research myself,” as you put it. My claim has been that bad ideas, like white nationalism, can easily be debunked because they are bad ideas. Therefore, I’ve been asking for the best of those bad ideas to show that they aren’t that good.
But when someone tells me to read three 800 page books and prove it all wrong, I tend to think something’s up. Especially when he comes out and says there aren’t any bad ideas to refute in them.
If you have a good idea that you want to put forth, the burden of proof is on you to prove it’s good, which is one of the reasons why bad ideas fail. You don’t get to say, “my idea is good and you have to read three 800 page books to prove me wrong.” It is quite literally the other way around, which is why I was so sure that any bad idea put forth could easily be destroyed, they don’t stand up on their own.
Not an argument. I didn’t leave this link here in order to convince anyone, but in order to provide further information for those who are interested. I have spelled out my arguments myself, which you don’t even bother to address, assumingly because you can’t. I have stopped this discussion for the time being because it’s off-topic. If you want to restart it, I’m fine with that, but then I want to see ad rem arguments from your side and not just a cheap ad hominem attempt at badmouthing me.
Edited
You should be aware that you’re winning. Since he cannot defend his ideas and ideology, he is being forced to send you to others to defend it. Do not fall into this trap. He will have you debating against hundreds of man-hours of other people’s work created over months of time instead of his own.
I’ve had the same tactic used against me by Christian Creationists. They will send me an article or two proving their position that is little more than apologetics, then I’d spend an hour doing the research to show them why their articles are wrong only to have them send me more articles or videos. They spend no time defending their position and you waste hours of your time because they don’t even listen to you or learn anything. And they always have another video to send you.
Only debate on information presented here, if they have a quote or raw data that they are using, have them produce it to back them up. But don’t let them send you on wild goose chases to defend other people’s analysis of that data.
After all, the Grand Canyon is only 6000 years old, right?
For our discussion about work under capitalism vs. work under socialism, his video “workplace: capitalist vs. socialist” is arguably particularly relevant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4tIhHHvzNA
He also has a few videos on the Labor Theory of Value.
With that, I’m going to stop discussing that topic at least for now, so we can return to the Antifa topic.
Edited
Ah yeah… about that.
http://reverepress.com/resistance/debunking-3-biggest-myths-antifa/
Yeah. What’s your point? How does any of this contradict the fact of exploitation?
If by “it”, you mean the factory itself, then possibly, yes. If you mean the product, that’s not what I said. I was refuting your apple tree comparison, not describing socialism.
What? Okay, let’s talk about consumer goods under socialism. Either a specific product can already be produced in abundance (which is the case for most consumer goods today, at least in the first world), then under socialism we’ll shift from a profit-based to a democratically organized need-based production anyway and this question doesn’t even arise. Or it can’t be produced in abundance yet, then people who want to have it have three options. They either need to produce it themselves (and keep in mind that they will have access to the socialized means of production), or they need to articulate their demand in a council and make it plausible why they need it, or third, there will at first probably also be some kind of labor voucher system - which is technically still something like a market, but different in a few aspects from capitalist markets (e.g. labor vouchers don’t circulate), and also meant to be temporary anyway (until the productive forces have developed enough to produce said good in abundance).
There is no pre-defined line. Since the means of production are socialized and democratically organized, you can articulate your wants in council and then see if the resources and labor power for them are available, and if people are willing to work for it. Or you can produce it yourself. Or you can directly exchange labor time for labor time, for example via labor vouchers - but the latter even only applies as long as there isn’t an abundance of the good in question already.
The needs as they are defined by the logic of capitalism. Welfare usually covers the “needs” of reproducing your labor power in the time where you don’t work, i.e. the absolute basics.
What other possible origin of surplus value is there? It’s not machines, because machines only transfer their own value to the product that’s produced at them. As a matter of fact, that’s even how enterprises actually calculate when they calculate depreciation. So, where else does the value come from. Where else but in the difference between the wages and the values of the produced goods can an intrinsic difference between expenses and created value actually been found? The answer is: nowhere. It is the only point in the entire production process. Prove me wrong. I doubt you can.
