Is surplus value, - theft or not?

[Immanuel Can]

The GOM is so extensive and reductive that it's like the basis of any ethical system possible whether those ethicals know it or not.

Actually, few systems of belief are founded on ressentiment, and by far the most famous one is Communism. Ethics is usually founded on a conception of right and wrong, good and evil, etc. Communism takes all that for granted, without any grounds at all...it assumes that the concept of "evil" or "bad" is embodied in "the bourgeoisie," or in "oppression," but as a Materialist worldview, can offer no basis at all for such a value judgment. It just assumes you will agree...like that it assumes you will respond enviously and greedily to its calls for "equality" or "equity," and to its demands for its own conception of "justice," and never question them deeply enough to realize there's nothing behind them.

Communism's a huge, nasty bluff, really.

[promethean75]

Then you clearly don't understand the GOM 'cause N is goin' all the way back to the days of Ghengis Cons. Yours is a position of spontaneous divine creation within the last six thousand years, his, a theory about the social development of an evolving species over twenty thousand years. For you, morality is handed down by god. For N, it develops between people, often unequal, over vast periods of time. N believes long before there was good and evil, there was only good and bad, and bad was only what was a disadvantage to the strong lawmakers. There was no resentment of the slave by the master. The slave was merely bad, dirty, ignoble etc. It was the prohibitionary morality of the weak that created the concept 'evil'. What the strong do and have, i do not, so the strong are a disadvantage to me, the meek, and are bad therefore. But a special kind of bad. 'Evil', to be precise. The evil became those that lacked the virtues of the meek. Modesty, humility, charity, sympathy, these pitiful feelings were alien to the strong and something bred only in weak people. The manners of the obedient, etc. Necessary for their survival. This began to torment them... that they had to be subservient on account of their weakness, not by choice. They then redefined their weakness as virtues and the virtues of the strong as vice. It was the most epic cope of all time.

[Immanuel Can]

Modesty, humility, charity, sympathy, these pitiful feelings were alien to the strong and something bred only in weak people. The manners of the obedient, etc. Necessary for their survival. This began to torment them... that they had to be subservient on account of their weakness, not by choice. They then redefined their weakness as virtues and the virtues of the strong as vice. It was the most epic cope of all time.

Nietzsche was right about many things. But what he was chiefly right about was the hopeless, inverted morality of a world without God. No wonder, then, that his most famous character was "the madman." The madman speaks the truth about what a universe without God would entail, with regard to morality...that when "God is dead," there really is none, only the "will to power," as couched in various forms. But a person who realized the honest implications of a world without God would indeed be driven mad.

[promethean75]

The first communists were fantastic worker brutes who were only kept in check by the emporer's army. If it weren't for those ancient POleece, the old monarchies would have never even gotten off the ground. Can you imagine how fucked king tut would have been if those n*ggaz stackin' pyramid rocks attacked his crib all at once?

The fundamental force of suppression is the POleece. Personal guards all the way up to the armies. They keep domestic order with the same rooflessness they dispel foreign enemies with.

If your king didn't have his fancy armies, you'd see just how wussy those dirty covetous plebs really are. Hammer 'n sickle, bitchez. I'm about that life.

[Immanuel Can]

The first communists were fantastic worker brutes...

Oh yeah? Whom do you mean? The Bolsheviks? Or do you mean something proto-Communist, prior to Marx?

[promethean75]

Please don't try to revive the dead gods like you're doing to fill the void. Embrace the chaos, Mannie! Ride the Tiger. Lose yourself in a roman wilderness of pain!

[Immanuel Can]

Please don't try to revive the dead gods...

Personally, I've never been a fan of dead gods. So thanks, but totally unnecessary.

[promethean75]

"Oh yeah? Whom do you mean? The Bolsheviks? Or do you mean something proto-Communist, prior to Marx?"

The Bs were an industrial age version of the prototype proletariat, and the proletariat is not Marx's idea. Long before the industrial age and immediately after the hunter-gatherer-scavanger age is when this class evolved. Before money and wage labor, they suffered losing control of the product stocks of their labor and the property upon which they labored to the aristocratic classes. The modern wage laborer is only the newest version of this fundamental slave class.

Fun fact: in the post Enlightenment age, this scam would have never happened. Here's why. In order to happen at all and get established, shamans and priests are needed to convince the people that the aristocratic governing class is mandated by god to govern. This has to be done long before the king builds his armies and secret POleece up because he's not yet able to defend himself against a revolt. He designs a brain police, which is a staff of intellectuals, propaganda artists, and scientists from the proletariat class whom the king has taken a special interest in.

