/lit/ - Literature

>Basic understanding of economics - 404

>>14661260
Market economics suck

>>14661250
>labour theory of value - correct
>surplus value extraction - correct
hmmm

>>14661281
How is the USA so powerful that it makes communism fail even in China? This clearly states the superiority of capitalism.

>>14661303
what?

>>14661303
If you compare China and India, where both have market economies, but China has much higher state involvement in the economy, you can see that this is likely the cause for the higher living standards and higher rate of improvement. Even if you compare the western countries, when social democracy had higher state involvement with the economy, the living standards were rising, while with neo-liberal market economy the living standards of people are declining again. Pic related Is trains in China

>>14661328
>>14661303
Airport in the USA

>>14661332
>>14661303
Airports in China

>>14661334
>>14661332
>>14661303
Burger land (USA)

>>14661342
>>14661334
>>14661332
>>14661328
>>14661303
China

>>14661334
arent there supposed to be lots of people in airports?

Dropping this

>>14661345
Have you ever been to china? I spent 6 months teaching English in Zhenjiang and travelling. It's a fucking dump you stupid faggot. A picture of a jet???? Jesus you're stupid

>>14661355

I knew Marxists were deluded but their lack of perspective is routinely baffling.

>>14661363
Oh yeah China isnt great, but I was attacking the burger who was defending the USA

>>14661355

Why don't the communists get together and buy the means of production, so they can then keep all the fruits of their labour? Why do they insist on stealing the means of production from their boss?

>>14661385
>stealing
The words you're looking for is "taking back".

>>14661396
Based

>>14661352
kek

>>14661385
The capitalist, the slave owner, stole from the workers. Him and his shareholders have ultimate say and power all they care about is maximizing profit. They need the workers more than we need him. We must abolish private property. When Marxists talk about private property, we are talking about the means of production (factories, farms, mines, etc) owned by a capitalist. We are not talking about your toothbrush or your clothes or your bike. Personal property refers to the things that you use. Private property refers to the things you don’t use, but own and make profit from by extracting surplus value from wage laborers. The abolishment of private property is to bring the means of production into the ownership of the whole of society, converting it to social property.

>>14661396

So its about taking revenge, more so than about actually achieving the communist ideal? You want to destroy, rather than create.

>>14661415

You didn't answer the question. You and your communist comrades could go out right now and acquire means of production, have it belong to your collective, and produce goods while reaping the full fruits of your labor. Why do you not do this?

>>14661250
I was going to write a response to all of these, but this is actually the really important one.

>labour alienation

Marxism is really cool when you're a teenager, because it explains your alienation. As you get older you realize that modern problems are problems of abundance not scarcity or inequality. Material things don't make you happy, even if you are lucky enough to have a lot of them.
Redistributing all the material things so that everyone is equal still won't make you happy. You will be just as alienated, just with more stuff. Redistributing the means of production might help for a little while, as it would at least give you a project to work on, but the thrill will be short lived and soon you will settle into a boring routine again.
The tragedy of life is that we are built to be hunter-gatherers. Literally any form of civilization will alienate you in some way.

>>14661509
Material things DO make you happy...up to certain point, where additional material goods have no proportional impact on happiness. The problem is that the bourgeoisie are stealing from the working class, and not just luxury shit like Rolex watches (which the working class couldn't afford anyways) but also basic human needs, rights and freedoms.

>>14661519
>basic human needs, rights and freedoms.
like what, exactly? what are you not allowed to do?

>>14661519
>basic human needs
Your great-grandparents would envy a minimum-wage worker today. For the first time in history poor people are getting fat because food is so cheap. You have more of your basic needs met than 99.9% of people who have ever lived. Yet you identify the main problem as oppression by the bourgeoisie. You are living proof that material things do not make you happy.

>>14661549
The right to create workers union, access to healthcare, free speech, privacy, affordable housing, the list goes on.
>>14661570
You don't seem to understand. Poor people get fat because they eat GMO laced, pesticide doused, HFCS synthetic garbage and drink fluoridated xenoestrogenated, teeth rotting soft drinks. You are falling for the prosperity illusion.
>You have more of your basic needs met than 99.9% of people who have ever lived.
No. The vast majority of people can't afford a decent house, education without falling into a debt trap or proper healthcare. These are basic needs, but hey we live in the best of times because now you can buy a new $999 iPhone every couple of years. Also, corporations and government are taking away your freedoms and rights like I said before

>>14661549
Not him but a while back a drilling company was able to move in to a small town near where I live (mostly farming property) to drill for natural gas. The locals protested but the company consulted an internal source to project ludicrous profit and promises of tax revenue to get the drilling permit, whereupon they almost immediately fucked up and contaminated an aquifer. Pretty much everyone in the region had to move out (crops poisoned, drinking water poisoned), many hectares of farmland being lost.

The company made nowhere near the profit they promised (because we had many times more natural gas production than we could use and nobody was going to import it), went through pretty much every tax loophole they could and through some legal fuckery ended up paying in just the triple digits in fines, which they made back multiple times over through defamation lawsuits when the people from that town went on the news about it. Also, the government (aka the people's taxes) ended up paying millions in damages to prevent further contamination.

I'm no commie faggot but there's plenty of shit that corps. get away with. Wasn't there also that city in America that had fucked up drinking water that had chemicals dumped in it?

>>14661355
>Your boss pocketed $480 for doing nothing
But no, he didn't do nothing. He provided the means to make the product, and provided the company structure that is required to achieve the complex task of making a cellphone.
He doesn't "arbitrarily" own the means, he literally owns the means through legitimate right. You can't just steal the means from him. He owns it.
If you don't like the fact that the owner of the means is taking a cut of profits in return for you being able to use his means, then perhaps you could find a different job where the owner's cut is smaller, or if you really can't have the owner of the means be compensated in any way for letting you use it, you could legitimately obtain your own means, either through the collective purchasing of a factory by your commune, or by the creation of more modest means, such as a hotdog cart.

Taking a cut of profits because you own the means is completely legitimate. Say for example, I owned a Hotdog cart, and my friend wanted to use my hotdog cart to make some money. I could say "sure, you can use my hotdog cart, but I want some of the profit in return", and my friend can either agree with my terms, or not use my hotdog cart. That is how the current system of employment basically works. Communists would say my friend should simply steal my hotdog cart, because for some reason I have no right to it.

>>14661303
USA didn't make communism fail in China. Kai-shek and Stalin did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_massacre

>>14661355
This is retarded.

>>14661385
Communism is not about communists keeping all the fruits of the labour but about the proletariat destroying present society and about the human race taking over control over its own reproduction. It requires getting rid of private property because it's private property that enables the situation in which our species is slave to self-expanding value.

>>14661415
>The capitalist, the slave owner, stole from the workers.
"Property" and "stealing" are legal categories, which reflect ruling relations of production. The capitalist is legally entitled to surplus value just as slave owner was legally entitled to the fruits of the slave's labour.
>Personal property refers to the things that you use.
That's not property. Property is a legal relation which is something over and above simply using something, which is a natural relation. You can own property on the other side of the globe and never see it with your eyes, but you can't be personally using it unless you're there. Socialism gets rid of property but not of people using things.

>>14661509
>Marxism is really cool when you're a teenager, because it explains your alienation.
Marx's alienation is not some anxiety you feel as a teenager when you listen to emo music or whatever.
>As you get older you realize that modern problems are problems of abundance not scarcity or inequality. Material things don't make you happy
You have a completely backwards (non-)understanding of Marx, according to which socialism would be effectively reduced to an abundant capitalism with equal distribution of wealth. Read Paris Manuscripts and Notes on James Mill.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/

>>14661519
>but also basic human needs, rights and freedoms.
"human rights and freedoms" are products of bourgeois society and won't be a part of socialism. Marx, "On the Jewish Question":
>The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property.

>>14661250
>Why haven't you read Marx?

Because he was an anti-semite and a misogynist.

>>14661396
But you never owned the means
Don't give me that shit about "b-but w-workers bbb-built th-the m-means"
Workers were hired and paid to construct the means. They did not own it, they were paid for their labour. The materials and land were purchased or otherwise owned by the business owner, all the workers did was get paid to arrange them in the form of a factory.

>>14661415
What's stopping workers from being shareholders, thus owning part of the means of production?

>>14661634
Pure Marxists have no brains but pure capitalists have no soul. Give me a fool over a tyrant any day.

>>14661652
Pure Marxists have neither.

>>14661646
Math. The shareholder can out invest the worker because of the pay rate gap. The conversion of wages into shares takes time. Time that the shareholder is earning at a higher rate and increasing the inequality between them and the wage worker.

>>14661646
Nothing, they already are sometimes. That's why characterizing socialism as simply "workers ownership of means of production" is incorrect.

>>14661652
But >>14661634 says pretty much what Marx wrote in Capital. For example:
>The use-value of labour-power, in other words labour, belongs just as little to its seller as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day's labour-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day's labour belongs to him.
Communism isn't about "taking back" something that someone supposedly "rightfully" owns, because communism doesn't even recognize any trans-historically valid concept of what's rightful and what isn't.

>>14661652
>It's either pure Marxist or pure capitalist
Stop. We already have a system that isn't "pure capitalist". We have minimum wages, employment regulations, mandatory paid leave, mandatory holidays and holiday pay, mandatory sick leave allocation, mandatory maternity leave, maximum work hours, and if even then all goes to shit we have unions.
None of that required the workers to seize the means in order to achieve. And asking for these things doesn't make the fundamentals of capitalist employment immoral.

>>14661664
rightfully should own*

>>14661665
You just listed many things that the USA does not have. No paid leave, holidays, holiday pay, sick leave, maternity leave, or maximum hours.

Marxism is substantially based on a clearly naive and philosophically inept axiology and his conception of value is not taken seriously by any philosopher of value theory.

