Oceans Yet to Burn — @zvaigzdelasas “surplus value” is critiqued within...

@zvaigzdelasas

“surplus value” is critiqued within capitalism not because it’s a priori bad to create more of something than you need to fill your own needs, but because capitalists by definition appropriate that surplus for themselves without having done anything which creates value in and of itself. This is what “profit” means within capitalism; not just more of something, but an exploitative impersonal relation which drives destructiveness and sickness.

This isn’t a fully-accurate picture, as it completely ignores the existence of the risk undertaken by capital in funding potentially bad ventures. Many businesses fail.

Is it all a risk premium? No, there is also rent-seeking, the ability of larger players to even enter the market in the first place, etc. I’m not a True Capitalist.

However, if you didn’t realize there is a risk in there that’s being compensated, then you aren’t suitable to run the Economic Planning Office, since under a planned economy the State does the same.

I’d rather just tax it.

politics communism

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justsomeantifas

when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.

mitigatedchaos

Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.

Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man. He killed people that didn’t need to be killed. He dropped people out of helicopters. He used methods of great violence. No one should imitate him.

But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.

So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.

politics communism capitalism

xhxhxhx

Communism will be a system of workers’ councils or it will not exist. The “association of free and equal producers;’ which determines its own production and distribution, is thinkable only as a system of self-determination at the point of production, and the absence of any other authority than the collective will of the producers themselves. It means the end of the state, or any state-based system of exploitation. It must be a planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitudes of the market system.

Paul Mattick (in Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils)

Difficult for the workers councils over here and the workers councils over there to coordinate their production to ensure that there are no shortfalls or gluts without an effective way of allocating targets and determining the most efficient ways of reaching them.

(via argumate)

it sounds like this “association of free and equal producers” includes all producers, hence an authority that rests with the “collective will of the producers themselves” and a concept of “planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitude of the market system,” which is only thinkable as a comprehensive system of allocative planning

it doesn’t really sound like “the end of the state,” though; it’s just that here “the state” has been replaced by the TUC/AFL-CIO

(via xhxhxhx)

Cyberpunk dystopia where mega-unions for the largest producers dominate the Central Council by having the largest number of employees, obtaining the most resources for themselves by controlling the planning process.

Source: probablyasocialecologist politics communism

dedicating-ruckus

elementarynationalism

Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.

Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.

jeremyvyoral72

This is just so sad. For any atheists out there, why? I understand the separation of church and state, but the American legion is not government, it is a private organization. Why attack a memorial to the dead erected by a private charity that has did for so many years? It just makes you look like an ass.

awhiffofcavendish

Self righteous superiority complex.

gouachevalier

“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump

Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?

higher-order

And people wonder why Atheists are hated.

mitigatedchaos

Athiests are, as far as I can tell, right about the whole “no God” thing. It certainly makes a lot more sense WRT bad things happening to good people than any religious explanation does, and doesn’t have the whole problem of Hell thing.

You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.

The thing is, people who were abused by religion, or under religious pretenses? They are going to HATE religion. So long as religion abuses or is used as a pretense to abuse people, you are going to get these kinds of reactions.

And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.

dedicating-ruckus

Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.

As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.

And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?

mitigatedchaos

Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.

You want an explanation?

Atheism is simple. It’s obvious. It doesn’t contain much information. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Because there is no one powerful enough and willing to stop them.”

But because it doesn’t contain much information, because it’s mere non-belief, it can only achieve widespread support in societies that are religion-dominated by riding on some other, more powerful, more viral ideology which displaces the main one - and those kinds of displacements tend to be a lot more violent.

Atheism doesn’t tell you what values you should have. The other ideology does, and uses the Atheism as a means to attack the legitimization of the previous ideological power structure.

“Atheism causes atrocities” has the causation backwards.

As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.

Look, the attitude here is “HOW DARE THOSE ATHEISTS BE SO AGAINST RELIGION?”

The OP says “the new atheists are going in the camps first.”

Now, he’ll say he was just memeing or whatever, but the underlying emotion about it, about how anyone could be so against religion, they must be evil, is there.

But the Atheists see religion in ways similar to how a number of people see some forms of Communism - an oppressive ideological machine that uses and discards human beings for its own ends, composed of many interlocking components.

