How Learning Economics Makes You Antisocial - Page 6 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15001860
QatzelOk wrote:Yes, they wanted more worker bees.

The alternative was always a higher death rate, especially for children. You are a socialist, so you think it is better for more children to die. Simple.
And now their worker bees are in the billions, and resources are drying up.

No, more and more resources are being made available. Google "Ehrlich Simon Wager" and start reading. The exception is natural fertility resources like fish stocks, but they are being depleted because they are NOT owned: it's the Tragedy of the Commons. The privately owned forests of the USA are in excellent condition because their owners want them to remain productive.
Withouut owners, humanity would have a lower population right now, and less technology. Thus, we would be much further away from extinction (the ultimate failure of a species).

Wrong again. Humanity actually came very, very close to extinction after the Lake Toba eruption 70Kya precisely BECAUSE we did not have technology to adapt to global cooling. In fact, our high intelligence relative to previous human species is probably mainly due to the intense selection pressure of that event: those who could not figure out ways to cope with radically cooler and drier climate -- especially surviving winter outside the tropics -- perished.
Oh please.

Sorry to identify facts that prove your beliefs are false and evil.
Our economy is so layered and connected and its mafias are so on top of social control, that banksters, means of production owners, and land owners all work together to ensure everyone else's servitude and poverty.

No, that's impossible, because unlike banksters and landowners, those who own producer goods have no legal power to deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have. They can't make anyone any worse off. All they can do is reduce scarcity and increase abundance. By contrast, banksters are legally empowered to issue and charge interest on the money that people have to use to participate in the economy, while landowners are legally empowered to deprive others of their liberty to use natural resources. IP monopoly owners can deprive us of knowledge and ideas that would otherwise be in the public domain.
The means of production, of transportation, of opportunity, of legality... are all in the hands of an oligarchy (our owners) who herd normal people with violence and lies.

The only people who can be our owners are those who own our rights to liberty: landowners and other privilege holders. Landowners own our liberty rights to ACCESS transportation infrastructure, job opportunities at factories, etc. IP monopolists own our liberty rights to access and use knowledge, ideas, and culture that would be in the public domain if they had not been legally reprivatized. The factory owner, by contrast, can't stop us from making a living, only offer us an enhanced opportunity to do so. Landowners and IP monopolists can and do stop us from making a living unless we pay them full market value for PERMISSION to do so. Banksters are in a slightly different category, as they enrich themselves by being entitled to do something -- issue money -- that the rest of us are not allowed to do. But our dependence on banksters for money enables them to charge us interest on the money we have to use to access economic opportunity.
They have studied the important parts of "economics" very well.

More accurately, they have paid for the creation and hegemony of a phony and dishonest "economics" -- neoclassical economics -- that serves their narrow financial interests.
#15001951
While what you have written is well put together and long on words, it doesn't in any way convince anyone that Learning Economics does NOT lead to anti-social behavior.

You have said that technology helped mankind out of a cooling event, but you have not proven that without technology, that mankind wouldn't have made it out of that cooling event. Only that certain humans didn't make it out alive, and therefore, you conclude, technologies are good (even as we currently approach the destruction of our living earth).

This demonstrates how you have learned to use your education to defend technologies and power, not to defend the quality of life or social relations.

So your texts are living proof that the OP position may be accurate.

"We learnt to defend power by always talking about it in glowing terms." Not of what you have provided is convincing of anything other than that you have bought into your own culture's values, and this includes Power-is-good, which means that social relations are not because power is used to dominate other people.

Perhaps the humans who died during the cooling period were all the kind people, killed by the more aggressive and fearful. That would re-spin your positive version of the history of technology pretty well into the opposite narrative. And all of your other points were equally selective in their description.
#15002064
QatzelOk wrote:While what you have written is well put together and long on words, it doesn't in any way convince anyone that Learning Economics does NOT lead to anti-social behavior.

There's a difference between learning the facts of economics, which promotes positive social outcomes by relieving scarcity, and learning modern mainstream neoclassical economics, which promotes, rationalizes, and justifies anti-social behavior and the gratuitous, forcible infliction of scarcity on others to obtain unearned wealth.
You have said that technology helped mankind out of a cooling event, but you have not proven that without technology, that mankind wouldn't have made it out of that cooling event.