>>14661589
>You don't seem to understand. Poor people get fat because they eat GMO laced, pesticide doused, HFCS synthetic garbage and drink fluoridated xenoestrogenated, teeth rotting soft drinks.
You don't seem to understand. No one is forcing you to do that. Not only are fresh ingredients more affordable than ever, but cooking your own food is actually cheaper than buying processed food.
>You are falling for the prosperity illusion.
You are falling for the Marxist theory illusion.
>You have more of your basic needs met than 99.9% of people who have ever lived.
>No. The vast majority of people can't afford a decent house, education without falling into a debt trap or proper healthcare.
No. You are extremely spoiled. 100 years ago, the vast majority of people lived in a single room with no indoor plumbing. 200 years ago most could not read, because the most basic education was off limits to them. 300 years ago most people died before they were 40.
In a hundred years from now there will be an even higher standard of living, and there will be an even more entitled bunch of people who feel oppressed by that.

>>14661679
That's because burgerland is a backward shithole and nobody seems to realize that

>Marx isn't taken seriou-
And before you decidedly post something retarded again, yes, China is Marxist.

>>14661698
China literally isn't Marxist. The workers don't own the means of production and private property hasn't really been abolished. The state merely replaced business owners, but this is no better because the state is not accountable to the people, and in fact has even more power over them.

>>14661629
>Marx's alienation is not some anxiety you feel as a teenager when you listen to emo music or whatever.
No, it is alienation from your essence as a human. Everything essential about being human developed under hunter gatherer conditions, so you will have some amount of alienation from it in any civilized society.
>You have a completely backwards (non-)understanding of Marx, according to which socialism would be effectively reduced to an abundant capitalism with equal distribution of wealth.
No, socialism is ceasing the means of production. I already explained that this will not reduce alienation, because it is still operating outside of what is essentially human.

>>14661684
>You don't seem to understand. No one is forcing you to do that. Not only are fresh ingredients more affordable than ever, but cooking your own food is actually cheaper than buying processed food.
Those are expensive and outside the purchasing power of someone working for minimum wage. Also you never know if "fresh ingredients" are safe, who knows what toxic shit they put in it.
>100 years ago, the vast majority of people lived in a single room with no indoor plumbing.
This is false, in 1920 a lot of people had moved to the city and had indoor plumbing. if you lived in the countryside, most had a house with multiple rooms.
>200 years ago most could not read, because the most basic education was off limits to them.
Yeah, people toiled in factories in inhumane conditions for pittances, just like today, except now they toil in offices.
>300 years ago most people died before they were 40.
False. If you managed to survive childhood, most people lived to grow old.
>In a hundred years from now there will be an even higher standard of living, and there will be an even more entitled bunch of people who feel oppressed by that.
What makes you think this is gonna be the case? Wealth disparity is widening every year.

>>14661698
Is China a philosopher of value? Did you not understand the predicate that came after the subject and copula "not taken seriously by any philosopher of value theory"?

>>14661646
>What's stopping workers from being shareholders, thus owning part of the means of production?
Laziness.
communism = socialism for lazy people
distributism = socialism for non-lazy people

>>14661509
>As you get older you realize that modern problems are problems of abundance not scarcity or inequality.
Not that but one of the perennial mainstays of Marxism (and of economics generally) is the counter-intuitive coexistence of material abundance with "artificial" poverty.

The internationalism is the part I hate, it barely works locally, was a disaster nationally but will work worldwide? How is this not idealism and utopian

>>14661328
>If you compare China and India, where both have market economies, but China has much higher state involvement in the economy
You don't know much about India. They squeezed free market enterprise almost as much as Maoist china, but didn't have their Deng Xioaping until the 90s. That combined with low human capital, a million different ethnicities and "democracy" meant India was always kinda fucked.
>Even if you compare the western countries, when social democracy had higher state involvement with the economy, the living standards were rising
Complete opposite. UK went with state involvement in industry in with its post war consensus politics, successful companies were forced to merge into gigantic state monopolies riddled with union problems. Germany went the opposite route. Things didn't get better for the UK until Thatcher tore it all down.

>>14661721
>>300 years ago most people died before they were 40.
>False. If you managed to survive childhood, most people lived to grow old.
People are still people if they die before their first birthday.
But regardless, everyone lives longer, no matter their age. A 20 year old could expect to live to 60 100 years ago, but now they'll reach 80+.

>>14661721
>Those are expensive and outside the purchasing power of someone working for minimum wage.
Now I know you are an angsty teenager who has never done your own food shopping. Processed foods are MORE expensive than fresh foods, not less. When I was young and we were very poor, my mother used to buy vegetables from the market and boil them to make a stew. That is the absolute cheapest thing you can eat.
>Also you never know if "fresh ingredients" are safe, who knows what toxic shit they put in it.
You at least know that there is no borax or chalk in it. You also know what date you need to consume it by. Better than most people who have ever lived. Quality controls are a fairly recent development, unique to capitalist society.
>This is false, in 1920 a lot of people had moved to the city and had indoor plumbing.
Those were called tenements, and you really wouldn't want to live in one.
>if you lived in the countryside, most had a house with multiple rooms.
Yes, and even fewer conveniences than the city dwellers.
>Yeah, people toiled in factories in inhumane conditions for pittances, just like today, except now they toil in offices.
Every single one of them would kill to swap lives with you. Your employer is not allowed to put you in danger, or beat you and has to pay you a minimum wage. The wage must be paid in money, not just tokens for the company store. The fact you would put your suffering on the same level as theirs shows just how spoiled you are.
>False. If you managed to survive childhood, most people lived to grow old.
No. If the average lifespan is 40, that means 50% of people are dying before 40. Children also count as people, by the way.
>What makes you think this is gonna be the case? Wealth disparity is widening every year.
Just like it has been widened before.

>>14661698
You just gave an example of the biggest institution in the world which explicitly treats Marx not seriously, i.e. by pretending that their rotten bourgeois society with hundreds of millions exploited workers is communist. It's probably hard to treat him less seriously than them.

>>14661718
>Everything essential about being human developed under hunter gatherer conditions
No, human is essentially a social being. Small hunter-gatherer tribes were only the beginning of the development of this aspect, which will only be finished in a fully unitary society encompassing the entire world.
>No, socialism is ceasing the means of production.
What the fuck does that mean?

>>14661723
What the fuck even is "a philosopher of value theory"? Communism is a critique of philosophy.

>>14661753
Read Marx, especially the early works in this instance.

>>14661726
If you are living in material abundance, but still think you are poor, the poverty has to be a lack of something other than material things. Capitalism has done nothing but give us more stuff, but it still makes us unhappy. This is how you know dialectical materialism is bullshit. We must be lacking something that is immaterial.

>>14661721
>Wealth disparity is widening every year.
Wealth disparity isn't synonymous with poor living standards. A billionaire making another billion doesn't suddenly make my life living on 40k a year any worse.

>>14661835
rich people want to disintegrate the middle class by stealing money from them, they want to make everyone else into a quasi-slave class

>>14661835
It does because they are doing whatever they can for their profits which means fucking you over from getting any benefits. The lobbyists in the US have been doing it with healthcare.

>>14661827
>No, human is essentially a social being. Small hunter-gatherer tribes were only the beginning of the development of this aspect, which will only be finished in a fully unitary society encompassing the entire world.
No, like it or not, your genetics took hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to those small tribes. Now you want to transition to a unitary society of billions of people. You are going even further from your essence than capitalism.
>What the fuck does that mean?
I meant to type seizing. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip, as ceasing the means of production would take you back to primitive society which is, I suspect, the only situation in which a Marxist would be satisfied.

>>14661840
Getting rid of the middle class is against the rich's self-interest since the former are the ones that consume their products. You don't see massive corporations migrating to shitholes where there's no market.

>>14661846
That's a non sequitur. Like I said, my life is pretty comfy living with 40k and working 6 hours a day and I couldn't care less if some millionaire is earning enough in a month to buy 5 yatchs.

>>14661867
You are narrow visioned.

>>14661250
>>historical materialism - correct
>>materialism - correct

>>14661874
Expand my horizons then. Or it this just a another equivalent of of the lazy "read Marx"?

>>14661867
>40k and working 6 hours a day
What do you do anon, if you don't mind me asking?

>>14661867
>Getting rid of the middle class is against the rich's self-interest since the former are the ones that consume their products. You don't see massive corporations migrating to shitholes where there's no market.
Are you really this stupid? You already see it, people who can barely pay rent but buy the newest iPhone for $999 by taking out loans and accumulating debt while companies outsourced their labor to shitholes where foreigners work in sweatshops like slaves

>>14661829
You clearly have not idea what Marx means by materialism. What you're ascribing to Marx and communism is actually an attribute of capitalism which will be negated in communism. Read a book.
>Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization.
>Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty.

>>14661863
>genetics
Humanity is much more than just the biology of a single individual organism. It's the accumulated history of tens of thousands of years. Without that we wouldn't be humans but regular monkeys.
>as ceasing the means of production would take you back to primitive society which is, I suspect, the only situation in which a Marxist would be satisfied.
No, that would be a backward development from capitalism while communism is a forward development.

>>14661281
>communism necessarily creates reactions against it that prevent it from coming about.
Sounds like it only works in theory for the time being.

>>14661899
And how's that the fault of corporations and not a mix of consumers having poor spending habits and awful financial education and governments being complacent to immoral (and inherently non-capitalistic) practices of said corporations? And how exactly is communism going to fix that?

>>14661829
>>14661909
Even more spelled out in an earlier paragraph:
>the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having

>>14661921
I'm not a commie and I'm not advocating it, I think ideology in general is cancer.
>And how's that the fault of corporations and not a mix of consumers having poor spending habits and awful financial education and governments being complacent to immoral (and inherently non-capitalistic) practices of said corporations?
Because corporations rule government through lobbying. They privatize education so only rich people can afford it without getting trapped in student debt

>>14661888
I'm a psychotherapist. Granted the costs of keeping a clinic is high but when all is said and done I make more than enough to make a very comfortable living and still save money for posterity.