They want to destroy all reverence for religion like some right-wingers want to destroy all reverence for Communism, because each bit sacredness contributes some small measure of power to the aura of uncriticizability that gave religion its power in previous eras.

Many of them see it that way for reasons not so different from why some of those right-wingers hate Communism so much - it was used to excuse or legitimize violence against them.

So as long as that’s happening, you don’t need to have people be tools of the Devil to run around wanting to tear down crosses. Unless, of course, you consider those doing the abuse to be tools of the devil - but then you wouldn’t be sending the Atheists to camps, ne?

And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?

Cross memorials? No. Not a blanket on stone monuments though - no Ten Commandments for courthouses.

Source: elementarynationalism politics perpendicular wood

dedicating-ruckus

mitigatedchaos

@dedicating-ruckus

In order to believe in objective moral facts, you end up needing some kind of theism. (Not necessarily Christianity, or any other specific variant.) Without it, the only rational grounding you can give for any moral claim will boil down to “because I feel like it”. This can work for individuals (though probably only if they’ve internalized the moral system of a surrounding theistic society), but good luck getting it to pass stably across generations.

I could go one of three ways on this.

Theists don’t actually believe in something objective. They’ve tricked themselves into thinking they do.
Of course that’s what a Theist would say.
If we’re being aggressive about it, it boils down the same way for theists.

Either non-theists can believe in objective moral claims, or theists can’t believe in objective moral claims. Gotta be one or the other.

Then of course, there’s the matter of why should finding the ultimate secular morality be easy? Physics isn’t easy. Chemistry isn’t easy. Mathematics, which isn’t a natural science, isn’t easy.

I’m not sure what your background is like here. You don’t ordinarily seem the type to go off from a position of ignorance, but it’s in fact fairly universal in my experience that vocal internet atheists don’t actually have any understanding of theological arguments.
These arguments basically have the same counter, which is that free will is actually really important, and God does not violate it. By humans’ free will, sovereignty over the material world passed to the Devil, “prince of this world”; this, in short form, is why bad things happen to good people. Similarly, Hell is identified with the state of willing rejection of God; He desires that everyone be saved, but this can’t happen absent the individuals’ decision to accept salvation.
This is a topic that could support (has supported, even) an arbitrary length of arbitrarily detailed argument, which I am surely not the best one to make. Since diving full-speed into theodicy would be fairly tangential to the original question, I’ll not continue along this vein.

“Free Will” is a cop out, and free will has always been a cop out.

Don’t posit beings of infinite power and then make excuses for them not to use that power.

Look, inside you, when you make a decision, that decision must be made somehow. If there is no somehow, then it is random. If there is a 1:1 fixed somehow, then it’s deterministic. If it’s somewhere in-between, probabilistic, then it’s a weighted random.

If you’ve got infinite power, then you’ve got time and resources for infinite mind engineering. If you decide not to bother with that engineering, then the outcome is arbitrary and therefore random. That’s not the kind of freedom you’d need to make to justify Hell.

Either way, you’re going to have a hell of a time, so to speak, getting infinite moral liability to stick to finite agents that were made by someone else who could have made the very laws of reality different but didn’t bother for some reason.

One could posit that God cannot imagine a universe without creating it, but that is not what religion teaches. One could posit that hell is temporary and you’re only there until you change your mind, or that only those who will never ever change their minds will go there, but that isn’t what religion typically teaches.

I’m not going from significant research here either, just general historical knowledge. To formalize my hypothesis a bit, I would say that every time a movement that is ideologically atheist has attained societal control, atrocities have followed on the part of that movement.
This doesn’t make any statement about the behavior of religious governments and power structures; clearly these have also committed atrocities historically. By this standard, I would say that the US has never qualified as atheist (despite getting closer over the late 20th century).

Ruling out religious governments and power structures is cheating.

This hypothesis would suggest that all, or a majority of, anti-religious advocacy is carried forward on the justification of concrete abuses (as universally agreed) on the part of religious people or organizations.
This is not at all my observation. Not all, not even a tenth of anti-religious argument is in this category. Perhaps a hundredth, and of this most is transparent gotcha arguments that are obviously not the interlocuter’s true rejection.