No, it doesn’t. If the company died due to a takeover of the workers who seize it and democratize it, that would be of advantage to the workers. The existence of a company has no value, it is the signifier of an irrational system. The fact that workers have to do wage labor in the first place is the signifier of an irrational system.
But even if we take your argument at face value, it still doesn’t do away with exploitation. Surplus value is the difference between the wages paid for labor and the value of the products that labor produces. You’re saying that being exploited is of value for the worker because it allows him to sustain his own life. But that’s only due to the system that he’s forced to live in. Your argument is just as insane as saying that a Master creates value for his slave because he feeds him.
A ship owner is not the same thing a captain, and both don’t even have to be the same person. As a matter of fact, most of the time, they aren’t. Under capitalism, the ship’s owner chooses its captain. Under socialism, the ship will belong to its crew, and then the crew will democratically elect a captain. And incidentally, there is nothing wrong with granting the captain certain privileges if the crew democratically decides to do so.
Indeed. And if you ask me, organizing production as a casino instead of applying rational planning is not exactly a good idea.
Given that the richest 0.6 per cent of the world’s population hold over 40 per cent of its wealth, calling this democratic is a fucking joke.
If the factories are owned by the workers and actually democratically controlled, that’ll make it even more difficult. Then you don’t just need to convince a few capital owners in order to take over (like Hitler did in the late days of the Weimar Republic), you’d have to convince a majority of workers in every single local workers’ council.
Edited
Chicago - cities are always much more expensive to live in than, well, less-urban areas. Also, if everything seems expensive, then that’s a sign a place is actually doing better. For example, an American will find his dollars go very far in Kenya, but a Kenyan will find his dollars won’t go as far in America, so he will think everything in America is very expensive.
That is, of course, a far more extreme example than Europe, but it highlights the principle. Whether it’s a sign that the US economy is slightly better or that everything was just more expensive because of living in a city, it’s hard to say, but I think it’s probably the latter.
@Aristagtle
And it’s not surplus value in the sense of someone is exploiting you, as socialists would imply. A product sitting in a factory’s storage yard does nobody any good. You have to transport it, run the stores that sell it, pay for the factory and those who organize it, and advertise it so people take it home.
Afaik, welfare and food stamps covers the “needs”.
The fact that the company continues to survive and pays its employees has value. The coordination they put into the company has value, and they’re paid because their decisions or what guide the company. Otherwise why would we pay coordinators of any kind? If there’s no value to a film director, then why does (just about, because there’s always some small exception) every movie have one?
Why do ships have captains? Should we also stop paying captains of ships because they’re just stealing value from the people “who actually run” the ship?
After looking through a few different plants, I found this one with all the needed info.
8500 employees, and 88 vehicles per hour.
It produces the Super Duty, Expedition, and Navigator.
The “build your own” starts at, taking the lower side of the range since cheaper models probably sell more, 33-77k, so about 45k.
The expedition goes from 47 to 64 , so average at around 55k.
And the Navigator, this site says the average is around 51k.
So averaging them, we get 50.3k. At 88 cars per hour, that’s 4,426k per hour. Divided among 8,500 employees, that’s $500/hour per worker. If they made the same 2.6% as the CEO of Microsoft makes from his company, then that would be $13/hour average per worker.
So, how much the workers make actually is very comparable to how much the CEO makes.
“Oh, so we could shoot the CEOs and double the income of all the workers!” Well, not quite, because a lot of that money goes back into investments, and because of how investing works, that improves the size of the company and allows it to employ more people if it goes well, as well as keeping it afloat so it employs anyone at all. So being a major shareholder in your own company actually means you’re paying your employees again, then making money from them so you can pay them again in a cycle whose excess really goes to growing the company, and thus employing more people.
And if you’re really upset that shareholders exist, consider that investing is sort of like betting, albiet probably slightly less luck involved. The difference is that investing rewards successful companies (or at least ones that seem successful, which mostly lines up with actually successful) and punishes ones that screw up. By making choices on what consumers buy, in a very real and tangible way consumers influence which companies succeed and fail. Not just because of direct profit, but because profit and loss are sort of amplified by investors.
