You’re talking nonsensical hypotheticals.
They want all of the money, money creation, property, capital, positions of power, control of government institutions, and control over the workforce for themselves.
With artificial intelligence once they make everybody obsolete they will increasingly make moves to have the entire planet for themselves with the violent elimination of everybody they deem the lesser inferior (There will be no UBI.)
It had always been about global conquest from the very beginning.
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Meritocracy devolves into nepotism. It is rampant everywhere. Merit becomes replaced by family relatives or by what man a woman is banging in sexual relations.
There is the noble lie of your meritocracy.
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Again, the Chinese are market socialists where capital is organized in a manner that serves a politically socialist agenda versus the United States where everything revolves around state capitalism.
It sounds like you’ve been suckered in neoconservatism by all of its trappings of individualism, liberal capitalism, and so called freedom.
I am familiar with all of that bullshit because I have been surrounded by it my entire life where I can point out the lies of this line of thinking very easily.
So called freedom that always comes with a price tag where if you have no money the same system turns you into a slave. That is where this ideology of yours always ends up.
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Yes but let’s hear what Jakob has in response, I am really interested to see how he sees these issues we are bringing up with regard to capitalism.
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The European Union dominates the United States? Hilarious.
The entire history of the C.I.A. inside of Europe after World War II would disagree with that assertion.
The European Union is against all forms of nationalism, to compare it to the Third Reich is ridiculous. Also, some other neconservatives will compare the E.U. to communism which is equally absurd considering it is billionaire multinationals that control the entire project out of Brussels.
The European World Economic Forum? Run by billionaires as well.
Neoconservatives are economically illiterate.
As usual neoconservatives worship the boot of billionaires where they’re afraid of anything that mentions socialism, Marxism, or communism because that means giving power back to the people where the grip by billionaires disappears.
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Wokeness is a product of neoliberalism’s hyper individualism which is in of itself a product of capitalism. Notice in places like North Korea, Vietnam, China, and other similar places there is no tolerance for any of that.
Neoconservatives try to blame all of that on Marxism which is ridiculous because all of that came from the very liberal and nihilist Theodor Adorno.
As usual, the very thing neoconservatives complain about comes from the very capitalist system they worship along with the very hyper individualism that comprises it. Once again neconservatives find themselves economically, historically, and philosophically illiterate.
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It’s hilarious you cannot see Late Stage Economic Capitalism of today as we’re on the precipice of World War III currently.
Want to know the end game of economic capitalism? It is techno capitalist feudalism.
All across the United States currently are gated and walled off wealthy communities that have their own private security or police where the rest of the nation has very poor run down neighborhoods of an American working class where inflation anymore requires them to work two to three different jobs just to barely survive. While the wealthy live exotic lifestyles of abundance and opulence everybody else is forced to live in squalor or penury.
This is the exemplary economic system of organization you worship and praise? Yeah, no thanks.
Is this the philosophical virtue you speak of?
No, thats not what I mean.
To understand my thinking on investment you need to understand the OP.
Whether you agree with it or not, it contains the logic I work with in the rest of this thread.
I don’t like repeating myself too much anymore, but I’ll have to, as I don’t think anyone dares to really grasp this; Capital is libidinal. Im not the first one to figure this out.
It ‘wants’ to expend itself. That is the main drive holding together the dynamic structure, its being in time.
I know it is very tempting to try to judge it in basic banal terms like greed. But that just doesn’t cut it. For the record also, anyone sitting at a computer simply disdaining Capital as reducible to greed and nothing else is a bit skewed. At least that should not be super hard to understand.
Maybe thats the step required in the first instance approaching this model. Take yourself into the equation. Thats generally a good idea, doing philosophy.
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You’re probably right that doesn’t exist there. Not that we know. But sure. It is only pushed in the decadent, guilt-ridden, identity politics driven, cucked out portions of the west.
It is a weakness we can afford.
It is an eye to the vulnerable that our strength permits us. Barely maybe, but still.
It needs to be absorbed somehow.
On the other hand we have powers where even one little squeaky birds voice of dissent from the dogma threatens the collapse of the entire culture.
The logic is plain, it’s the identity politics of the downtrodden.
But fueled by the privileges the Capitalist Republic affords these downtrodden ones.
Do you understand that there is a difference between studying and worshipping?
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Ive been posting about this war since 15 years ago.