Come now, how much rejection of Communism do you think is because of how badly, historically, Communism has fucked up?

There are always going to be die-hard opposition members no matter how great your ideology is, for any sufficiently large population. It’s a natural variation. But to get bigger than that, your ideology has to have flaws.

I can tell you right now that if the Soviet Union were chill and sitting on $80,000 PPP per-capita income and this was an economic miracle wrought by Communism, I wouldn’t be bothering to oppose it. Lots of other people are like this, and yet you will find me bitching about Communism on this very blog.

The typical tactic here is to pick some modern leftist political position, enshrine it as a moral absolute, and then attack religion for not obeying it. Normal examples include opposition to abortion, gay marriage or divorce.

American religious groups blew an absolutely enormous amount of social capital fighting homosexuality, when homosexuality is only really a problem when combined with something like promiscuity - which, unsurprisingly, is not great for heterosexuals, either.

Now, unless I can cause a secular reasoning against it to catch on, there’s not as much social capital to fight polygamy.

But the real key thing here is that you want to apply literally infinite punishment to something like homosexuality. This is massively disproportionate to any sort of harm that it causes. It would be one thing if it were murder that was being punished in this way, but it isn’t.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t accept any of these as knock-down moral arguments against religion.

Not the point.

The point is the level of outrage over the actions by atheists, the whole “this is why everyone hates atheists” thing, the sympathizing-with-putting-in-camps, is disproportionate.

It’s entirely understandable that atheists would behave this way without being tools of the devil or even just cynically fighting for personal power.

Source: elementarynationalism politics perpendicular wood

steelwoolcomesfromsteelsheep

wsj.com

Is Communism Cool? Ask a Millennial

Generation Opportunity’s Andrew Clark writes about how young people see socialism today: The U.S.S.R. broke up 25 years ago—ancient history for some.

Andrew Clark

leftistparasite

“A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe ‘Communism was or is a problem.’ The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin.”

steelwoolcomesfromsteelsheep

mitigatedchaos

Side effect of the Republicans calling everything to the Left of Thatcher “Socialism” tbh. It was bound to have consequences eventually.

politics chopper meme cw?

mutant-aesthetic

twitter.com

Julian Assange 🔹 on Twitter

“10/ Here's Singapore's long term prime minister Lee Kuan Yew:”

a-sleepygoldenstorm

What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.

Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized electoral politics.

mitigatedchaos

Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.

Source: a-sleepygoldenstorm politics torches in the night racepol

the-grey-tribe

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

thathopeyetlives

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.

Today things are… different.

It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology

I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)

If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.

I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.

rendakuenthusiast

Endorsed.

Source: thathopeyetlives politics the invisible fist mostly endorsed the red hammer

bambamramfan

mitigatedchaos

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.

One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.

(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)

Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.

bambamramfan

I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.

mitigatedchaos

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

This is were I think the “moral aspect” factor comes in. It doesn’t really make sense, especially when a lot of the close alternatives will produce worse outcomes, to say “Capitalism is contradictory” unless it’s being used as a moral system.

There are people such as Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists who do use it as a moral system, as well as various other right-wingers who don’t understand the true power of AI yet. (The latter group I am having mixed success on winning over.) “Your espoused moral system is contradictory” works as a critique for them, certainly. (I’d go so far as to say that the Anarcho-Capitalists are unwitting enemies of humanity.)

But otherwise, it’s like saying “your elephant is mortal”, and like, I know my elephant is mortal, I’ve looked at a number of elephants and this one and its close relatives were the best ones I could find. I’ve heard people claim immortal elephants exist, but I’ve never seen one.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

And it’s good to show these people compassion, but I think the presence of contradictory demands is going to be a thing so long as tradeoffs must be made - and thanks to opportunity cost, which still very much exists under Communism, there are always going to be tradeoffs. In other words, I don’t think Capitalism is particularly special in this regard. (Again, unless one is using it as a moral system.)

Certainly, attempts at Communism have resulted in collisions with reality, where someone is subjected to contradictory expectations, which are partially responsible for the black markets and corruption that resulted.

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying?

The problem is, aside from wage subsidies or basic share/income, which are still within the same species of elephant, I don’t really see a better elephant right now.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics communism capitalism

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

politics communism capitalism

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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