Whether humanity would have survived without technology is irrelevant: technology is what has driven our intellectual development into becoming human. Without it, we would be no more intelligent than chimps, because brains are biologically expensive, and there would be no compelling reason to have more brains than a chimp.
Only that certain humans didn't make it out alive, and therefore, you conclude, technologies are good

Technologies are incapable of being good or evil. They are just ways to enhance the power of our human faculties. People choose whether to use them for good or evil.
(even as we currently approach the destruction of our living earth).

That is a remote possibility but one that must be faced. As technology enhances human powers, its further development will inevitably be pursued. It cannot be stopped or even appreciably slowed by any human political intervention, any more than silly "biodiversity preservation" laws can stop evolution. It's true that a malevolent superhuman artificial intelligence (SAI) or out-of-control self-reproducing nanotechnology could indeed destroy all life on earth. But the notion that, e.g., burning fossil fuels as an industrial energy source could possibly have a large net negative impact on global climate, let alone imperil human survival, let alone destroy the biosphere altogether, is just silly, Chicken Little nonscience with no basis in empirical fact.
This demonstrates how you have learned to use your education to defend technologies and power, not to defend the quality of life or social relations.

False. See above. I merely have enough more and better education (and intellect) than you to understand why your fears of CO2 and technology are absurd and groundless.
So your texts are living proof that the OP position may be accurate.

It is accurate in the sense explained above. Those who study modern mainstream neoclassical economics become worse human beings.
"We learnt to defend power by always talking about it in glowing terms." Not of what you have provided is convincing of anything other than that you have bought into your own culture's values, and this includes Power-is-good, which means that social relations are not because power is used to dominate other people.

Please try to find a willingness to know the difference between the power to give and the power to take. Both socialists and capitalists pretend they are the same: socialists to justify taking the factory owner's power to give, and capitalists to justify giving landowners, banksters, and other privilege holders the power to take.
Perhaps the humans who died during the cooling period were all the kind people, killed by the more aggressive and fearful.

It's possible. Evolution does not care about kindness. It only rewards survival and reproduction, and those are therefore the ultimate measure of morality: everything else perishes. Among animals, this dynamic often results in behaviors we find appalling, like the new alpha male lion's infanticide of a fallen male's offspring. One primate ethologist said that such behavior made life in gibbon society, "a grisly existence I would not wish on my worst enemy." But remember: it is precisely technology that has made us more peaceful than our ancestors, by upping the stakes in violent conflict. The big, brutal bully has to think twice about throwing his weight around when even the 98-lb weakling is perfectly capable of sticking a spear through his chest. It may have taken two world wars to evolve a peaceful German, but it only took one to evolve a peaceful Japanese.
That would re-spin your positive version of the history of technology pretty well into the opposite narrative. And all of your other points were equally selective in their description.

Nope. I don't agree with your premise that niceness is a higher good than survival. Survival is the highest good because morality cannot be impractical, and everything but survival ends in extinction and consequent moral meaninglessness.
#15002282
About people killing one another with weapons, Truth To Power wrote:Evolution does not care about kindness.

You don't know what evolution is. Natural Selection is evolution.

Being selected based on fake criteria like your ability to be a psycho-bitch who kills everyone... is anti-evolution. Weaker specimens (naturally weaker) can out-survive the strong, and this makes our entire species weaker and less survival-oriented.

If weapons determine who lives and who dies, our species will become more and more unethical and dangerous to itself and others.

Darwin's work emphatically leaves it up to NATURE (not techno-toys) to determine who lives and dies. NATURE is the definition of strong, not Smith and Wessen.
#15002330
QatzelOk wrote:
Alienation and emptiness are human miseries that would not be available if our owners did not provide them.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, emptiness and alienation are also experienced by the owners themselves, and in situations where ownership is irrelevant.



This isn't a *contradictory* point -- taking it as being true at face-value, it would mean that capitalist alienation would apply to ownership as well as workers.

Of course this isn't the real meaning, though, and TTP has a written record of sidestepping the Marxian definition, in favor of imputing a *psychological* definition.

The *real* meaning of 'alienation', as applied to the worker, is an *economic* / material distinction:



Alienation of the worker from their product



Alienation of the worker from the act of production



Alienation of the worker from their Gattungswesen (species-essence)



Alienation of the worker from other workers



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_ ... alienation



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QatzelOk wrote:
You don't know what evolution is. Natural Selection is evolution.

Being selected based on fake criteria like your ability to be a psycho-bitch who kills everyone... is anti-evolution. Weaker specimens (naturally weaker) can out-survive the strong, and this makes our entire species weaker and less survival-oriented.