So in a very real sense, capitalism is actually rather democratic, where how you spend your money is your vote.
The massive advantage here is that this naturally happens in the system, so it’s a lot harder for any singular group to sieze control of the system and make a totalitarian state.
And even better still, it is a seperate system from the government, so the government has the ability to intervene. In a way, by keeping the companies and state seperate, you’re creating a form of checks and balances. This, among other things, is inherently why command economies end up being totalitarian states. Not to mention that abriding people’s rights to buy, sell, etc. is, of itself, somewhat totalitarian.
…But what are we even doing arguing this at this point? The image is about Antifa and Nazis being the same. We’ve gone way off-topic, and I’m getting a bit tired of the argument. Aside from me saying it would be foolhardy to try socialism and we aren’t the slaves of the “bourgeoisie” (and just about anyone can take shots at becoming one, but there are nobler and more rewarding pursuits in life than becoming rich) and that our system of economics is the best that’s “ever been tried” thus far, what’s the point at this point?
I, do, btw, think that at some point technology will change the discussion. Then we can all basically live off of enslaved robots who live for the purpose of serving if they even posses enough intelligence to even have such concepts. I think by the time anyone managed to make any ground in some kind of economic revolution in the States, we’d already be halfway to when the robotic/AI singularity would occur, so it’s all kind of moot point for our generation, assuming tech keeps up its pace.
Yes, obviously. What, did you think I was implying you lived in the Third World or something? It’s just that I remember a time when Western Europe was the land of Gold and Free BJs, and America was kinda dealing with one economic downturn after the other.
that’s some shit bait, dude.
As someone who lives in Europe, I would say: Not that hard. You have to keep in mind that the prices of consumer goods are a lot lower here than they are in the US. I stayed in Chicago for nine months last year, so I do have a comparison. But then again, I’m German, and Germany isn’t in every sense representative for all of Europe.
Edited
Money is a productive force in a very specific sense, but not in the sense you insinuate. It serves as a means of organizing private production. Money in and of itself of course produces nothing. Money in a sufficient quantity can buy you a factory and also the labor power to run it, but you don’t actually produce anything until you’ve actually bought it, and then you don’t have the money you paid for it any more. Money in an insufficient quantity doesn’t buy you any means of production, nor command over other people’s labor power, but merely the means to sustain your own life. In other words, money is only an unrealized potential for owning means of production, and even that not always.
Not capital, money. Money becomes capital only when you invest it in order to make a profit. Money you spend on consumer goods to sustain your life isn’t capital.
Just not in the relevant way. In the relevant way, owning a factory is equivalent to being able to run it for your own purposes, under capitalism in order to extract surplus value (profit) from it. Buying consumer goods usually doesn’t make you a profit, at least not if you’re on welfare. (People on welfare very rarely buy goods for the purpose of re-selling them.) As a matter of fact, buying consumer goods only makes the actual owners of the factory a profit, and thereby reproduces their ownership of the factory, not yours.
Only that’s not what happens when you’re on welfare. It doesn’t allow you to go into a factory and just take products. It allows you to buy them - and the obvious difference is that the latter makes the factory owner a profit while the former doesn’t.
No, “wealth redistribution” is the idea of Social Democracy, not of Socialism. Socialism is about changing the mode in which wealth is produced by giving the workers command over their own workplaces and then gradually shifting from a profit-based economy to a need-based one. Social Democrats think that you can remedy the failures and contradictions of capitalism by leaving production as it is and then just redistributing produced goods. Socialists believe that the mode of distribution is fundamentally linked to the mode of production, and that you have to change the latter in order to change the former.
That’s debatable, but it isn’t even the question here. The question was whether welfare gives workers partial ownership of the means of production or not. It does not.
“Largely”. Given that the machines only pass on their own value to the products via depreciation and the workers create the entire rest of the exchange value of the products, they also are the source of the entire surplus value. Any profit the owner makes is the result of the workers getting less value than they produced. That’s the entire secret of profit.