>>14661909
>You clearly have not idea what Marx means by materialism.
No, you clearly have no idea what I mean by materialism. When I say material things don't make you happy, I am not speaking merely of ownership and use, but of the totality of the material conditions of life. A purely phenomenal existence with no space for noumenal. Read a real German philosopher instead of a failed economist and you will know what it means to go beyond materialism.

>>14661827
It should be fairly obvious. Philosophers who study value in its most general abstract aspects.

It doesn't matter if communism is a critique of philosophy. The labour VALUE theory is a value theory. Alienation is also value concept.

Marxism is laden through with values just like neoclassical economic theory is. It's just that Marxism is exceptionally weak in this particular area.

>>14661957
he;llo babee. make believe pretend idiot!!

>>14661935
That still doesn't make the consumer exempt from the responsibility and consequences of their own shitty consuming tendencies, and that goes doubly so for education. Everyone with half a brain should've already known that "higher education" is a meme and that you can make really good money by going to trade school, and even in the cases where a degree is mandatory, you can just as cheaply get them from community colleges and then expand on that degree with further education once you have the money for it.
People getting +80K in debt for their literature degree are just feeling the consequences of their dumb actions. It's economic darwinism.

>>14661965
ltv is right
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emnYMfjYh1Q

>>14661909
>Humanity is much more than just the biology of a single individual organism. It's the accumulated history of tens of thousands of years. Without that we wouldn't be humans but regular monkeys.
This is biologically false. Humanity is the product of HUNDREDS of thousands of years of evolution for tribal hunter gatherer existence. Civilization is the product of a mere TEN thousand years of development. We have changed our external conditions faster than our genetics can possibly adapt. You expect the human to be able to integrate into a united global society, when we have evolved just barely far enough from the monkey to build cities.

>>14661937
Ah, that does sound comfy. Good for you anon.

>>14661707
Based and chinkpilled

>>14661957
>No, you clearly have no idea what I mean by materialism.
You wrote "this is how you know dialectical materialism is bullshit". You were clearly referring to Marx you dumb cuck.
>A purely phenomenal existence with no space for noumenal.
You don't know what that means either. Jesus Christ you're a fucking pseud. I was wrong about you needing to read *a* book, because you will need a lot of them.

>>14661965
You're equivocating on the meaning of "value" like a motherfucker. Maybe try learning what Marx meant by that word when he used it. Hint: it has nothing to do with this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/ (I mean in a way it has, but definitely not in the way someone unfamiliar with communism would ever begin to think)

>>14661976
This retard is even more stupid than libertarian anti-Marxists. You can't prove this empirically because it specifically goes beyond appearance. The appearance of value is price, and prices are all you can touch empirically. You can't get to value starting from appearances -- this is the basis of the entire error of political economy that Marx uncovered.

>>14661993
>Humanity is the product of HUNDREDS of thousands of years of evolution for tribal hunter gatherer existence. Civilization is the product of a mere TEN thousand years of development.
No, that's just a bunch of glorified monkeys. Humanity needs accumulated development, knowledge and ability going from generation to generation.
And you can't just compare the number of years like that. You need to take into account the tempo of biological evolution and the tempo of the development of civilization.
>You expect the human to be able to integrate into a united global society, when we have evolved just barely far enough from the monkey to build cities.
Yes, just like I expect the human to be able to use computers even though they've been popularized only decades ago. Or into states with 1 billion members, which also is something quite far away quantitatively from muh primitive tribes.

>>14661966
>he;llo babee. make believe pretend idiot!!
That's exactly the attitude that causes alienation in modern man. The middle ages were materially a shit time to be alive, but they were also the high point for religious expression, as people felt the tension between their bestial and angelic natures. Call it make believe if you like, but they were not dealing with a depression epidemic.

We in the modern world have all the material means to live a comfortable life, but we can no longer find a reason to live.

>>14661250
>op just listing false theories as 'correct'
Great premisse for a thread.

>>14661976
If I remember correctly, Marx thinks that the productive relations and forces of production within a historical epoch give to the capitalist class unfairly the means of production, the raw materials and the labour power of the workers being sold to them to be exploited for the surplus value generated. This economic base ensures that the workers without ownership of the means of production are exploited as capital compounds and as it does so it ensures workers must have to continue selling their labour power for less and less.

Is that accurate?

>>14662062
That the question of "finding a reason to live" even EMERGES is an expression of the state of the world that has gone mad. The pseud answer is taking the question seriously and filling the void with some figment of imagination -- this is seeking reconciliation with an inhuman world that man can't properly reconcile himself with. The proper answer is rejecting the question as merely a symptom that only pretends to be a problem to solve and changing the world so that the question never arises in the first place.

>>14662084
>give to the capitalist class unfairly the means of production
No, the sense of fairness is also a product of specific relations of production, so in bourgeois society private ownership of means of production is fair.
The rest is approximately ok.

Argue all you want, but Marx' greatest defeat is that it's YOU who's arguing about it, /lit/

>>14661334
Chinese escalators are scary man

>>14662053
>You were clearly referring to Marx you dumb cuck.
I was criticizing Marx's reliance on material conditions to explain alienation. What part of that is difficult for you to understand?
>You don't know what that means either. Jesus Christ you're a fucking pseud. I was wrong about you needing to read *a* book, because you will need a lot of them.
You would understand if you had read literally anything that was not written by Marx.
>No, that's just a bunch of glorified monkeys.
No, homo sapiens diverged from homo erectus half a million years ago. We are biologically the same animal we were ten thousand years ago. If you read a very simple biology book for children instead of Marxist theory, you would know the basic timeline. They even do color illustrations to make it easy for you.
>You need to take into account the tempo of biological evolution and the tempo of the development of civilization.
The tempo of biological evolution is highest when selection pressure is high. Civilization protects people from as many natural causes of death as it can, lowering selection pressure.

>>14661652
>pure capitalists have no soul
What did he mean by this?
Serious question, this is obviously not about fundamental psychology. Just like /tv/ can use soul to define meme lightning.

>>14662142
>We are biologically the same animal we were ten thousand years ago.
It really depends on where you draw the line of being the same. There has been a surprising acceleration of generic divergence over these 10k years.
The implications of this really don't fall well at all within the egalitarian mindset of Marxists though.

>>14662104
>The proper answer is rejecting the question as merely a symptom that only pretends to be a problem to solve and changing the world so that the question never arises in the first place.
Am I actually arguing with Mustapha Mond here? The problem you are trying to get rid of is the problem of being human. It only gets WORSE as you improve material conditions.

>>14662162
Other anon thinks that the answer to the problem is to not have the problem in the first place, and that is only issue is having the problem. At this point might as well go brave new world and force feed people opiates. There the question will indeed not arise and all is well.

>>14662153
>There has been a surprising acceleration of generic divergence over these 10k years
True, that is to be expected given population explosion and rapid migration. We are still the same species though. If you had a time machine you could breed with stone age people and have viable offspring.
>The implications of this really don't fall well at all within the egalitarian mindset of Marxists though.
No, not at all! I wonder what they would do if they had their global utopia and noticed that some people are not quite as suited to it as others.

>>14661993
>>14662053
Humanity is actually the product of millions of years of social development alongside biological.

>>14662184
I low key think this is what both communist and liberal democratic societies will do in the end.

>>14662210
>Humanity is actually the product of millions of years of social development alongside biological.
Yes, with the social outpacing the biological over the last 10000. Which means we are not evolved for the conditions we live under, even if they are objectively better.

>>14662228
All ideology

>>14662231
No, biology. Not accepting science is ideology.

>>14662226
>communist and liberal democratic societies will do in the end.
Obvious for libdems because they rest on a mixture of utilitarianism and glorification of 'good feelings'. Heroin addiction (or any method with the same effect) is the endgame of both these trends, most liberals just become 'moderate' when faced with it.
Commies might resort to this to negate the awfulness of communism. On the surface it largely goes against the fetichisation of work, but this fetichisation is of a negative, conjuration type. They worship work because they hate it. Hedonism is a perfect way out of this.

>>14661509
Good post. Not the usual brainwashed/ braindead Marxist critique.
Yes we are hunter gatherers, but it's too late now. We cannot go back, or we would have to kill 99% of the world population.
Dealienated labor, meaning, labor which have some sense and intellectual stimulation, not the usual drone like tasks in Capitalism, and abolition of class based society seems to be ways to be happier, have more free time, less pressure, and more meaning in our lives.

>>14661385
Because the system itself is rigged. If CEO is nice he will be pushed out for a more profitable CEO.

>>14661622
>If you don't like the fact that the owner of the means is taking a cut of profits in return for you being able to use his means
The workers literally create the means.
>Say for example, I owned a Hotdog cart, and my friend wanted to use my hotdog cart to make some money. I could say "sure, you can use my hotdog cart, but I want some of the profit in return",
Once you have made enough profit to pay the price of the Hotdog cart back, all the extra profit which comes after is undue. If you accumulate profit and buy a second hotdog cart, you literally did it with the work of your "friend".

>>14661634
Of course capitalism can only work it a society were private property of the means of production is authorized and even glorified.
A society which glorify private property of the means of production isn't even a human group. It's not a tribe, a horde, a people, a family, whatever. It's an artificial construct, something mechanical and psychologically unbalanced. If you want to glorify the machine, do it. It's kind of pathetic, and i don't want to be part of it.

>>14662298
>Obvious for libdems because they rest on a mixture of utilitarianism and glorification of 'good feelings'.
That leads to a really horrible thought. Instead of solving the opioid epidemic, they might just develop ever cheaper and safer forms of pharmaceutical grade opioids. The whole population could then be high-functioning junkies.
>They worship work because they hate it. Hedonism is a perfect way out of this.
Interesting. So the escape from hated work allows you to worship it with more sincerity.