If weapons determine who lives and who dies, our species will become more and more unethical and dangerous to itself and others.

Darwin's work emphatically leaves it up to NATURE (not techno-toys) to determine who lives and dies. NATURE is the definition of strong, not Smith and Wessen.



With your points taken, QO, I'd like to say that you probably *don't* want to go down this road of 'biological determinism' since human *culture* has far supplanted any kind of *genetic*-based determinism -- which happens to be the prevailing line of mainstream bourgeois science these days, unfortunately. (The hard sciences and the social sciences don't usually talk to each other, which is yet-another form of reductionist Western 'alienation', so-to-speak, or the ghettoization of subject areas.)


Humanities - Technology Chart 3.0

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Humanities-Technology Chart 2.0

Spoiler: show
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Humanity is at the stage of material production where it really *doesn't matter* who's strong and who's weak because society has the capability / means of providing *all* people with the materials for healthy, self-motivated lives, given varying starting-points per individual.
#15002405
ckaihatsu wrote:This isn't a *contradictory* point -- taking it as being true at face-value, it would mean that capitalist alienation would apply to ownership as well as workers.

Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.
Of course this isn't the real meaning, though, and TTP has a written record of sidestepping the Marxian definition, in favor of imputing a *psychological* definition.

All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.
The *real* meaning of 'alienation', as applied to the worker, is an *economic* / material distinction:

QatzelOK was referring to alienation in the context of emptiness and misery, which are psychological, not economic.

<silly Marxist garbage snipped>
#15002413
QatzelOk wrote:You don't know what evolution is.

I understand it incomparably better than you. Watch:
Being selected based on fake criteria like your ability to be a psycho-bitch who kills everyone... is anti-evolution.

See? There is nothing fake about still being alive when your competitors are dead.
Weaker specimens (naturally weaker) can out-survive the strong, and this makes our entire species weaker and less survival-oriented.

Nope. Weaker specimens out-surviving the strong means the former are actually fitter. The fossil record is full of bigger, stronger, but extinct versions of modern species.
If weapons determine who lives and who dies, our species will become more and more unethical and dangerous to itself and others.

Maybe, maybe not. As our weapons have become more powerful, human societies have become less, not more, violent, and less, not more, concerned with other species. No modern human society is remotely as violent and unethical as ape societies.
Darwin's work emphatically leaves it up to NATURE (not techno-toys) to determine who lives and dies. NATURE is the definition of strong, not Smith and Wessen.

Nope. Darwin made it clear that survival and reproduction trump whatever you imagine nature defines as "strong." There is little doubt that modern humans are physically weaker than Neanderthals. But they are gone, and we are still here. Smith and Wesson is just one recent factor in that evolution.
#15002440
Truth To Power wrote:Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.

Explain. Preferably you would provide your own theory of alienation, too.

All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.

Accusations of obscurity are a complaint, not a rebuttal. Any trouble one encounters understanding Marxist definitions does not refute these definitions, just as it would be in bad faith for me to accuse you of being unclear and then to use that accusation to argue against your points, without regard for their actual content.
#15002617
Truth To Power wrote:
Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.



This has no *meaning* -- all you're doing is being dismissive without saying *why* or *how*.


Truth To Power wrote:
All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.

QatzelOK was referring to alienation in the context of emptiness and misery, which are psychological, not economic.

<silly Marxist garbage snipped>



Your dismissiveness is baseless -- it's one thing to say 'I'm pro-capitalism', but it's another thing to then shit all over perspectives on social reality, like those from me, that are pro-working-class without your providing of any justification or reasoning for that dismissiveness.

Your anti-Marxism is unwarranted since you can't do anything except opinionate.
#15002716
Truth To Power wrote:There is nothing fake about still being alive when your competitors are dead.

No one said there was. But this "survival" isn't necessary Darwinian evolution. Evolution is about A SPECIES being strong because of its genetic history and elimination of those who can't tolerate NATURAL conditions.

If a serial killer opens fire at a rock concert and kills everyone else, this person is no "stronger" from an evolutionary perspective than the people he killed. In fact, some of the people he killed no doubt had better "survival" genetics than the killer, and were more "survival-minded" which is also part of Natural Selection.

On the other hand, if a naturally-occurring disease or climatic condition kills everyone except those with a specific genetic trait, then these survivors are part of evolution. But the minute humans start using technology to cheat at this natural reality, we being to pursue things that are NOT survival-oriented.