Why is everyone turning amnesiac? Smartphones probably.
Since we’re in an advanced stage of Capitalism, it is required that we work on it a bit, tweak it, fix a couple of problems with it. Thats what im doing.
China represents this term the best.
Social credits and such baed on digital monitoring of behavior that determine if you’re allowed to ride public transport or buy luxury groceries, etc. Your preferred system.
Not mine.
I suspect you are closer to living in such a gated community than on the streets. I doubt you’ve ever been homeless.
But yes, Capital is stagnating and messing up in part in the US, largely because manufacturing has been transferred to China and other places. Largely, it appears to me now, by the machinery of the reserve dollar.
A study of this stage in capitalism requires a study of the role of the dolla, the role of the US as providing the worlds reserve currency which allows other nations to trade more seamlessly and thus lucratively than they would be able to without the dollar-tarmac.
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Do you still ever read a physical book? You can’t seem to even interpret a post with less than 10 lines anymore. You aren’t the only one. A lot of people are actually developing amnesia or early alzheimers, no doubt due to smartphone use.
I was in the train a few years ago, had been a year or two, and just saw person after person swiping, scrolling videos on their phones. Literally no one was not on their phone. It completely baffled me. How can this be even remotely satisfying?
I later realized you have to truly be in the complete pits to want to do this, in genuine despair.
We can discuss how this despair is a product of techo-Capitalism.
Which is a stage of Capitalism I think is insufficiently bold.
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The US as a country, the fiscal budged, loses on it. But a bunch of private businesses thrive on it. Boeing, Lockheed, those guys.
The same goes with the default dollar. The US as a nation, fiscally and income wise, loses gigantically on it, but a pretty good number of private businesses thrive on it.
Well it’s not a beautiful creature. I am not so sure it has all the power you ascribe to it, but whatever power it does have it does not use sanely. I respect that you stay opaque on the particulars.
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Everything in nature is meritocratic, except Comunism.
I don’t see Britain, France, Germany and the US as completely separate in their roles right after WW2. It was intertwined. Nato is simply the military tie between what horrendously became the EU (first the gas and steel union, which could have been sane) and the US.
There was a lot of nazi input, yes but also Soviet, American, and much Brit in it - The Great Game. Politically once about central Asian territory but there is temperament involved. In any case the EU a product of the ravage of the two world wars and of the ideology of banking which was the only ideology left standing. On the whole it’s another totalitarian project the likes of which the 20th century has prolifically produced, using structures and concepts of the previous ones. Its a financial ideology primarily, which applies to neither nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia.
It went quite well until the Euro was introduced. Before that, nations had the freedom to do their businesses with the US, which was what we had to look to for culture, vital value, and the dollar in more natural and spontaneous terms. It was more fertile. And the money itself was beautiful. It was nice having to wait at the borders, of which there are so many, and exchange money. The German Polish border had a peculiar trade: fields of tens of thousand garden lapricauns, which obviously no one was buying except the people who knew which ones contained the heroin.
For some insight into the financial ideology underlying the EU,
Here’s chart of the Euro against the Swiss Franc.
Poland is doing a lot better than Germany at the moment by the way - which does not suffice to refute your position of course but still - It has these garage startup based technologies that the Chinese, when they steal it, can’t reverse engineer because they lacks the material science and manufacturing concepts.
Despite some thriving going on here and there, the EU is a totalitarian machine forcefully and ideologically reducing Europe to mere economic values, with an appropriately soulless flag. It’s not a solid concept, it only survives up to this point because so much wealth, cultural and otherwise, was there for it to squander. Or not even squander, squandering is too natural to apply. I don’t even know if there is a word for what the EU does with Europe.
The EU has some things that produce some de facto advantages over the US for the poor - so, moderate Socialism - some quality control of food, and some price ceilings for healthcare. I think the latter is actually sane as an idea, as I don’t think healthcare is really fit to stand directly under the purview of Capital as such. Much like bread or milk or fruit don’t. Its too primordial for that.
This points back to the first tangent off the OP, the question of sustenance as an in this moment unnecessarily gnarly product.
The gnarliness grew out of temporary necessities that aren’t bottom line necessities of Capital as such.
Capital at this point is too timid, too afraid of its shadow. Which is just a reflection of the starte of western philosophy. It lacks Earth, and therefore has limit on its boldness. It strains to be bold, but is too neurotic to really pull it off.