>>14662309
I like your optimism, but I think you're missing the full scale of the tragedy inherent to civilization. There were always people doing dealienated labor, but they were out-competed by those who ruthlessly pursued material progress. Those who try to revive it fall to the same fate. We have evolved our society beyond our nature, to the point that nature cannot keep up.
In civilized people there is always a religious tension between the animal and the angelic. We want to be these perfect beings, but are always prevented by our essential nature. As we progress materially there are always more sins to atone for.

>>14661250
Banging on a rock for an hour with a hammer, does not inherently make it more valuable than a rock you picked up off the ground.

>>14662246
I am accepting science. What you are saying is ideology.

>>14662144
He meant that capitalism views a human as a consumer unit. It is a dehumanizing force that seeks to extract the maximum value out of a consumer unit as possible. The more value extracted per human unit the better capitalism is functioning and praised. Ways of extracting value go beyond meeting the consumer unit's needs to extend to profitable warfare, incentive to poison and addict to pharmaceutical drugs, and incentive to outlaw natural substances to profit off of incarcerating a class of criminals who possess them. Capitalism favors misery and suffering. Better to poison a consumer unit with one drug and offer the cure with another than to keep the consumer unit healthy. The poisoning method creates twice as many jobs as the prevention method.

Capitalism would be in dire straights if everyone started saving their money and spending as little as possible. The whole thing would collapse and all the saved money would become worthless. Good thing your credit score depends on being in debt. Utter insanity.

>>14662226
What are antidepressants anon? You think the drug has to make you feel good to match the description of a hack like Huxley?

>>14661250

>labor theory of value - nietzschean diary entries
>labor alienation - practically "anarcho-primitivist" tedian-vargian assumption that there ever was a different state of affairs
>historical materialism - utterly absurd even for marx, nothing appears at its alleged "due date", marx himself silently conceding the point by making no such predictions despite claiming to be privy to unimpeachable knowledge

A more serious reply on property:

"Public" property is in fact the apotheosis of "private" property. Think about it in the most concrete terms, as Marx intends, or claims to intend: what would no "private" property actually BE? Mutually sustaining pure negatives wherein one is implicitly forbidden, implicitly conditioned, implicitly limited, etc., purely for the sake of others' claim, others "private" property, in said Phenomenal. Even assuming "private" property is zero-sum, even though this is Rationally and demonstrably not true, "public" property is not so much further zero-sum, down the fractal vanishing point, but is the THE God's eye zero-sum that engulfs the whole Phenomenal in the losing circle; the house of Yaldabaoth. Property being most Ontologically emancipated when "private", free from all owners, but one. Obvious Christological parallels to the body, the triumph of the Self over the "architecture" of Yaldabaoth or the "utility" of Moloch. Consider THAT, philistines.

>>14662522
There are some positive angles. Hutterites and Amishes, small and dealienated communities, for example are thriving. The open source movement is successful, and is out of the exchange value system. Flat organizations are real (see Valve). NEETs, which are somehow dealienated, are also a more and more common and an accepted way of life. In only 10 years, NEETs will probably be accepted by society.
What's even the point of living in the machine? It's pointless. Only way for me to have enjoyable living condition is either to live like self sufficient farmer. Civilization is craziness and is the result of a class based society.

>>14662892
>Better to poison a consumer unit with one drug and offer the cure with another than to keep the consumer unit healthy. The poisoning method creates twice as many jobs as the prevention method.
That's literally what they are doing. They put in jail people who discovered a cure to cancer. https://www.change.org/p/robert-buckland-qc-end-the-illegal-imprisonment-and-persecution-of-lyn-thyer-and-david-noakes-now

>>14661303
you're a retard.

>>14661345
yes, that's exactly how China is. You forgot the smog filled cities and the abject poverty of the rural areas.

>>14661594
Preach, brotha. The only reason why I even picked up Marx is because corporations are cancer.

>>14661281
Yeah, like the famous USA Vs. USSR and the USA vs. China wars that plagued the 20th century....

>>14661684
300 years ago most people die before the age of 40? You're a retard. There was high infant mortality, but if survived your childhood you had a good chance to live to be around 60. Unless a disease that is not deadly anymore, or there was a war.

>>14663267
>you had a good chance to live to be around 60.
70. Even in primitive tribes, people, lived easily up to 70.

>>14661250
Because in his massive tomes, Marx mostly focuses on production in the sense of the kind of shit that goes on in a manufactory.

His class-conception and historical materialism are made in complete ignorance that the logistics of an economy dwarf the importance of everything else. How can I possibly take anything this man says seriously, when the model that forms as the foundation for his ideas is completely malformed?

>>14661415
>The capitalist, the slave owner, stole from the workers

The vast majority of today's wealth was created by a very small percentage of capitalists and scientists / inventors.

It's not a zero-sum game.

Furthermore, when talking about ''classes'' you have to take into account such phenomena as ergodicity, otherwise any talk about inequality is pseudo-scientific babble. The 'capitalist' was the 'worker' yesterday and might be the 'worker' tomorrow, and vice-versa.

>The abolishment of private property is to bring the means of production into the ownership of the whole of society, converting it to social property.

Old, old babble. People have tried it and failed tremendously because that does not allocate resources to their most productive end, due to lots of problems, most of all knowledge problems (even in the computer age - no, computers cannot make economic calculations to run a society, and even if you tried it would be so fragile that it would crumble easily).

Marxism is anti-empirical pseudoscience taken seriously only by people in the humanities who have zero knowledge about the real world.

>>14663085
You sound like you suffer from a severe thorazine deficiency

The means of production should own themselves.

>>14661250
>falling rate of profit - correct
>labour theory of value - incorrect, and pseudoscientific bullshit he provided no proof for
>labour alienation - correct
>surplus value extraction - correct and natural
>private property is bullshit - incorrect and subjective, for a "materialist" he was a moralfag
>historical materialism - incorrect, all of his analyses are much too macro scale

>>14663314
There is always someone like you. How are you new shoes?

>>14663220
And the bat soup and accidental virus leaks. And government cover-ups. And complete disregard for anything except looking like the benevolent dictator. Oh but you know, muh planes

>>14663322
You sound like your neovagina is clenching up on itself, you better widen it.

>>14661303
How is a gorilla so powerful that it will tear a human to shreds after mere seconds of hand-to-hand combat? This clearly states the superiority of the gorilla.

>>14661707
>China literally isn't Marxist.
lets see
>The workers don't own the means of production
well thats socialism not Marxism
>private property hasn't really been abolished
well that's the goal of a communist society, not Marxism. China doesn't call themselves communist, neither did the USSR. the USSR considered itself socialist and China considers themselves capitalists, but both are Marxist

>>14661718
>socialism is ceasing the means of production
you mean "seizing"

>>14663517
If the human is such a superior creature, why is it so incredibly fragile it dies from a literal slap on the ass from a gorilla?

>>14663527
>the USSR considered itself socialist and China considers themselves capitalists, but both are Marxist
Karl Marx wouldn't have approved Chinese wage labor. That's for sure.

>>14663527
>well thats socialism not Marxism
>Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership[1][2][3] of the means of production[4][5][6][7] and workers' self-management of enterprise,[8][9] as well as the political theories and movements associated with such systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
So you admit they're not Marxist and are just barely socialist, and only because the fascistic state is so common for communism that it's excused as a part of socialism too. Sure.

>China doesn't call themselves communist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China

>>14663496
If you stop struggling, they wouldn't have to strap you down for your shot.

>>14663604
If you weren't such a human failure, maybe you wouldn't have to morally justify stealing

>>14663594
they are Marxist, but not all Marxist countries are socialist or communist. China thinks the best way to advance the material conditions of society today is capitalism, they believe they are laying the groundwork for socialism in the future. and yes the communist PARTY of China is communist. when I say China isn't a communist country I mean the country isn't communist, not that it isn't run by communists. I know this takes a bit of abstract thinking but I know you have the brainpower to manage.

>>14663588
he wouldn't have approved the vanguard party either, what is your point?

>>14661250
>labour alienation
Objectively didn't happen. Ricardian economics were cringe even at the time.

We are further from revolution now than ever before.

>private property is bullshit
The only shit here is the contents of your guts, which will be redistributed to the dirt if you ever touch my property, thief.

>>14663636
Your family just wants you to stay on your meds. Why do you hurt them? Why can't you just be a good boy?

>>14663681
Seething thief wants to steal. Unfortunately, everyone is armed these days. Looks like you're going to need a new plan that doesn't involve getting mowed down in droves by Reactionaries.

>its wrong for bosses to take surplus value from workers because they didn't work for it
>its okay for the government to take surplus value from workers despite doing nothing because ????

>>14663349
>labour theory of value- incorrect, and pseudoscientific bullshit he provided no proof for

LMAO that is a fucking hot take and tell me how I know you haven't read Marx?

http://www.dreamscape.com/rvien/Economics/Essays/LTV-FAQ.html

>>14663725
do you really think Karl "abolish the state" Marx wanted the government to exploit surplus labor?

>>14661622
>hot dog cart
Your friend isnt named Ignatius, is he?

>>14663732
I thought it was Karl "abolish the state after an indeterminate period of time in which the state can do whatever it likes, just trust me bros, it's for the workers I swear, pls gib power" Marx

>>14663765
dictatorship of the proletariat is just a democracy of the laborers. it isn't "the state can do whatever it likes", rather "the state can do nothing the proletariat doesn't support"

>>14663656
How can China be Marxist if Karl Marx himself wouldn't have approved Chinese wage labor and the vanguard party?

>>14663782
because if you hold "isms" to mean "does not deviate from that persons ideas whatsoever" then the whole linguistic convention is meaningless and there has never been a platonist, or a kantian, or a hegelian, or a marxist, or a a buddhist, or a leninist, or...

>>14663765
Re-read Karl Marx. Not just the communist manifesto. The period of time you refer to is not indeterminate, but a transitional periods. Transitional periods are not suppposed to last almost a century like what happened in soviet Russia.