Even if that’s mathematically correct, that’s completely irrelevant giving the amount of products produced. Also, if you calculate the percentage the simple worker gets from an individual product, it’s such a tiny fragment that it probably becomes difficult to calculate it at all. Not to mention CEOs are also employees. They might have a share in the company as well (and usually they do), but as CEOs, they’re wage laborers. So their wage isn’t even really of concern here. The real profit goes to the shareholders.
Edited
Goddammit, I meant to say until most recently!
@Cirrus Light
Just playing devils advocate. As I said, and as this chart shows, Europe really has fallen on hard times…
Edited
So it’s only “doing well” because it has such a huge population, not because it has a system of economics conducive to high living standards.
@Aristagtle
That’s a good question, why are you saying that they’re so bad that they’re a major flaw with capitalism? And before you say you weren’t saying that:
@Aristagtle
@Aristagtle
Continuing,
And yeah, it doesn’t give the means of production entirely to the “workers”, but it does give a very tiny slice of it by giving them capital. I didn’t say it was socialism, I’ve been saying it’s partial socialism.
Heck, in a way, just being able to buy products is owning it in part. If you want to own a factory to produce a car part you need, then aren’t you in some way taking some small slice of possession when you take the product it makes?
If you get to pluck some of the fruit of an apple tree, doesn’t that mean you partially own it in a pragmatic sense? You don’t do the work of upkeeping it, to boot. But even in a real socialist state you would just contribute one part of many to its possession, so it wouldn’t even be any individual worker’s then, either.
But at this point it’s just a stupid pointless argument about semantics over an inconsequential comment about welfare being partial socialism.
Even if for argument’s sake I say money isn’t the means of production so you don’t get some piece of it, it is a small amount of wealth redistribution which is the essence of the whole thing, “from each according to his ability to each according to their need” and all that.
But btw, when you get taxed over 50%, it may be a meager help to “their need” that you say is insufficient, but it’s not a meager contribution. When someone pays over 50% of their income, they are no longer the majority shareholder in their life.
And btw, even pure capitalism does distribute the goods of the factory to the employees. The money the factory makes goes largely to the workers, and all the equipment and upkeep and such. Any individual CEO would be fantastically lucky to make a nickel from a $10 dollar toy that gets sold, and makes like a few pennies, tops (but I doubt it’s that much) for each dollar of paycheck.
For reference, the CEO of Microsoft has a salary of 18 million. Microsoft has a Revenue of 85 billion and a net income of about 17 billion. That means he gets about 2 to 3% of every sale. Less than Uncle Sam gets from sales tax, never mind other taxes. So if he made nothing, an 18,000 Salary would go to 18,400.
I’m honestly surprised he makes that much. I think my math is oversimplified somewhere.
Edited
Some problems with your thesis:
Edited
That said, you’re right that the recent economic crises didn’t hit as hard as the ones in the 1920s. However, political radicalization also hasn’t reached similar levels as it did back then. If that’s the criterium, why complain about either?
Edited
I want to see how you produce anything marketable by only using paper with fancy pictures on it.
Yes, money can be a symbolic representation of capital, mainly because factories are also commodities and money represents exchange value. In all other situations, you wouldn’t be so insane as to confuse a symbol with what it represents, particularly if it can also represent other things (in this case, commodities in general). If you think welfare buys you any relevant shares in a factory, you’re seriously deluded. The majority of wages aren’t even high enough for that. Welfare at best buys you the means to sustain yourself, i.e. to reproduce your own labor power. It doesn’t buy you command over other peoples’ labor. I doubt that you can give me an example for that. Even Sargon of Akkad thinks that’s not how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXQ8Wdhucdw - and he’s doing these calculations for someone who has a job. If you’re on welfare, you’ll usually have even less money. So no, welfare doesn’t put means of production in the hands of the workers. Not to mention that if you buy shares in a factory at the end of the world, that still wouldn’t be workers’ ownership of the MoP anyway. The idea of workers’ ownership is primarily about putting it in the hands of the workers who actually work there.
Also, there has literally never been any capitalist economy without some form of state intervention. You will not be able to give me even one single example. State intervention is not external or contrary to capitalism. Drop that idea.