We are there now. Our SUVS helps drivers survive frontal impacts, but will drive our species to extinction. Is this a clear enough example for you to understand what actual "Evolution" is? Or are you too locked into your own practices and ideology to understand it?

Most Westerners are still living in the 1700s when it comes to understanding Darwin.

Evolution is about being "adaptable to the natural world." To be "adaptable to weapons and capitalism" is a disaster in that this kind of unnatural "killing" leads to the survival of the weakest and most dim-witted.

Imagine the Capones killing everyone else in Chicago. And then all dying of hay-fever when spring comes.

Nature doesn't care how strong you are with technology.

Learning (and internalizing) our fake social practices (like Economics) leads you to practices that endanger the survival of our species.
#15003113
Justin_S wrote:Explain. Preferably you would provide your own theory of alienation, too.

Alienation is a psychological or social phenomenon, not an economic one. To the extent that modern life and work are alienating because they are unnatural, and quite unlike the life and work of our hunter-gatherer forebears, that is a matter of improved technology, not economic system, and would not be -- and hasn't been -- any different under socialism.
Accusations of obscurity are a complaint, not a rebuttal.

Wrong again. Definitions that are intended to obscure rather than clarify are dishonest and worthless.
Any trouble one encounters understanding Marxist definitions does not refute these definitions,

Wrong again. If definitions don't make sense, or don't match useful concepts, that refutes them.
just as it would be in bad faith for me to accuse you of being unclear and then to use that accusation to argue against your points, without regard for their actual content.

I can be accused of many things, but being unclear is not one of them.
#15003140
Learning economics certainly can make you anti-social.

But it isn't necessarily the case. It can even make you less anti-social, such as if you take the lessons to heart about the severe socio-economic issues effecting society.

On the other hand, learning environmentalism can make you downright homo-/sui-cidal, if we are honest about it (and I'm not really suggesting this result to be irrational, nor am I really rejecting environmentalism).

@QatzelOk , for example, is actually quite economics literate. He might want to deny this, or maybe not. Perhaps he's a professor of economics in Canada, who's sort of taking the piss in a way.

I don't really necessarily think so (but then, he could be a plumber, and my guess might be about as statistically odds-on, given how little I know him--or I could guess he's maybe a sheep farmer, and the odds might be a little higher, based on how well I've gotten to know him of late...). (Okay, now I'm taking the piss.)

Anyway, I'm a bit pissed (pissed in the British sense) so I think I'll pinch it off, but Qatz's economics is actually also economics. Not saying I totally agree with him or anything, but economics does indeed benefit in my view from diversity of opinion; yet often does really suffer from group think (not to mention the insidiousness of perspectives based on (upper-)class vested interests, etc.).
#15003173
ckaihatsu wrote:This has no *meaning* -- all you're doing is being dismissive without saying *why* or *how*.

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Your dismissiveness is baseless

Nope. It's based on facts of economics and epistemology, and more importantly, willingness to know them. Marxism/socialism is based on refusal to know them.
-- it's one thing to say 'I'm pro-capitalism',

I have stated repeatedly that I am not, and you know it. I am just even more anti-socialist than anti-capitalist.
but it's another thing to then shit all over perspectives on social reality, like those from me, that are pro-working-class

Your perspectives are neither based on social reality nor pro-working class. They are merely anti-success. As we have seen in this thread, the socialist perspective resents the superior merit and consequent material success of the highly productive even more than the parasitism of the privileged.
without your providing of any justification or reasoning for that dismissiveness.

No, I have stated exactly why Marxism is wrong, absurd, and worthy of nothing but dismissal: it refuses to know the fact that the factory owner makes a contribution to production by offering the worker access to opportunity -- means of production -- he would not otherwise have. Everyone who has read this thread has witnessed the absurd mental contortions you have resorted to to prevent yourself from knowing it.
Your anti-Marxism is unwarranted since you can't do anything except opinionate.

Wrong. I have identified the indisputable facts of objective physical reality that prove Marxism is objectively false. You have simply decided not to know such facts.
#15003181
QatzelOk wrote:No one said there was.

Yes, actually, you did.
But this "survival" isn't necessary Darwinian evolution.

Sure it is.
Evolution is about A SPECIES being strong because of its genetic history and elimination of those who can't tolerate NATURAL conditions.