>>14663645
China are not communist, and they are barely socialist. As a matter of fact, they are much closer to national socialism than marxism, unless of course what you mean by marxism is that they justify their national socialism by claiming to have arrived on the idea as the most condusive to marxism.

>>14663726
Unironically mudpies, faggot.

>>14663830
Reminder: Marx is only interested in socially necessary labor

>>14663830
>unless of course what you mean by marxism is that they justify their national socialism by claiming to have arrived on the idea as the most condusive to marxism
just replace natsoc with capitalism and yes, unironically. read some Chinese communists sometime

>>14663778
Yes, an intermediate period of time where the party that's capable of convincing everyone to "just trust me bro" is able to do whatever the fuck they want, because they've got the support of the majority. Simply put, genius.

>>14663824
>Transitional periods are not suppposed to last almost a century like what happened in soviet Russia
Just because you posit that water is not supposed to be wet doesn't make it so.

>>14663801
Perhaps it's true, but in this case it doesn't make sense.
One cannot be a true Marxist and think soviet russia was marxist.
Like one cannot be a true christian, and think George W. Bush is a true Christian.

>>14663853
>the party
you are thinking of Lenin and the vanguard party. Marx thought socialism wouldn't be run by a "party" but by a "class"

>>14663858
>one cannot be a true Scotsman
dropped

>>14663860
Yes, by the proletariat, to be exact.

>>14663850
It's closer to fascism than capitalism, let's be real here. See pic.

>>14663843
His theory still fails to explain the intricacies of actual economies, because again, it's much too macro in scale.

>>14663860
Well what he though has jack shit to do with what happened. And i'm not thinking of a vanguard party, but of a collective union of skilled manipulators that wish to take power in a society and thus naturally congregate into a party within the sytem, and the power over the country is naively given to them until they grow powerful enough to be self-sufficient. This happens in the first few months, and what you're left with is borderline fascism.

>>14663871
Marx never aimed to explain the intricacies of economics. He tried to have an other explanation of the economic phenomenons. Economist in favor of Capitalism were referred by him as "classical economists".

>>14663881
True. But in an other location, communism was fullfilled in the Israeli Kibbutz, and also in the Hutterian Brethren.

>>14663871
>true capitalism has never been tried!
ironic

>>14663881
>I'm not talking about Marxist theory I'm masturbating over my historicist analysis of political manipulation
okay I'm talking about Marx

>>14663891
Relatively small population count, homogenous society. Most economic systems work at that scale.

>>14663898
Lmao did you really think that was a gotcha? If it doesn't meet the criteria of capitalism, it's not capitalism. Unlike communism, capitalism is able to exist in practice without violating the core axioms of the ideology. It's just that China ain't it, chief.

>>14663903
And marx is talking about something that demonstrably has not and cannot exist. You still wanna keep talking about him, buddy?

>>14663883
Generally, trying to explain phenomena using models ie. not as what the phenomena actually, objectively are results in tremendous faggotry, and literally all philosophers are guilty of this. So i kind of agree, sure.

>>14663954
>capitalism is able to exist in practice without violating the core axioms of the ideology
name one capitalist society that didn't enforce property rights through violence or the coersion of violence, I'll wait

>>14663954
>marx is talking about something that demonstrably has not and cannot exist
who cares? do you know what Aristotle said about abstract thinking anon?

>>14663977
To ensure voluntary transactions of property, there must be some form of protection against involuntary transactions, such as theft. Enforcing private property is an excellent way to do this, and you are not violating the axiom of private property by forcing people to keep their transactions voluntary.

>>14661355
>A grocery store you founded, stocked, maintained and cared for so it would turn out a profit is not your property

>>14661250
marx was a spoiled elitist who to this day tricks low IQ academics

>>14664029
so the government gives special exclusions for owners of property and they enforce this through violence? note real capitalism, see your pic
>>14663871

>>14663977
Are you seriously complaining that people will shoot you if you take their stuff? what the fuck lol

>>14664041
I'm not complaining I'm saying it precludes it from "true capitalism" as anon defined it

>>14663982
>who cares?
You obviously care, you demonstrated that you care by dismissing my argument against Marx's contradictory analysis (His belief system can only function if some of his axioms are rejected, worker ownership of the means of productions and a state or other de facto authority to enforce communism and prevent free trade are mutually exclusive, yet both must be true in order for it to be communism) by saying that it has nothing to do with Marx, and you did it right here: >>14663903

>>14661456
Not revenge you tard, if someone nicks your phone and the police catch them you get given it back, the theif doesn't get to keep it.

Oh nvm I forgot about 2008 financial crash they got to keep what they stole in government bailouts

>>14664030
at the core all communists are naive children with no empathy for the hard work of people to build anything beyond the immediate, it's the brutal irony of them previously hiding behind the 'working' class. In their addled man child minds they believe that only children covered in soot and some how themselves are the ones who are deserving of dreams and reward and everyone else is an evil 'capitalist' or in the 21st century where they hide behind racial minorities in multi cultural countries, everyone else is a 'old white male'.
People should strangle pseudo communists they meet in public to death.

>>14661570
The fattening food is the only food you can afford, you have to be rich to be skinny

>>14663726
>people who run businesses don't know how they work.
tell me how I know you're 17 and this is your first year working a fast food job

>>14664040
Yes, that facet of the system is not "real" capitalism. This is because private property itself is an axiom upon which voluntary transactions rest (The concept of voluntary transactions cannot exist without property and agency over that property to voluntarily manage), and it can only be ensured through violence.

>>14664058
you aren't arguing against Marx's system, you are arguing against the viability of a state "enforcing communism". Marx never would have said communism needs to be "enforced", if fact he would have said if any authority is trying to enforce it, it cannot be communism by definition. you should argue against Lenin instead, you might hit a few points, but this is just cope from someone who never read Marx

>>14664085
>beans
>rice
>meat
>vegetables
all affordable, but yes, if you're poor and are too stupid and lazy to feed yourself then you're options of healthy food served to you by others is limited if you want to spend less than 6$ on
a meal

>>14664096
so what you are saying is real capitalism has never existed as it is always propped up on state coersion

>>14664117
>coercion
Not letting you steal stuff is not coercion you faggot

Does anyone know that quote that's like "if the cities disappeared tomorrow, life would continue in the countryside. If the countryside disappeared tomorrow, the cities would collapse."

>>14664117
>if me and my useless friends can't take your shit then it's the state holding me down
it makes me smile to know how many communists have been murdered or starved out in the last 100 years

>>14664131
so you just ask them kindly to stop? there is no possible threat of violence put against theives? what about people who break contracta? you write a stern letter asking them to he more responsible?

>>14664137
this is not my definition faggot I don't give a fuck about the government enforcing private property rights through coersion

>>14664152
stay assblasted, subhuman filth

>>14664146
Yeah there is a threat of violence against thieves, it's self-defense, not coercion.

>>14661250

>>14664171
>not real capitalism
>government violence is wrong in ALL cases (except the ones I support)
the irony is dripping

>>14664192
>trying to conflate the government stopping someone from committing theft with the government stealing your things
marxists lmao.

>>14664212
how are they your things?

>>14664214
Because you got them from someone who agreed to give them to you. This concept is clearly very difficult for socialists

>>14664212
why is it that the only way you can imagine the violation of property rights as theft? again, contracts are enforced with this same coersion. also, how do you define property?

>>14664222
What if you point a gun at them, and say "agree to give me this thing or I'll shoot" or say you're in control of their ability to get food, or their ability to make money, and you imply you might take one of those things away if they don't agree to give you the thing.

>>14664222
who owned them in the first place then? someone has to take something first, right? this is related to this question
>>14664230

>>14664230
>why is it that the only way you can imagine taking someone's things without their consent as theft
truly a mystery. Luckily big brained marxists are on the case

>>14664236
>What if you point a gun at them, and say "agree to give me this thing or I'll shoot"
Then you're a criminal and the state should arrest you. If the state is itself doing this then it's engaging in tyranny

It's best just to ignore communists desu. There are only two kinds of leftists- highly intelligent manipulators who want to be in the intelligentsia and their midwit victims who dont actually understand what it is they're arguing for. Marxism is built on duplicity, and you would have to be a fool to think the working class would benefit from a leftist regime change. I don't know how this idiot got credit for labor rights when they are obviously a product of liberalism and Christian philosophy in general.

>>14664105
That's fair. Communism cannot exist in a large-scale industrial society without enforcement though, and that's precisely what my point is. Communism cannot exist in reality as it was proposed in theory, it would have to be mangled and twisted in ways which would make the system unrecognizable, such as what Lenin did.

>>14664243
so you don't think the state enforces contracts? did you not finish the post before replying?

>>14664254
Contract means you've given consent. The concept of keeping your word is also apparently foreign to socialists

National Bolshevism

the complete inability of commie bugmen to successfully run their own lives is the refutation of marxism I need

>>14664254
the state enforces contracts to mitigate people murdering each other over discrepancies in an attempt at vigilantism, it's the same reason we have capital punishment to quell the victims friends and families

>>14664247
The important point was, of course, the one you ignored. Let's simplify it and say, what if you have a gun, and suggest they agree to give you something you want. There's no real threat, just the implication.

>>14664269
are you literally fucking retarded? Yes that's a threat.

>>14664117
No, i'm saying that real capitalism, when propped up by state coersion, is a much more consistent and practical system than some crypto-moralistic autism that literally cannot be manifested in the real world.

>>14664236
You forget to play the devil's advocate. You are the one on which the other person's ability to live relies on, true. But it is in no way your responsibility to be charitable and benevolent, the most you can do is refuse association. This works wonders in something like a consitutional republic with a strong cultural bond and some state-side regulations.

>>14664241
Yes. The ownership of property is based upon literal milennia of the natural cycle, of the plants exploiting the sun and of the animals exploiting the plants, and of the humans exploiting both themselves and the natural kingdom. This is literally unavoidable. Going back to how this relates to property, if someone has no claim over an object, they can claim it as their own because they found it. They can trade the gold nugget for a pig someone found, and now the pig is their private property. Nowadays trade is largely based on creating and not finding, though.