So- Capital has a nervous system now?
Then what is its cortex?
Its cortex is its frame of conception of opportunity, the power to increase value. Its nervous pathways all simply follow from that.
The Greeks had an immensely vaster frame than what underlies current capitalism, but so even did the 15th century Dutch.
That is not due to sudden spontaneous weakness, but the changed circumstance including of a world population a ten times times the size of 1600, and a thousand times what it was in 500BC. Space.
So how to reinvent space?
Musk is commendable for even giving this issue some thought. But his approach is not philosophical, not in the Continental sense.
This analyzing status quo and history is boring. Capital can not be down-understood. Capital is a movement in time, and as Bergson saw, the future is not reducible to the present.
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I hope you will notice my lengthier response post to you where I clarified that I think what you mean is the direct power of investing as such. Which, in re-reading your OP here, I do believe that is correct.
Investing, which you call “freedom” gained, or as you call the suspension of real world economic value in order to value economic value directly (or valuing currency), this is the power of investing.
When someone invests, they take money they could otherwise use to buy something, and instead put it in an abstraction: a “stock” or share of a company, a piece of ownership. Why do they do this? Because they believe or hope the value of that share of ownership will increase over time.
How does this translate into freedom? Well, insofar as having a large pile of cash frees one from needing to sell one’s labor energy and time for money, if you take that large pile of cash and invest it you are hoping to extend that freedom to not work. That is the main and as far as I can see here, only freedom at play. Capitalists want to be freed from the productive machinery of the economy, they do not want to sell their physical or mental or emotional effort and time in order to gain a paycheck, so instead (if they happen to have a large enough pile of cash) they do not use their pile of cash to purchase the goods and services wanted and needed in their life, they invest some of it in the hopes it will grow into an even larger pile of money.
Yes it is true they do not have ultimate control, their chosen stock might rise or fall. Other factors may intervene. But capitalism as a system does have great control over money, insofar as the people who sit at the levers of power at the top of the system can create or destroy, and direct here or there, any amount of massive flows of capital they choose to. Obviously we see that exampled by the federal reserve inventing trillions of dollars out of thin and and spreading it around to financial institutions, thus boosting the stock market for instance, and over time that extra money flows down into the real economy causing price inflation there as well.
What do you mean by capital is libidinal? That is wants to expend itself, as you said. What does “expend” itself mean precisely in this context? That it wants to burn up and stop existing, like a fire expending itself? That it wants to push all of its energy like a sprinter racing to the finish line? I cannot see any of that applying to a system of investment in ownership shares of companies. I think you need to explain this in greater details and far less ‘abstractly’. You said it would be clear to the philosopher, but it isn’t necessarily.
Again, what does this mean specifically? I understand how the capitalist gains freedom by sitting on a large enough pile of cash that he doesn’t need to work a standard job. He has gained the freedom to not need to sell his energy and time to gain a paycheck, thus his freedom translates into more personal time and energy for himself, the freedom to not be bound to wage-job. With that big pile of cash he has, investing allows him to hopefully get it to grow larger over time and thus he will not deplete his big pile of cash: he will be needing to spend some of his pile of cash on the needs and wants of daily living, but the bulk of his pile of cash will be used to purchase ownership shares in companies with the hope those shares will increase in price over time (more buyers than sellers in the net) and then at some point in the future he can sell those ownership shares back into the marketplace for profits, which will at least offset the money he needed to spend in the real economy buying the goods and services that sustain his existence. Therefore his pile of money becomes self-sustaining.
All of that is easy to understand. but what do you mean by “freedom from the machinery of capital that a wage-worker has”? Do you mean that someone who works at a standards wage job doesn’t need to worry about the stock market, because he has no or very little investments there? That may be true, but a downturn in the stock market can still severely impact wage-workers. They can lose their job if their company loses enough of its market capitalization due to a stock downturn. So this must not be what you mean by it.
I think you mean something psychological, because you think the capitalist (investor specifically) is somehow psychologically bound within the machinations of this stock ownership market. Do you mean that investors become increasingly obsessed over the value of their investments? That may be true, we do know a lot of the marketplace for ownership shares (stocks) is driven by the so-called Fear and Greed index. If that is what you mean then I would agree.