Nope. It's about genes and the individuals who pass them on or fail to pass them on. That's all.
If a serial killer opens fire at a rock concert and kills everyone else, this person is no "stronger" from an evolutionary perspective than the people he killed.

That depends on how may descendants he ultimately has compared to them.
In fact, some of the people he killed no doubt had better "survival" genetics than the killer, and were more "survival-minded" which is also part of Natural Selection.

A lot of evolution is of course just dumb luck, but there is no unambiguous way to separate luck from the effects of genetically inheritable fitness. One reason intelligence is so highly adaptive is that it enables one to better predict the vicissitudes of fortune.
On the other hand, if a naturally-occurring disease or climatic condition kills everyone except those with a specific genetic trait, then these survivors are part of evolution. But the minute humans start using technology to cheat at this natural reality, we being to pursue things that are NOT survival-oriented.

Nope. We create our society based on our genes, so the reality our society creates is just as much a part of natural selection as anything else.
We are there now. Our SUVS helps drivers survive frontal impacts, but will drive our species to extinction.

Such claims are absurd.
Is this a clear enough example for you to understand what actual "Evolution" is?

It's a clear enough example to prove you DON'T know what it is.
Or are you too locked into your own practices and ideology to understand it?

Your claim above was false and absurd. Learn it, or continue to talk nonsense on the subject permanently.
Most Westerners are still living in the 1700s when it comes to understanding Darwin.

Including you.
Evolution is about being "adaptable to the natural world."

Nope. It's only about which genes get passed on. Nothing else.
To be "adaptable to weapons and capitalism" is a disaster in that this kind of unnatural "killing" leads to the survival of the weakest and most dim-witted.

Only if you think you know better than reality what constitutes being weak and dim-witted.
Imagine the Capones killing everyone else in Chicago. And then all dying of hay-fever when spring comes.

Why would I waste my time on such obvious absurdities?
Nature doesn't care how strong you are with technology.

Yes, actually, it does.
Learning (and internalizing) our fake social practices (like Economics) leads you to practices that endanger the survival of our species.

Not really. Our species' survival will be endangered by certain technologies -- bioweapons, self-replicating nanotech, and superhuman artificial intelligence are candidates in the foreseeable future -- that really have very little to do with social practices or economics. People pursue power, and technology is power. That's true under any economic system.
#15003368
Truth To Power wrote:
Alienation is a psychological or social phenomenon, not an economic one.



Bullshit -- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.


Truth To Power wrote:
To the extent that modern life and work are alienating because they are unnatural, and quite unlike the life and work of our hunter-gatherer forebears, that is a matter of improved technology, not economic system, and would not be -- and hasn't been -- any different under socialism.



First off, you're *not* a socialist, so you have no *credentials* to speak on behalf of socialism, or on historical Stalinism.

It's funny that you're deliberately avoiding *economic* issues here on an *economics* thread -- you're blaming 'modern life and work' for people being alienated from the work that they do, when in fact the problem is the *social hierarchy* of classes, in which the ruling class preys on the labor efforts of the working class.

The *timeline* of class society doesn't matter -- it could be feudal lords over serfs, slavemasters over slaves, the aristocracy over governments, or Silicon Valley over our present-day use of computer technologies. What all of these scenarios have in common is that technology is *incidental* to the social relations of dominance by ownership over labor.

So again you're *wrong* -- social relations *are* economic / material, leading to alienation, and are *not* due to century or decade, technology, or social psychology.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show
Image



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Truth To Power wrote:
All Marxist definitions are dishonest attempts to confuse and obscure rather than clarify and illuminate.



Justin_S wrote:
Accusations of obscurity are a complaint, not a rebuttal.



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong again. Definitions that are intended to obscure rather than clarify are dishonest and worthless.



Sure, no one can disagree with you *empirically* here, but you're only using an abstraction, off on a tangent, as usual -- the *issue* at-hand is whether Marxist definitions aim to confuse and obscure instead of clarifying and illuminating.

Since Marxist definitions are from the perspective of the *working class*, *you* deride such as being 'confusing' and 'obscuring', since you're politically partisan to the interests of the *merchant class* and its quantitative economic scheme of 'pricing' (exchange values), while ignoring the actual human labor that *produced* such exchange values.