>>14664308
*if nobody has claim over an object, somebody can claim it as their own because they found it

>>14664252
It could, even if scarcity was still a thing, if there was no antagonisms left.
It is the paradox of exchange value. Exchange value is done because you don't thrust the other party, and don't see him as your family. But it also tend to dissolve human antagonisms slowly, with time. Each generation see less antagonism. That's not LGBT culture, that is a fact.
Give it a few centuries, and there will be no antagonisms left.

>>14664308
>if someone has no claim over an object, they can claim it as their own because they found it
ah see this was the version of property right Marx is working with, and private property fucks all this up. you mixing your labor with nature no longer gives you ownership over property, it gives you a wage. you mixing your labour with nature picking apples is either a) wage labor, or b) theft from the owner of the tree. Locke thought this means ownership should be capped by utility (e.g. if those apples are just going to go bad, it is NOT theft to take their apples). you should read more anon because this idea of property is a better argument for Marx than against him

>>14664308
>They can trade the gold nugget for a pig someone found, and now the pig is their private property.

Congratulation, you just invented the neolithic revolution.

>>14661250
>Labour theory of value - correct.
O I am laffin.

>There are people actually defending this genocidal ideology who has "never been tried" despite all the support every dictatorship get from communists.
Is this a stage like acne?

>>14661281
Command economies fail.

>>14664350
What the fuck are these "antagonisms" in this context and how does exchange value change anything

>>14664352
>you mixing your labour with nature picking apples is either a) wage labor, or b) theft from the owner of the tree
No. Wage labor and theft both require a person for who you work. Mother nature has no agency and she has no rights. I am exerting my will on a wild apple tree, and i am taking the apples into my posession by force from the tree. This isn't theft because the tree is not a legal entity, it's like saying that taking your dog's toy away from him is theft. In order to keep labor theory of value afloat you have to keep positing increasingly ridiculous and inaccurate bullshit like picking fruits because you're hungry is wage labor. No amount of reading can mend this, unless you misrepresented the position of Marx.

>>14664370
Oh wow it's almost as if that was precisely the answer to your retarded question, would you look at that!

>>14664422
*Wage labor and theft both require a person for who you work or a person whose property you are stealing
Also triple dubs, check em

>>14664422
>ridiculous and inaccurate bullshit like picking fruits because you're hungry is wage labor
no it would be theft unless you owned the tree lmao wage labour comes from being employed by the owner of the tree. "mother nature" doesn't exist anymore anon, you need to purchase or rent land to use it and it's fruits

>>14661976
Value is subjective.

>>14664422
>theft requires a person for who you work
you don't employ me anon can I stop by your house and grab a few things?

>>14664470
If the tree has no owner, there is not a way in hell you can convince me that taking from that tree is wage labour or theft.

>"mother nature" doesn't exist anymore anon, you need to purchase or rent land to use it and it's fruits
This is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion at hand: we were debating whether or not, theoretically, taking apples from a tree is always necessarily either wage labour or theft, as per your claim, not whether or not there exist trees which have no legal owners:
>>14664352
>you mixing your labor with nature no longer gives you ownership over property, it gives you a wage
Wage is a monetary reward agreed upon and received after some service is provided. To another legal entity. I admit, i didn't notice the "no longer" part, and i disagree with it. Go into the fucking woods and pick a few wild apples. You have absolute legal ownership over the apples.

>>14664490
see
>>14664424
What i meant is that wage labor requires you to work for another legal entity, and stealing requires you to take from another legal entity withot their voluntary consent.

>>14664486
I asked the cashier that my toothbrush wasn't worth $2, and i tried to bargain with the supermarket manager about it, but they wouldn't listen :(
I'll try again tommorrow, in an other supermarket, about mineral water.

>>14664519
>Go into the fucking woods and pick a few wild apples. You have absolute legal ownership over the apples.
someone owns the forest anon, either the state or a private entity, and you do not have licence to do this.

>>14664588
That's strange, i went into a supermarket and bought a toothbrush for $5. Then i went to an antique store and bargained over a beautifully carved pinewood chair, and the manager agreed to let it go for $15 less than what he wanted for it at first, which was still much more than the chair was worth back when it was produced. Huh, go figure.

>>14664519
>You have absolute legal ownership over the apples.
Oh shit that's so cool. We are lucky it's apples and not oil or diamands. Otherwise i'm pretty sure we wouldn't have ownership over it.

>>14664603
You are a lucky guy to go to antique store often. Usually the ordinary wage worker just go to Ikea.

>>14664594
That's true, but that is more of an observation of circumstance rather than an empirical truth about trade, so in my view it's a bit of a moot point. Yeah, legally speaking you'd be stealing from the owner of the tree. But it is fully possible for a tree to not have an owner or the owner not caring about who picks his wild appletrees.

>>14664622
>But it is fully possible for a tree to not have an owner
Beware you are beginning to think like a commie...

>>14664648
No the commie thinks the tree is owned by everybody

>>14664612
Yeah, that's what happens when the government provides corporate subsidies and encourages jobs to be outsourced to shithole countries like China.

>>14664606
Yeah, no, you absolutely would. If you found some diamonds in an unowned mountain, they're absolutely yours. If you went digging for diamonds in a mountian somebody owns without their consent, (We could debate the desireability of land ownership for quite a long time, i'm not quite sure what my position on it is) then the situation is more complicated, but the owner of the mountain should not under any circumstances get the diamonds you found under his posession, even if you acted illegally. I'm split on this one. But then again this is all missing the entire point of why we started this conversation, isn't it?

>>14664648
See
>>14664654
I'm still iffy about the extremely hard question of land ownership though, and if somebody should be able to claim a forest as their own just because they "found it", or if a state should be able to sell a plot of land occupied by it's citizens. Those are all questions worth considering, of course.

>>14662634
No, it's actually measurable now because we have gene sequencing. Disputing it 100 years ago would have been a scientific discussion. Denying it now is ideology.

>>14661355
If this is how leftists promote their shit it's no wonder they're all brainlets.

>>14665000
Not an argument

>>14662907
Antidepressants are a step towards it. The perfect productivity drug would have to both take away both emotional and physical suffering, so it would be like an antidepressant opiate combo. It also has to be extremely addictive.

>>14661303
Power worship is a strangely pervasive form of irrationality

>>14665032
And being an apologist for the weak and dysfunctional is a particularly pathetic form of denialism

>>14663089
>Hutterites and Amishes, small and dealienated communities, for example are thriving. The open source movement is successful, and is out of the exchange value system.
I hope they do thrive and produce a new model for civilization. I just don't see how they will compete with the corporate model. Guilds and cooperatives have been around for a long time, but most can't compete.
>Flat organizations are real (see Valve).
This is probably more realistic, but it doesn't really solve the problem so much as decentralize it.
>NEETs, which are somehow dealienated, are also a more and more common and an accepted way of life. In only 10 years, NEETs will probably be accepted by society.
To be accepted by society, you normally have to contribute something of value. NEETs would have to find some kind of niche where they make up for the value they are not providing by work.

>>14663267
Children count as people.

>>14663349
>falling rate of profit - correct
Even this is due to rising productivity though, which Marx himself admitted.

>>14663871
Yeah, we all get that capitalism is supposed to be based on mutual agreement and consent. The problem is that once you accumulate enough wealth, you can always influence the government to do whatever violence you want on your behalf. It is exactly the same as the communist who says communism is based on consent of the proletariat, but once in power the revolutionaries always set themselves up as a corrupt government. Real capitalism has never been tried just like real communism has never been tried, because they are both unsustainable ideals.

>>14661250

>labour theory of value - incorrect
>labour alienation - incorrect
>surplus value extraction - incorrect
>private property is bullshit - incorrect
>historical materialism - incorrect

>>14663977
>name one capitalist society that didn't enforce property rights through violence or the coersion of violence, I'll wait
Enforcing property rights by violence is allowed by the core axioms of the capitalist ideology. What it doesn't allow is violating property rights by violence, which it always does in the end.

>>14665143
Of course it is. It'll get funny in a few decades when no more profit is feasible.

>>14664085
I already addressed this in another post, but the cheapest possible food you can get is fresh vegetables. The skinniest I have ever been is when I was very poor and my mother used to make vegetable stew every day. Eating fattening food is way more expensive.

>>14665239
>Enforcing property rights by violence is allowed by the core axioms of the capitalist ideology
then it violates the NAP and is not-real-capitalism(tm)

>>14665266
how does protecting someone from being robbed violate the nap

>>14665256
If your prediction is correct, then we will be in a zero scarcity economy. What is bad about that?

>>14665266
Protecting property does not violate the NAP. Using the government to steal property violates the NAP, which is what capitalist societies always end up doing.

>>14665298
During the transition, most people will go nuts, and won't know what happen. It has already begun.

>>14665317
When that actually happens Im positive the elite will just gas everyone else, why wouldnt they

>>14665317
The internet and computer networks generally have already created a zero scarcity economy for information. You can get more information than you could ever consume for free, and if that isn't enough you pay pennies for a kindle e-book or buy a spotify subscription. Yes the transition is driving us nuts, but we're finding ways to handle it. I don't see how it would be any different for a zero scarcity material economy.

>>14665234
Intersting point, but i disagree. A government can be structured in a way in which corporations have little to no influence. And i don't personally believe that a pure capitalist system is desireable for a country, adopting large aspects is extremely beneficial.

>>14663085

Reply already, cowards.

>>14665276
again, you can only think of the violation of property rights as robbery lmao; brainlet take. look into Aaron Swartz and tell me who he "robbed"

>>14666596
>you can only think of the violation of property rights as robbery
Yes, because the violation of property rights must be involuntary in order to actually be violating property rights.

>look into Aaron Swartz and tell me who he "robbed"
Tell me what about him is so notable.