Being imprisoned within the corruption of the system, yes this is true in the sense that the investor does not and CANNOT AFFORD TO care if the companies he is buying ownership shares in are corrupt or not. He will only care if that corruption may lead to a downturn in the value of his ownership shares, so as long as the corruption is hidden or tacit enough (or sanctioned by he system in some way, as most of it seems to be today) then he has no concern. He does not care about corruption as a moral issue, only as an issue for his bottom dollar – because THIS is the main feature of capitalism, it converts every other value into the terms of the value of the bottom dollar, of growing the pile of cash over time.
If people need to lose their jobs, or be killed, the capitalist is fine with it as long as his pile of cash is still growing.
I disagree with what you said here:
I do not believe the capitalist (investor) values economic valuing. I think he only values the potential and likelihood of the increase of his pile of cash. Indirectly and because of this, he will put his money in places where he believes they will grow. This does not necessarily have to have anything to do with economic value. Look at the federal reserve money printing for example and how closely investors follow fed decisions on interest rates and monetary policy. These decisions often harm the economy either in the short or long term, for example an expansionary monetary policy will cause inflation and ‘fake’ economic growth, or a contractionary monetary policy will cause deflation and put more pressure on businesses, some of which will reduce hiring or simply go out of business altogether. And if you want to look at the overall net for the entire economy, it can easily be argued that these decisions over time are literally destroying the economy or at least hollowing it out from the inside due to the massive inflation and debt that is now baked into the system and cannot really be dealt with anymore.
So no, the capitalist investor does not value economic value, he values whatever can get his pile of money to grow larger. That could be investment in Amazon, or it could be quite literally anything else. It could be shorting Amazon, literally betting against it. Because in the end all of these purchases of ownership shares in companies are bets. The capitalist does not make these ownership share purchase because he values the company or what it does, he. makes them because he plans to sell them in the future for more than he paid. And THAT is the primary value from which all others here derive.
Yes, it isn’t necessarily that the capitalists are sitting around thinking how to exploit everyone else (although some are certainly doing that), no.. the almost greater evil is their utter indifference. They simply do not care about workers or the good of any specific company here or there or even the whole economy in total or its long-term future; they care about their own pile of cash growing. THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS HERE. Can you see that?
You are bringing up other secondary values which do relate to capitalism and some of which are positives, but I am trying to focus on the very bottom line, baseline fundamental value of capitalism. The primary value that capitalism revolves around and elevates above all others. If we are to make a study of capitalism then this level of analysis is what is requires.
…and if you can please expand and be precise with examples of what you mean by “wants to expend itself” as I was asking about above, then I can also respond to that portion of what you wrote. If you simply mean “expend the pressures” (inherent to or developing within the system) then I don’t think that matters or is relevant, since literally every system will naturally act to expend pressures that develop within itself, that is literally what pressure means. Whether or not a system or a part of a system is actually able to expend a pressure in such and such a context or time-line is not relevant in terms of what these pressures mean: they are parts of the system, elements within it, seeking to expend themselves. Capitalism in this way is no different than any other system except maybe in how it achieves expending (or I would use the term discharging) those pressures (I would use the term excesses or even errors).
War is a good example, as you brought up. Capitalism uses war to expend internal pressures. If there are market conditions unfavorable to the continued growth of the large piles of money of many of the capitalists, then they will pressure the political class to go to war somewhere. This serves multiple ends for the capitalists: it stimulates money printing which artificially boosts economic spending and stock valuations, it acts as a distraction away from things like allegations of corruption or bad quarterly reports, it leads to more contracts for the military industrial complex to go kill people in foreign lands and then even more contracts later to rebuild. These and more show how war is a tool of capitalism to “expend pressures” that build up within itself. Likewise, capitalism exports inflation directly (and the US primarily does this, because of its default position as the global currency supplier) and that could be another example.
Is that what you mean by capitalism is “libidinal” and wants to expend itself"? Libidinal means something of the mind and desire. I do not think capitalism has a mind or desires anything, but I know you are using this not in quite the literal meaning. But again, every system or being of any kind insofar as it experiences internal pressures within itself is going to tend to be restructuring and repositioning within itself such as ways appear for the discharge of those pressures. simply because that is literally what ‘pressure’ means. It’s not a conscious or mental phenomenon, it is purely physics (thermodynamics for example).