Recall that you once *admitted* this -- that the price of the product sold *has* to be greater than the wage paid to the worker for *producing* it, otherwise there's no point in private ownership of the productive process under capitalism:


Truth To Power wrote:
[If] the value of the product is not greater than the value of the labor that goes into it, it's a waste of time making it. There's no net gain. Duh.



viewtopic.php?p=15000685&sid=73a62d5256f5a274fe01ad7013aa2f46#p15000685



So here you acknowledge that labor inputs *value* into the final commodity, and that that labor is not paid the full market value ('pricing') from the sale of the product produced by that labor. This discrepancy can be called -- in Marxist terms -- 'exploitation'. The worker is ripped-off, in material terms, for every hour of labor, which is a type of *alienation* in economic / material terms.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

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Truth To Power wrote:
Marx's theory of alienation is garbage.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This has no *meaning* -- all you're doing is being dismissive without saying *why* or *how*.



Truth To Power wrote:
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.



*You're* the one making assertions without any underlying evidence, and without providing any reasoning, like 'why' or 'how'.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Your dismissiveness is baseless



Truth To Power wrote:
Nope. It's based on facts of economics and epistemology, and more importantly, willingness to know them. Marxism/socialism is based on refusal to know them.



This is *yet another* baseless contention from you -- here you are, on a *discussion* board, but you're preferring to favor sounding like some kind of authoritative 'expert', while unable to make the sale because you're not providing any objective basis for your facile claims.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
it's one thing to say 'I'm pro-capitalism',



Truth To Power wrote:
I have stated repeatedly that I am not, and you know it. I am just even more anti-socialist than anti-capitalist.



Bullshit -- you've repeatedly touted equity values and profit-making, which is all solidly proof of your ideological agreement with capitalism.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
but it's another thing to then shit all over perspectives on social reality, like those from me, that are pro-working-class



Truth To Power wrote:
Your perspectives are neither based on social reality nor pro-working class. They are merely anti-success. As we have seen in this thread, the socialist perspective resents the superior merit and consequent material success of the highly productive even more than the parasitism of the privileged.



This is more ideological propaganda on your part -- you situate 'productivity' as being the machinations of elitist capitalist ownership over mass-industrially-productive private property (factories), while it's the *workers* who actually have to work on the machines, to produce finished products, while being materially *exploited*.

'Success' to you is this ruling class dominance over the social-productive process, through the ownership of private property, including the capitalist state's use of violence to *enforce* these class relations. There's no 'merit' to private property, and 'material success' only comes from this productive monopolization over the heads of the working class.

Since you *do* acknowledge privileged parasitism, you'd do well to *emphasize* this empirical reality, and the objective interests of the working class for the collective *seizing* and *controlling* of all socially productive machinery.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
without your providing of any justification or reasoning for that dismissiveness.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, I have stated exactly why Marxism is wrong, absurd, and worthy of nothing but dismissal: it refuses to know the fact that the factory owner makes a contribution to production by offering the worker access to opportunity -- means of production -- he would not otherwise have. Everyone who has read this thread has witnessed the absurd mental contortions you have resorted to to prevent yourself from knowing it.



'Opportunity' is an overstatement since *all* working-class people are empirically *under duress* to sell their labor power as a commodity to this-or-that private property owner, for a necessarily exploitative wage.

There's no 'contribution' when all financial investments into the productive process are done *strategically* for the sake of making private profits.

You somehow think that you're *refuting* Marxism with your groundless claims when all you're really doing is pinning medals on yourself and buying trophies for yourself. It's underwhelming.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Your anti-Marxism is unwarranted since you can't do anything except opinionate.



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong. I have identified the indisputable facts of objective physical reality that prove Marxism is objectively false. You have simply decided not to know such facts.



Nope -- I've provided many points, including reasoning, that you're unable or unwilling to respond to.


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Truth To Power wrote:
[W]e create our society based on our genes, so the reality our society creates is just as much a part of natural selection as anything else.



This reveals *much* about your own viewpoint and worldview -- you're a *biological determinist*, and now you've projected this worldview into *cultural* human development.

By this premise you're stuck in a kind of 'genetic predestination' -- since society is allegedly 'based on our genes', and, according to you, based on the process of natural selection, there's no space left for the exercise of one's own *free will*, since all of our personhood and decision-making is already pre-determined *genetically*. Good luck with that erroneous hypothesis.


Truth To Power wrote:
[Our] species' survival will be endangered by certain technologies -- bioweapons, self-replicating nanotech, and superhuman artificial intelligence are candidates in the foreseeable future -- that really have very little to do with social practices or economics. People pursue power, and technology is power. That's true under any economic system.