>>14666618
oh boy, a literal retard.
robbery doesn't mean "involuntary violation of property rights", it implies the threat or use of violence. for instance, going off a previous example, if you pick an apple off a tree in the woods, it might be theft, but it isn't robbery. since I have to explain the English language to you, I'll assume you aren't worth the effort.

>>14666632
>I'll assume you aren't worth the effort.
Don't get me wrong, the only reason why i'm giving you the time of my day is because your ideas might be o some use to me, not because i respect you as a human being either.

>it implies the threat or use of violence
Ah, i assumed you meant theft. Robbery, coersion, use of force, does not violate property rights, but it violates the justification for property rights: voluntary transaction.

>>14663242
>doesn't know any south american history

>>14662142
>I was criticizing Marx's reliance on material conditions to explain alienation. What part of that is difficult for you to understand?
What is difficult for me to understand is how you can do that when you don't even know what he means by alienation or material conditions.
>You would understand if you had read literally anything that was not written by Marx.
I've read Kant. What the fuck would having "space for the noumenal" even entail? You're just talking about your sky fairy and only using the word noumenal to make it sound more distinguished. You're a fucking pseud.
>No, homo sapiens diverged from homo erectus half a million years ago. We are biologically the same animal we were ten thousand years ago.
Tip: If you start your sentence with "no" then it should better contain something contrary to what the other person has said.
>The tempo of biological evolution is highest when selection pressure is high. Civilization protects people from as many natural causes of death as it can, lowering selection pressure.
Selection pressure can never conceivably be so high as to even approach the tempo at which our social being develops.

>>14662162
>It only gets WORSE as you improve material conditions.
Communism is not a welfare scheme you stupid faggot. I'm telling you the last time: read a book. I already told you which one and even pasted some quotes, treating you like a 5 year old. Turns out you're a fucking neonate.

>>14662228
>Which means we are not evolved for the conditions we live under
Yes we are. We are evolved to be adaptable and to build civilizations so that our social development overtakes our biological development in terms of significance. We struggle against the current social conditions because the conditions are INHUMAN, not because they're so human that we're not biologically human enough to rise to the task because muh evolution.

>>14667106
Not any of the anons you responded to, but i have a serious issue with this claim:
>We are evolved to be adaptable and to build civilizations so that our social development overtakes our biological development in terms of significance
No. We are evolved from proto-monkeys, which are evolved to fuck around trees, rape eachother and die. Then we're also granted the frontal lobe, among other cool gadgets, allowing abstract thought and among other things, large-scale organizaiton. Then these evolved monkeys organize socially, they recognize they live in shit and squalor so they invent the wheel and start building societies, little by little.
But even the frontal lobe is in eternal conflict with our purely instinctual, animal nature. The ancient aphorism that there can be no pleasure without pain is unequivocably true, because human beings have an astonishing capacity to always, no matter how good life is, strive for change, to want what they can't have. The fact that civilization as we know it today hasn't resulted in a complete collapse of the human species due to our contradictory nature is fucking astonishing, but there have been enough atrocities and enough idiocy along history that i'd say we got lucky.
It does not matter what your subjective position considers "more significant". Our social conditions are directly sourced from our biological and physical features, and those do no advance in a linear manner.

To finish this off, we are not evolved to do anything. We have evolved along certain general behavioral patterns, but our evolution has no goal, that's a bit of a misnomer, and our bodies are not adapted to modern society. We have not "evolved" as animals to live in big cities. Our bodies evolved into the bodies we have now while our species was still in the tens of thousands, beating neanderthals with sticks and raping wildlife in the asshole. At the very best, our biology is lenient enough to allow us to survive within the conditions of modern society, but we sure as fuck have not evolved to thrive here, to sit for hours on end on our asses, to eat as much as we want every single day, to look up images of naked women online whenever we're startled by the uncomfortable thought of actual social interaction.

Prove me wrong. I'll wait.

>>14667106
And to summarize my post even more succinctly, the fact that you feel as though your conditions of life are "inhuman" is the only example of the relativization of pain and pleasure you need. You live in a world where literal magic exists. Husks of aluminium are powered by the liquified remains of ancient organisms, where it is normal for most citizens to be in sole possession of a mangled death machine, which many of us use to barrel at 100 kilometers per hour through highways with to reach our office spaces, optimized for human comfort. You have convenience. You have pleasure on demand. Your only job can be to sit on your ass for 8 hours a day and draw some squiggly lines on a screen. This would sound like a fucking utopia to our hunter-gatherer forefathers, but as a testament to our bottomless arrogance, we still complain that our bellies are not full.

>>14662892
>creates twice as many jobs
Creating jobs is not a purpose in capitalism. Outside meme academics, capitalism not being about 'creating jobs' is usually the first criticism against it.
>consumer unit
Every single economic doctrine will see people as producing and consuming because that is the very core of economics. You might as well write an esthetic theory without awe, beauty and sublime.
The defining characteristic of capitalism on this front is that people are free to consoom and there is a very strong incentive to give other people what they want (which is the actual result of 'being consumer units', as opposed to being told what to produce and consume).
As for the debt thing, it has little to do with capitalism, being literally the same for any system (and in actual history the 'public sector' has always been the driver of it through their price control on interest rates, enforcing now zero percent interest). Fighting against the 'hoarders' is a strong historical anti capitalist slogan.
Indeed people won't be creating much with zero investment over time.

>>14661355
What is this retarded logic, a low skill factory worker is not valuable, why would an employer share full profits with him kek

>>14664188
Aren't pics on the left from the Great Depression of the 30's... You know, when capitalism collapsed?

>>14667216
Of course capitalism creates jobs. It needs to create jobs to get employees to create products which it then sells back to the employees at a markup. This is how employers turn a profit. The duty to work is engrained deep in our society. Feminism began with the goal of equal rights including the right to work, but now that right has become a duty as well. though the need to do real work has largely disappeared in modern tertiary economies, everyone still has some pointless empty shitty job to occupy their time and give them money to buy products now imported from the third world instead. Idleness is not tolerated in Western society. This isn't like ancient Rome where slaves did all the work and the citizens were allowed to do nothing all day.

>>14661957
G*rman philosophy is worse than snake oil. It makes all philosophy look like snake oil.
>>14662062
If the only reason for humanity to live is to belive a lie then i don't have much hope in this spiecies.
>>14664132
Yeah, i wonder for how long it would continue without manufacturing capabilities.

>>14665328
Without proletariat, there is no elite.

>>14667106
>What is difficult for me to understand is how you can do that when you don't even know what he means by alienation or material conditions.
I knew you would do this eventually, because it happens in every discussion with a Marxist. When you hear anything that doesn't fit your theory, you just do a definitional retreat and say that's not what Marx meant by it. Then you wonder why no one likes Marxists and conclude they must have false consciousness. People don't like you because you're incapable of being honest.
>You're just talking about your sky fairy and only using the word noumenal to make it sound more distinguished.
Well a society in which our brains are constantly stimulated to only think about phenomena all the time clearly isn't helping anyone, but you just keep telling yourself it's all sky fairies.
>You're a fucking pseud
No one is a bigger pseud than Marx and his followers. Pretend economist and pretend philosopher.
>If you start your sentence with "no" then it should better contain something contrary to what the other person has said.
It was contrary to what you said, but I'm not even going to bother explaining to you at this point. Anyone in doubt can just read the two comments.
>Communism is not a welfare scheme you stupid faggot.
Show me where I said it was.
>Selection pressure can never conceivably be so high as to even approach the tempo at which our social being develops.
>We are evolved to be adaptable and to build civilizations
Pick one.

>>14667190
>This would sound like a fucking utopia to our hunter-gatherer forefathers, but as a testament to our bottomless arrogance, we still complain that our bellies are not full.
I already told you this here >>14661509 and here >>14661570. No economic system will change your level of happiness.

>>14667216
The needs of capitalism are at odds with the needs of the individual. Capitalism has a perverse incentive to manufacture harm to the individual and then also manufacture the cure to the harm it created. B-b-but muh based capitalism was just meeting the consoomer's demand!

The pharmaceutical industry thanks you for being a mouthpiece for their sadistic greed.

>>14667381
>The pharmaceutical industry thanks you for being a mouthpiece for their sadistic greed.
Lyn Thyer reminder.

Most self-proclaimed "communists" have an even worse understanding of Communism than the average non-person who posts in /pol/ and the like

>>14667164

This is nonsense.

China is a market economy; anyone who uses it as an example of communism is a fucking idiot.

And I'm not defending communism at all-- just saying that China's not your "example" of how it's a failure.

>>14661328
六四事件

>>14661632
>Because he was an anti-semite and a misogynist.
He was Jewish so he gets a writeoff on all of that. The Holocaust retroactively and prospectively expiated all past and future Jewish sins.

>>14663860
>Marx thought socialism wouldn't be run by a "party" but by a "class"
Please, state your proof that this obvious ruse was not a ruse.

>Marx
The real redpill is that communism only works in small communities where everyone knows everyone and there is no need for a state or hierarchy – see he Hutterites. The globalist egalitarian communist utopia dreamed up by Marx and his latter day tranny acolytes will never happen thankfully

>>14667164
>Prove me wrong. I'll wait.
You haven't refuted anything I said or otherwise wrote anything interesting, so I'll pass. It's a trivial truth that we've biologically evolved the capacity to live however we're living now, because otherwise we wouldn't be alive. No amount of barely coherent verbal vomit will change that fact.

>>14667190
>You have convenience. You have pleasure on demand.
But you don't have true humanity, which is not a matter of individual pleasure of convenience.
>as a testament to our bottomless arrogance
It's not arrogance. It's being attuned to your own alienation and to the inhumanity of the world you live in.
You can complain all you want about people not conforming to your great idea according to which they should be constantly overjoyed and content with their lives because they own a mobile phone that would be like magic to some monkey man. But this is absolutely pointless, as they will never conform to it.

