Planet Shit by Every Time I Die

Outside of academia, new technology is only developed to replace jobs, or to sell commodities. A business always has incentive to do away with workers when a machine can do their job cheaper. And those machines, aren’t designed to make the workers jobs easier. If regulations force safety on companies it can protect workers that way, but only to the bare minimum. If anything, machines have wrecked our bodies and minds. I’m not even convinced that commodity consumption isnt a way to shackle workers to even more machines.

A coin flip could do his job roughly as well as the average CEO, probably slightly better

You think american workers are going to benefit from Trumps policies?

They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the “owners” of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.

Capitalism isn’t neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can’t control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can’t be exploited for profits, to violence. But they’re as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.

We don’t overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn’t matter, the system has a logic all its own.

The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that’s why we have to fight and win for a better system

Socialism or barbarism!

Thank you for the considerate response.

You might be more well equipped for Marx than you think. The Tao the Ching, and the I Ching are both works of dialectical philosophy. Marxism, when applied correctly, is a fusion of empirical materialism and dialectics. Whenever people new to Marxism struggle with his method, I always recommend the Tao te Ching. People raised with western rational model, like us, struggle with contradiction in our reasoning. Except when it affects our lives directly, our minds reject it. The Tao teaches us to stay with the contradictions, which is what is needed to perform a dialectical analysis, since dialectics is the logic of change, progression, and synthesis, relation and contradiction.

This along with the mention of Marcus Aurelius reminds me of when I first started trying to educate myself, and came across the work of Nick Taleb. Its a bit pitched to the right for my taste these days (although his sterling advice, “don’t be a sucker” is as good advice as you’ll ever get,) but at the time it is what got me into studying philosophy, Meditations was the second philosophy book I ever read. I don’t consider myself a stoic, but I loved that book at one time, as well as the Enchirideon by Epictetus.

Your claim of an imbalance in power between the workers and owners is at least an acknowledgement of Marx’s theories. Maybe you like that balance, lots of people have a fetish for “balance of powers” and maybe there’s something to that. Except the balance can’t be achieved, it always prefers the owners and requires historical amounts of civil unrest to make any reluctant progressive change at all.

I don’t appreciate being told that I’m in a cult, a cult that never existed, and certainly Marx never started one. Its dishonest, but I guess you picked it up somewhere. I def didn’t know what Marx was about before I studied him. Buy now if I don’t know an author, I don’t have to pretend I’m smart or know something I don’t, I just say I don’t know and if I am interested then I study them. Very simple and honest.

Here’s the thing they won’t tell you about Marx: when you’re a worker and you learn to read him, because he’s difficult, you realize that he confirms your experience as a worker and goes deeper. He proves what we suspect but that everyone tells us isn’t true. He removes doubt and provides a way forward –

– and then you study the history of the USSR and other 20th century socialist experiments and the doubt comes back. But Marx was, hands down, the greatest intellectual of the 19th century and should be read and studied by all. Not to indoctrinate into a cult, but to actually open peoples minds to what is possible, and how class rule, throughout history, has worked tirelessly to alienate us from our selves and each other. Capitalism is just the latest and greatest form of class rule.

But a better world is possible!

Amazing how we forgot about the openly fascist America First movement. I had never heard the term since Trumps last term, and yeah lots of people call him fascist, and while it’s debatable I think most thinking people would say he’s like fascist adjacent or some kind of precursor. But the America First movement was just straight up “we hate democracy, fascism is good, heil Hitler” but yet was mysteriously wiped from our history, maybe out of embarrassment, but maybe out of the knowledge that to a certain elite section of people, fascism isn’t just good, it can be useful.

Of course for the rest of us its mass death, imprisonment, slavery, surveillance

Clearly you’ve never read Marx, which is unfortunate. If you think Marx is a “reductionist model” then you are cleanly, plainly, completely mistaken. Das Capital isn’t a pamphlet, its 4 unfinished volumes.

Your anti intellectualism is a sad affair, but propaganda is a hell of a drug. I love being told by people who haven’t studied Marx in a meaningful way what he is all about. Do you also have strong opinions on Augustine, Hegel, Kant or Descartes? Have you ever read them?

Its not a flaw, its working as planned. But yeah, our “market solutions”, basically any problem created by capitalism just gets exploited for profit. Even when the economy crashes its actually a good thing for the very rich, as it " disciplines" labor, moves people down and out of the middle class which lowers wages systematically, takes out a few competitors, etc.,

Things you hate? How can it be explained as capitalism if you won’t say what it is.

You act like there was never a guy named Karl Marx who proved this stuff, and debunked many myths about the economy, like 150+ years ago. It isn’t just a random thing like a superstition. In fact believing capitalism isnt responsible is almost a superstition.

Wages are flat while production has skyrocketed the last 50 years, a little longer than I’ve been alive. The system produces a few rich people at one end and a bunch of poor people at the other, that’s what it is meant to do, it’s what it does. It isn’t just an economic system, its the state and media as well.

People aren’t just blaming all their problems on capitalism like some petulant child. There are causes that are very clear and some more hidden, but its no secret and hasn’t been for a pretty long time.

Stop associating Trump with the working class. MAGA is a petite bourgeois movement. Workers don’t go for Trump because they’re racists, they go for Trump because their boss likes Trump and they’re a little politically backward, and that’s for a whole host of cultural and institutional reasons.

One thing that is interesting to me is how small business owners or like mid-upper management types will take on all these worker affectations like trucks, country music, cowboy hats, etc. but don’t get it twisted, one exploits and the other is exploited, and the worker who needs their boss to survive, aspires to be like him. And their boss has huge trump flags everywhere, signs in their yard, and he seems like someone just like me!

Machines were the weapons employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labor. – Karl Marx

A bunch of gay dudes on a boat making plays, stealing from racist british fops; I would totally be a pirate back in the day. Actually maybe its time to bring that shit back

Consider yourself lucky you didn’t have kids with her

If you want to discuss the history of the Russian revolution, I saved but didn’t post several paragraphs, but deleted them for the sake of brevity. Flattening the whole 100 years of Russian “socialist” history to highlight it’s worst abuses is just as intellectually lazy as flattening it to only highlight the best parts of it. I’m not going to apologise for Kronstadt or anything that came after, but the civil war period was horrible. And had the Bolsheviks not taken power, Kornilov or Kerensky would have, and instituted far more brutal oppression; if not just tried to restore the Tzar.

The organizing principles of the Bolsheviks and RSDLP should absolutely be studied leading up to Oct 1917, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, and Anton Pannekoek’s criticisms of Lenin.

But saying “firing squad” doesnt prove that communism leads to authoritarianism, although it references a time in history that was very brutal and oppressive. However, Its not as good of a criticism as you are capable of. I’m used to having discussions with people who probably aren’t critical enough of the Bolsheviks, so its refreshing to hear from you, in a way.

Communism is the struggle for a moneyless, stateless, classless society.

There’s no connection between a supposed ideology of communism, and authoritarianism. The “authoritarianism” arose as a result of material circumstances, not ideology. I’ve looked into the histories a lot and its very complicated. Not like you wouldn’t understand it, just that it can’t be reduced to a simple truism, cant be made succinct.

Let’s just say that the capitalists who hoard all the wealth and do nothing to earn millions and billions, who own the media and for whose benefit the state represents, aren’t too keen on movements that sometimes overthrow them. So it’s in their interests to paint socialism and communism in as bad a light as possible.