You're again imputing your own opinions onto socialism, which is *inappropriate* since you ideologically defend capitalist exchange-relations, or 'commodity production'.

You're missing that social values like 'power', are a function of the society's *productive relations* -- class -- and with the mass-conscious *overthrow* of the class divide there will be an opening for *other* productive relations and values to emerge, ones based on a new reality of *material abundance* instead of capitalism's artificial scarcity, and of full social *cooperation* instead of class-based hierarchical *rule*.
#15003377
ckaihatsu wrote:Bullshit -- alienation is an *economic* dynamic, one which separates the products of labor from the workers who created them, just like the Wikipedia article covers.

That's retarded. No one goes to work being sad they didn't get to keep what they produced because they go to work to get money not the things they sell to get money. Imagine a factory worker crying because the factory managers paid him lovely lovely money instead of a ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts. :lol:
#15003379
SolarCross wrote:
That's retarded. No one goes to work being sad they didn't get to keep what they produced because they go to work to get money not the things they sell to get money. Imagine a factory worker crying because the factory managers paid him lovely lovely money instead of a ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts. :lol:



You're obviously missing the point -- why *shouldn't* workers be able to keep the products of their own labor?

A ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts are still *commodities*, and could be sold to buyers for *far more* than what the workers receive in wages to *produce* those commodities. All that the private property owner has brought to the table is the past products of past labor expended, like the factory building itself, known as 'dead labor'.

You seem to be trying to *convince* the worker that necessarily-exploitative wages should be seen as *sufficient* somehow, as adequate recompense for the ownership's taking of the workers' product of their / our labor.

We can simply look to what the hegemonic *owner* prefers to take -- it's the *finished* product, worth more on the market than the *lesser* value of the wage paid to the workers for the *production* of that commodity, whatever it happens to be.
#15003380
ckaihatsu wrote:You're obviously missing the point -- why *shouldn't* workers be able to keep the products of their own labor?

A ton of exhaust pipes or self-sealing stembolts are still *commodities*, and could be sold to buyers for *far more* than what the workers receive in wages to *produce* those commodities. All that the private property owner has brought to the table is the past products of past labor expended, like the factory building itself, known as 'dead labor'.

You seem to be trying to *convince* the worker that necessarily-exploitative wages should be seen as *sufficient* somehow, as adequate recompense for the ownership's taking of the workers' product of their / our labor.

We can simply look to what the hegemonic *owner* prefers to take -- it's the *finished* product, worth more on the market than the *lesser* value of the wage paid to the workers for the *production* of that commodity, whatever it happens to be.

The workers themselves don't want them, they want the money. The customers want the product.
#15003387
SolarCross wrote:
The workers themselves don't want them, they want the money. The customers want the product.



Okay, it looks like I'm going to have to *spell this out* for you....

Yes, there's always *organic demand* for whatever products -- this includes the *life-critical* products of *food*, housing, etc.

Under capitalism, however, organic demand *isn't enough* -- if the persons who need or want to be consumers don't have enough money to *purchase* life-critical goods (etc.), then the state will *enforce* the default personal scarcity from the goods (and services) that they may critically need. A good example here is Venezuela right now, where U.S. sanctions have denied 'free trade' to that country, thus further impoverishing many -- collective punishment -- despite Venezuelans not having done anything wrong to warrant this collective punishment through economic sanctions.

Workers are the ones who *make* things -- not the capitalists -- and so they should be able to control the products of their own labor, away from commodity production and exchange values, and instead for actual human need.

Yes, under capitalism we live in a money- / commodity-based economics, and so workers need money to purchase the necessities of life and living. If they could also control their own productive efforts, for material production, then they could collectively direct *where*, and *to who* these goods and services go, instead of being ripped-off by the bosses (private property owners).

So a worldwide socialist revolution is needed so that no section of humanity has to suffer while human-necessary goods and services are produced, possibly in overproduction (physical abundance), yet poorly distributed due to the lack of money in the possession of those who need, but can't afford, such goods and services.

Ultimately money would no longer even be socially *necessary* because, under capitalism, it's a commodity itself, and socialism enables free-access and direct-distribution to the products of self-collectivized, liberated labor.

I developed a framework model for a potential functioning of a post-capitalist, socialism- and communism-type economics and society, which is here:

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions


You're welcome.
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