The end here seems to be a contradiction. If capital is needed to drive effort of competition, but this happens in different types of states and ideologies, then how for examples does this occur in states and ideologies that do not have market economies based on fractional ownership shares of companies? Capital as defined as the amount of currency (or value in any economically potential way) that is not being circulated into immediate economic transactions, so savings would also count as capital. Capital can also be literally the machines and infrastructure that, instead of being sold for cash, are being used to produce other goods and services. Does this mean that a state or economy can only function on the basis of its stores of savings? That makes sense in terms of the history of agriculture and feudalism for example, it was the rulers’ ability to build impenetrable fortresses whiten which to store excess grain and other goods, piling these up for themselves outside the reach of the rest of the people, that allowed for feudalism to develop. And then later, with the invention of gunpowder, the feudal system broke because it was no longer possible to build totally impregnable fortresses; the excess accumulation of grain and other resources could be redistributed back into the economy or repositioned to be saved in other ways.
I would tend to agree it is good and important to have savings (value not immediately discharged), that is like a safety yet. Certainly this is very important at the level of nations or states, and probably has an important role in ideology too although I’ve never thought about that angle before.
Therefore capital can be seen as all of the ‘unused’ economically-potentially-valuable stuff that is not immediately liquidated or transacted away. Some of this is just savings sitting there doing nothing, some of it is infrastructure and machines and human capital, and some of it is investing. All of that is good and interesting to me, but I am far more concerned with the fundamental nature of capitalism in terms of its ultimate value (growing money over time) and where this value ultimately leads, which I see it leads to a system growing larger and larger converting everything into the value of money and being highly incentivized to ignore system-level problems if oneself is still getting rich off of the backs of not addressing those problems. The combination of those two tendencies (the tendency to subvert all other values into the value of growing one’s own pile of money, and the tendency to ignore problems and risks if by ignoring them oneself is still getting richer anyway at least in the short-term) is what I see as among the fatal flaws of capitalism in the end.
I know a lot of good things come from capitalism especially in its early and middle stages, a lot of innovation and economic productivity for example. Of course there are horrors and errors that go along with that too, like devaluing workers so much that the company is literally just throwing them into miles with explosives to build railroads and doesn’t care how many of the workers die or get injured. Or the poisoning of the environment and of the consumers if the company thinks it can get away with it, as long as its bottom line is increased. Capitalism even in early and middle stages has these and many more horrors and errors, but overall it can be compared somewhat favorably to other forms of large-scale economic organization. However, none of that is my concern at the moment because I am focusing on the late stages of capitalism which is where we are all today the west.
And in its late stages, things become very… not good. For the reasons I just outlined above. Although it is always possible to point somewhere else in the world or in history and say “A Ha, look! They had it far worse!”, that to me is not really a relevant position or argument here. Yes there is almost always someone somewhere who is better or worse off, this applies to people or institutions or systems or economies or nations or just about anything. Merely indicating this fact in a specific case doesn’t rise to the level of a sufficient rational argument for or against something, although it can contribute to such an argument especially if the analogy can be made more precise as to present specific elements of relation between both things being compared and also if there can be multiple examples, among such examples can be found meaningful causal relationships that make the analogy more interesting and meaningful than simply pointing out an instance of difference as such.
Lastly here and in terms of trying for further clarification, you saying capitalism becomes something akin to a biological entity.. can you give specific examples of this? How, where and why do you see this and why is it specific for capitalism as opposed to other systems or other complex-dynamic things that might also be able to be analogized in biological terms?
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For more information on how Wokeism is not Marxist but instead is a nihilistic and liberal perversion see the Orthodox Marxist critique of Adorno who is described as a liberal bourgeois well poisoner.
“You probably live in a gated community.”
I am lower middle class currently.
“You’ve never been homeless.”
I only have an entire thread on my life experiences of being homeless living in poverty here.
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I like the Chinese and respect them, however, there are some things of their system that even I don’t like.
Under my ideals of socialism, communism, and Marxism my goal would be to make all of that more postmodern in being entirely culturally western. Kind of like the pop culture, rock and roll, or even Hollywood version of communism. Something like Yugoslavia’s luxury communism where everybody gets to enjoy the fruits of mass consumerism within a capital economy that is socially distributed everywhere.
You don’t win hearts and minds by having people live in constant terror, you win them over by having their daily needs met.
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