Incidentally, your reference to “natural selection” is also faulty, because it assumes that selection is a finished process and not an ongoing one. For the greatest part of human history, the systems that won out by “natural selection” weren’t capitalist, but rather feudal or slaver societies. It’s only fairly recently that capitalism started to “win out” - and the reasons for that are complicated, but one reason was a series of revolutions of production technology that changed the “environment”, so to speak, namely the industrial revolution. We’re right in the middle of another one right now - the digital revolution - and possibly with several others in different areas right ahead of us. The question then becomes: How does humanity use these innovations, and who’s going to decide on that? And particularly at those points in history, human action becomes a factor of selection.
Edited
A friend of mine actually started making and selling socks like this by paying a factory in China. He owns a small piece of the means of production, and did it on what I think is like a few thousand dollars or less that he got from a Kickstarter.
By taking money from people who make more and giving it to people who make less, you’re giving that economic power to produce to the poor. That friend of mine is a concrete example of how redistributing capital can equate to giving partial ownership.
As for the issue of economic crisis, the point isn’t that it doesn’t happen. But it’s not as bad as you say. Not all recessions like the housing bubble cause Nazis to rise (they rose in a depression far worse than any the US has ever seen, where you’d literally have to use a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread).
In fact, what gave rise to the Nazis wasn’t even a free market. It was war debts and crappy government response that crashed the value of their money. So it was state interference, and other nations forcing them to pay for WW1. And as a result, their currency became trash because of economics and how banking works, so they blamed the “Jewish bankers”.
And it’s related to the point because I’m saying that there’s not a better system. No better system has ever succeeded. Like it or not, free market has won by natural selection as the most powerful economic system, and to humanity’s great fortune, it’s far more conducive to a free society than one where the government is given enough power to control everyone’s lives as is necessary to seize shareholder’s assets by force.
Natural selection doesn’t make it right, but it does show it makes the most powerful nations and economies. China realized this and is communist in name only. Soviets, Cubans, Venezualians, Jonestown, hippy communes, they all suffered shortages and often starved.
Think there might actually be something to the incentive of making money that might motivate people to work and produce capital and do services?
But though natural selection doesn’t make it right, that it exists as an intimate, unremovable (without major changes to human behavior) part of the freedoms to buy, sell, own, produce, and make agreements, does make it right.
@rylasasin
Attributing a saying isn’t meant to be an argument. It’s meant to be honest and informative so you don’t think I came up with it.
But “Capitalism != markets” isn’t an argument, either.
Capitalism comes from free markets naturally, just like fruit comes from a plant. If you give people the rights I mentioned, then they form favorable arrangements that get increasingly complex and efficient that we call “companies”. Just look at the word “company”. It’s an association of people who are making agreements to help each other make money.
If I like to mow lawns and I have those freedoms, I’ll start asking people to help for some pay, ask for money to mow lawns for people, maybe get some people to try to get the word out so more people will pay me to mow their lawn - but those people are specialists skilled at getting the word out and want to be paid, so on and so forth.
And yes, it is partial socialism because it’s redistribution of wealth, which is really what “the means of production” really is. The means of production is assets, a form of capital or wealth. If you have capital, you can produce, or buy the assets to produce.
Graduated taxes and welfare, then, are a way of transferring some of that means of production (capital) to the people who lack it. From them according to “their ability” and to them according to their “need.”
Yet we have a free market as well, so our system is really a blend. We haven’t totally collapsed yet because there’s still incentive for people to work usually.
Usually.
I have another friend who lost federal aid because they took a short summer temp job, but because the job paid well for what short time it lasted, it counted, and he ended up not getting aid, so he made less money that year because he worked. Grats, government.
Do we really need more of that? Do you think de-incentivising work is how you produce more wealth to go around?
Edited
In fairness, didn’t one of the mods say that this was a shitposting thread?
Edited
Cyborg… you just got Trolled… by someone who wasn’t even trying to Troll you…
That said:
@rylasasin
This is really a nothing post, bordering on pure shitpost.