made y’all a meme
This is weird because I always thought it was the proletariat and not the capitalist who is trying to seize the means of production. God this is all so confusing.
Both actually want the means of production because it represents economic power to them
Guh… so much ignorance.
Which is of course what this thread is all about.
I dunno what it is about the compulsion to publically assert opinion on a topic you know little about, yet somehow also feeling very strongly about it all the same, even when the whole thread is about calling out just that kind of behaviour…
So if the intention is to prove Peter’s point then very well done, I guess.
I mean, I understand that many people like to treat contentious issues like a football game - GO MY TEAM! THE OTHER TEAM SUCKS (for simplistic uninformed reason that misses the point #7194)!!
Whatever happened to scholarship, huh? Like actually assessing something impartially, and possessing the ability to rationally entertain more than just one side to a story, and even being able to evaluate material on its objective merits and flaws rather than immediately retreating to the stance you’d already made up your mind about before even doing any work whatsoever??
It seems like Karpel is the only person to criticise Marxism while actually applying his points to a reasonable degree of demonstrated knowledge on the subject, whilst also not overtly signalling some virtue of “loyalty” for or against it.
The only other people who demonstate some degree of knowledge on the subject are the ones who support it, but that’s to be expected. No need to harass people for knowing more than you do.
You don’t even need to have read Marx to know that the financial definition of profit is an employer’s company paying employees less than what they earn the company.
This is just fact, whether it’s Marx pointing out the obvious, or you worked it out by your clever old self.
The justification of an employer distributing the wealth that goes into “their” company in such a way is all this risk and noble bravery stuff, that they’re the ones so gracious as to employ workers who would otherwise be penniless, that they could still be contributing some kind of skilled work especially in the beginning stages of a company etc.
But you don’t even need to “agree” or “disagree” with this justification to note that there are arguments both for and against it, but more importantly than acknowledging that it’s not a simple evaluation, it is a FACT that employers who profit are getting more money than what they earned the company, when their employees are getting less money than what they earned the company - because this is the financial definition of profit. Whether or not so many attempts quickly end up with employees getting paid a bit at first even if the employer soon ends up failing and worse off than they started does not change this fact.
Is it okay for employers to do this, given what they contribute? Decide as you will, but it is not negotiable that they DO do it.
So to start from the premise that “it’s none of anyone’s business what an employers makes” just COMPLETELY misses this entire setup, simply to say that GIVEN an employer earns what they do, we ought not to interfere.
They already interfered !!! - just acknowledge this fact, whether you think it’s justified or not.
Are you against distribution of wealth? Well what about the implicit distribution of wealth performed by employers?
Is it the law that this is perfectly fine to do? Of course, but a thread about Marxism goes deeper than blindly saying “yes, Mr. law, I comply” - and you can either stay on this topic of Marxism or rattle off the same old tired points, which you’re just as tired as of saying as others are tired of hearing and having to correct.
Can this forum please demonstrate the slightest degree of sophistication higher than the embarrassment that is social media, and just acknowledge this FACT? Leave your prejudices and tribalism at the door for pity’s sake. Internet discussion on this topic is a fucking broken record, can we just for once get past the most base level of inanities?
Never work. There’d be bread lines for days and nobody would have any oil to burn their lamps. We’d obviously have to ration our rice, and since we’d be communicating through telegram and printed paper again, cooperation between cities and states would be slow and disorganized. And that’s just to name a few things. The idea is incredibly dangerous, dude. We’re far to technologically backward and underdeveloped to be able to govern such a system effectively.
Marx was inspired by reports of indigenous tribes that had no monetary system and no barter system. These tribes only live in geographically isolated parts of the world (islands, mountain tops)
Even the American three branches of government was borrowed from a native tribe (I think it was the Iroquois).
All these ‘revolutionary’ ideas were taken from exploration of the world by the Europeans.
The problem with these types of theories is that they don’t apply to a massive global community (now 8 billion people)…
America did ok for its time, not great, not perfect, just ok. And now the East is going to rise.
Does the East have inspiration from native tribes? Yes. Do they care? No. Just like the Americans didn’t care. Sure, these tribes were a backwards people, but nation states have not improved upon them.
The most democratic thing you can do with currency is to place a wage cap.
Human beings think that if they express an opinion strongly enough then it makes them look quite knowledgeable [ least to themselves ]
This has been going on for as long as we have existed and so predates Dunning Kruger by a couple of hundred thousand years give or take
I find it very easy to be non committal because my sense of detachment naturally inclines towards that state
I hold no absolute opinions about anything but equally do not demand the same of others - how they respond to a topic is none of my business
I therefore do not require everyone to be HAL9000 like but so long as I myself am not being emotional with any subject matter my job is done
I never click those links because they take me away from here for no reason
You know surreptitious,
I have a dangerous mind because it’s huge. Despite what Urwrong and iambiguous have decided.
When you have a mind as huge as mine, anything other than solving every problem in existence forever is boring.
Like I stated previously… once Europe started visiting the Americas … all these really fascinating ideas started coming back to Europe … did they do it right?
Not really. viewtopic.php?p=2772874#p2772874
They fucked it up … but that doesn’t mean we should quit.
We now live in the world of mass communication and so that is where we will advance as a species
We no more conquer new lands but instead compete with ideas in the cyber space that never sleeps
It’d be nice if that were true. A sociologist figured out in the early 90’s that people are exposed to less information because of the internet. They only read and watch whatever agrees with them.
Obviously a forum like ILP has an extremely open mind, so it doesn’t retain the population these social scientists predicted — which turned out to be true.
I mean fuck! Iambiguous of all people won’t even talk to me anymore. What they predicted was a more compartmentalization of knowledge, and it’s true… if someone disagrees with you, you can just go somewhere else. Only look up anything that agrees with you etc…
It’s sad to me that’s what the internet became.
There are three basic problems with the internet as it is
The first is the sheer quantity of information - the human brain cannot process but only a very infinitesimal amount of it - very infinitesimal indeed
The second problem is the quality of information and the fact that many go to sites that reflect their own opinion so no critical thinking is involved
And the third is that it is psychologically addictive and this is affecting both the mental and physical health of a significant proportion of humanity
Now I have absolutely no idea what the solution to all of these problems is or if they can be solved or if the will to want to solve them even exists
The internet is quite simply the greatest educational tool ever invented but unfortunately its also lots of other things as well
So it is both the best and worst of humanity
I personally know people who have no degrees in anything, but because of the internet they have the equivalent of PhD’s. Doesn’t happen very often, but it does occur. Of course, folks like this can’t get real jobs.
And generally that there are two teams. Binary. Us them. Third (and fourth etc) options just don’t exist. In fact most people agree on this. It’s either A or B and if you are the other one from the right one you are dumb evil naive…etc.
There are significant enough differences between workers and owners to characterize them as different classes. So there is indeed a war between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and despite what David gilmour said, we are not ‘after all just oooordinary men’.
To pretend there is no class war here in tremendously, tremendously naive.