>>14667352
>because it happens in every discussion with a Marxist
They tell you to read Marx as soon as you reveal that you don't understand him in the slightest by saying some utterly retarded shit? Sounds like reasonable people.
>People don't like you because you're incapable of being honest.
At least I can read a book about a thing before attempting to criticize it.
>Well a society in which our brains are constantly stimulated to only think about phenomena all the time clearly isn't helping anyone
And I assume you would propose that instead we think about noumena, because you clearly haven't read a page of Kant and you're just talking out of your ass, am I right?
>Pretend economist and pretend philosopher.
He never pretended to be any of those. On the contrary, he outwardly criticized first philosophy and then political economy, so only someone completely uninformed about even Marx's basic project (let alone the actual content of his critiques) would think he pretended to be an economist or a philosopher.
>Show me where I said it was.
>>14661829 "If you are living in material abundance, but still think you are poor, the poverty has to be a lack of something other than material things. Capitalism has done nothing but give us more stuff, but it still makes us unhappy. This is how you know dialectical materialism is bullshit."
This is how you know the poster is a clueless retard.
>Pick one.
Those aren't contradictory. By adaptability I mean being immediately able to adapt to a large set of distinct social conditions, without any significant biological changes, depending on what kind of society you're born into.

>>14668193
what reason would Marx have to lie about his theory? this is epic cope
>Marx said x
>no Marx actually said y
>okay but Marx was lying about y and really deep down secretly he wanted x

>>14668486
>what reason would Marx have to lie about his theory?
He was a disingenuous scumbag and I do not separate the man from his work. I give his work no more credit than I would give any man of his ilk.

>>14668499
>his ilk
you mean a racist? plenty of philosophers were racist anon you need to get over that. do you think he wasn't really a communist or something?

>>14668556
He saw communism as a way to force a more rigid social hierarchy and buried his intentions in fancy language. People need to remember that the American Democratic party was, in fact, the party of slavery, and their core values have not changed in the last 200 years.

>>14668556
Also, Fuck You.

>>14668581
>He saw communism as a way to force a more rigid social hierarchy and buried his intentions in fancy language
no he actually said the opposite of that in pretty clear language. you honestly can't pretend something like the manifesto, written for illiterate factory workers, is obscurantist. l if he wanted to argue for a party rule he could have, nothing was stopping him. Marxist-Leninists certainly did and they actually managed to start a revolution with that idea. if you have to pretend that Marx was saying the opposite of that thing he wrote like 50,000 pages on I'll once again have to say this is cope
>People need to remember that the American Democratic party was, in fact, the party of slavery, and their core values have not changed in the last 200 years
did you have a stroke? you seemed to forget what you were talking about mid post or something

>>14668619
>if he wanted to argue for a party rule he could have, nothing was stopping him.
What? It's a populist movement to install and authoritarian regime. It is necessarily "obscurantist."
>did you have a stroke? you seemed to forget what you were talking about mid post or something
I'm suggesting Bernie Sanders is a not-so-crypto-marxist operating out of the democratic party. Explain to me how the fuck paying off college student debt is emancipating the working class? Is the bourgeois actually the working class, or was this dishonest language the entire time?

>>14664095
>tell me how I know you're 17 and this is your first year working a fast food job

LMAO most of the wealthiest business owners hire other people to do that for them. You think piggies like Paris Hilton know jack shit about business?

>>14665239
>Coercion is good when I like it.
Your logic is so fucking arbitrary. Actually interact with the point. Someone squats on abandoned building= literally rape

>>14665266
Lmao

>>14668692
Marxism is crypto-authoritarianism. They will never argue correctly because they are trying to start a populist movement against popular interest. They have to lie.

Listening to all of these butthurt ancap retards is making my day.
>muh NAP
kys

>>14668701
>>14668706
Case and point

>>14668701
Are you going to make a point or continue to incoherently ramble?

>>14668713
Please continue to shit up your own propaganda thread. You're doing a better job of making marxism look retarded than I possibly could.

>>14668134
Reread it until you learn english.

>>14668308
>It's a trivial truth that we've biologically evolved the capacity to live however we're living now, because otherwise we wouldn't be alive
Imagine being this much of a little reductionist bitch baby. Just because we're alive doesn't mean we're thriving. Just because we're capable of artificially surviving under modern conditions doesn't mean that our bodies are evolved to live this way, you astronomical fucking dipshit.

>But you don't have true humanity
Define "true humanity", you cryptomoralizing nigger.
>It's being attuned to your own alienation and to the inhumanity of the world you live in.
Just imagine being this much of a slave to marxist jargon. Being "attuned to your own alienation" means literally nothing more that you feel bad for some reason and subjectively interpret that reason to be muh capitalism, instead of the objective and demonstrable inconsistencies between the modern world and our biology.

>>14668664
To add to this, the democrats have every right to fuck him over in the primaries, he's not a liberal, and they have no obligation to include him in their caucus.

>>14668664
The modern college tuition debt is not higher education anymore, it is subsidizing training for employers. You used to show up to a job and get trained on their dollar, now you go to school for 4 years or more, get into a huge amount of debt, just so you can get a job for someone who will be able to get away with underpaying you because you need this money so badly
>don't go to uni then
>go into trades
>stop being a fucking retard
I'm not saying going to uni and getting in debt is the only option available to people today, but it's the one that was pushed hard in the mid 2000s and led to the creation of this student debt crisis. It has brought us one step closer to pushing the entire working class into debt before they are even employable so that businesses don't have to pay to train their employees and they can count on lower turnover because people can't afford to quit. It's also a form of financial gatekeeping in that certain jobs have a monetary entry level that can be surpassed so you get out of school debt free vs. -70k and desperate for anything. That's the model they want for all employment and they hate trades because a trade will free you from the debt cycle.

>>14668706
>>14668713
Your strawmen are fucking horrible lmao

>>14668709
It's not even worth the time of day, but I'll give you this. Lockean private property ethics are absolutely nonsense. You guys use 'coercion' in completely ambiguous and arbitrary ways. For example, if the state taxes you, it's coercion according to capitalist logic. (I'm mostly referring to libertarians, not moderates like noelibs, etc.) But let's say the proprietor charges rent for you to live on his property. By the way, what makes something 'your property?' Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Homesteading is both ahistorical (Most property was created through state backed force to privatize the commons) and a shitty ethical explanation as well. Let's say I drop some fucking tomatoes in the ocean; the molecules spread to wither end of the ocean. I've technically 'mixed my labor' haven't I? Where do the property boundaries end and begin? What natural law makes this objectively just? Nothing. Shut the fuck up ancap.

>>14668664
>It's a populist movement to install and authoritarian regime. It is necessarily "obscurantist."
patently false, literally could be disproved by reading anything Marx wrote
>Bernie Sanders
fuck off you fucking burger, turn off CNN and read a book you mongrel

>>14668718
Ok triggered ancap.
>>14668749
Thanks, I have plenty more.

>>14668757
Fine, I'll start with Das Kapital.

>>14668751
As a minarchist, i fully agree with this critique of ancaps. That being said, commies are no better.

>>14668770
Genuinely curious and not trying to meme on you, but do you support a consequentialist view of monarchism or a sort of Nozickian natural rights basis?

>>14668770
Fuck I'm retarted, I meant Minarchist.

>>14668781
Instead of monarchism, i subscribe to the consequentialist view of the state (I'm sure you could elaborate as to why you said specifically the consequentialist view of monarchism). I believe that a constitutional republic with an armed populus and a strong culture is the best compromise between stability, freedom and comfot that's possible, so i don't really need to enter into metaphysical explanations for a "right" to live or somesuch.

>>14668763
I'd say that critique of political economy is by far the best starter as he spends an awful lot of capital talking about it.
Just a heads up

>>14668788
What did he mean by this?

>>14668739
>doesn't mean that our bodies are evolved to live this way
Our bodies aren't "evolved to live" any way in particular. Evolution does not have a telos, it is utterly meaningless and contentless as far as the social goes. If current, industrial, global society exists, then it is human nature just as hunter-gatherers were and are human nature if they exist.

>>14668751
> Let's say I drop some fucking tomatoes in the ocean; the molecules spread to wither end of the ocean. I've technically 'mixed my labor' haven't I? Where do the property boundaries end and begin? What natural law makes this objectively just? Nothing. Shut the fuck up ancap.
Isn’t this Novick’s critique? I guess I’d argue that labor didn’t produce any material benefit and thus you aren’t entitled to the claim of homesteading

>historical materialism
>labor theory of value
>correct

>>14661250
Good.
Now read Lenin and Stalin.

>>14661878
>That one autist who still believes in G0d

>>14669778
Now go read Friedman

>>14669524
>Our bodies aren't "evolved to live" any way in particular
Precisely my point. Our bodies have objectively evoled while we were exhibiting certain specific behaviors, and thus has evolved to disadvantage us from other specific behaviors, many of which are crucial in modern society. Of course i'm not contending that industrial society isn't human nature - it is a product of humanity, and as such of our nature, of course. I was responding to another anon's response to yet another anon, the original claim being that the social development (and i'd posit, the more generally socially constructed aspect of technological society) has far outpaced our biological evolution.
I fully agree with this. The way the anon i was directly responding to started screetching about "inhuman conditions" and "alienation" is a direct conclusion of my world view, which i believe is much better than the short-sighted one espoused by that anon.

>>14670158
It's not your point. You keep insisting on the idea that we evolved "for" something, for example
>has evolved to disadvantage us from other specific behaviors
Once again, we did not evolve "for" anything. This does not register at the social level, at the outset of the existence of the social realm everything else in reality is subsumed by it and nothing from our animal nature remains. Even our physical body is socially mediated, something which can easily be seen by how easy it is to conceive of a world in which 'you' still exist without having a human body at all (especially clear nowadays, with transhumanism being more and more a concrete fact of life).

When Marx speaks of an inhuman world, he is emphatically not referring to anything having to do with biology or evolution. It is precisely our human, not animal, nature which is at odds with the social relations that dominate us in class society.