[promethean75]

First, its local elders who run the show. The thing gets complicated as they expand in size and productivity, so power is distributed to individuals in a new managerial class that ends up passing that function (and its perks) on to the families of the managers in that class. This is the origin of the oligarchy and the inheritance of power in the earliest monarchist governments. They began as special administrative workers who managed and organized the economy, and then over several generations became fixtures of government by the consent of the masses (with a little help from the priests).

Thereafter, the external threat of invaders consolidates the power of the oligarchy even more because now the people entrust it to protect them and so they pledge allegiance to it.

While he plundered, far and wide
All his starving children cried
And though we sung his fame
We all went hungry just the same

(Kings, Steely Dan)

[Immanuel Can]

"Oh yeah? Whom do you mean? The Bolsheviks? Or do you mean something proto-Communist, prior to Marx?"
Long before the industrial age and immediately after the hunter-gatherer-scavanger age is when this class evolved.

I'm interested in your source for this information. What is it?

Fun fact: in the post Enlightenment age, this scam would have never happened.

Oh. So you disagree with Marx? Marx said it was the inevitable development of "History," (his god-substitute). But you say it didn't have to happen? And Marx said that feudalism had to give way to industrialism before the industrial proles' class could really exist. (Clearly, in Russia's case, he was dead wrong...again.) But you say no?

[promethean75]

Now, while you remind us of how we escaped the tyranny of the king and settled in Ermerica where immigrants would flock for decades to come to find liberty and freedom from their European tyrants, i would remind you that the first two hundred years of this was dreadful for anyone who stepped off a boat. And you can't go back, so you're fucked.

Those wigs had already divied everything up between the big slavers, financers and industrialists, so immigrant wage laborers and indentured servants were already fucked. It just seemed like you had more freedom because America was a big empty field. But the slave owners already owned everything. You couldn't even build a random homestead without risking getting arrested for being on some fat or alarmingly thin fucks property.

[Immanuel Can]

...i would remind you that the first two hundred years of this was dreadful for anyone who stepped off a boat....

History, for the most part, has been dreadful for everybody. So there's no distinction there. Just try being a African eunuch or a Medieval peasant. By comparison, being a migrant to North America was an opportunity: there was land, at least, and resources, at least, very attenuated relationship to the British monarch, who was months of sea travel away, and a ton of freedom as a result. There was also very little industrialization, and what was there was concentrated in the northeast. The South was mostly agrarian, and the West hadn't even been "won" yet.

...financers and industrialists...

News for you: America was founded in the 18th Century. 1776, to be precise. Industrialization was already well underway in England and the rest of Europe. But you were arguing for class much, much earlier...back to stone age times.

So your source was...what?

[promethean75]

"Oh. So you disagree with Marx? Marx said it was the inevitable development of "History," (his god-substitute). But you say it didn't have to happen?"

Indeed, and Marx couldn't have meant what he said literally, anyway. Capitalism is not a physically necessary mode of production. It doesn't have to logically happen in history. It did, but it didn't have to. It could have been bypassed altogether. Or, as Marx claimed, it would come into existence naturally, produce sirius conflicts in practice, and cause the masses to rearrange shit.

And socialism certainly isn't inevitable. Especially as long as the major world religions keep the working classes at odds with each other internationally. Capitalism could be the end of history. Ultra capitalism... Elysium level terraformed mars resorts for the 118, 276 owners of planet erf while 7 billion people down below the smogosphere wear uniforms and breathing masks and file slowly, languidly, to their punch cards under the careful watch of the D7eX model citizens protocol force mobile cybernetic security systems by Tesla.

[Immanuel Can]

"Oh. So you disagree with Marx? Marx said it was the inevitable development of "History," (his god-substitute). But you say it didn't have to happen?"

Indeed, and Marx couldn't have meant what he said literally, anyway.

So was Marx incompetent? Or lying?

Capitalism is not a physically necessary mode of production. It doesn't have to logically happen in history.

Marx thought it did. It had to, he thought, because it provided the whole rationale for the revolution. It was the avails of industrialization that he hoped to be able to redistribute, too.

And socialism certainly isn't inevitable.

Well, Marx thought the version of it called "Communism" was inevitable. Of course, like some fevered pseudo-prophet, he thought it was inevitable in the future, not in anything that had yet happened.

Capitalism could be the end of history.

Not according to Marx. He thought the Triumph of the Proletariat and the Classless Society would produce the end of history.

Of course, Marx was a goof. He got everything so wrong that not even his present-day followers are willing to back his nonsense. For them, he's now called "crude Marxism," and their own is "Neo-Marxism." In other words, they're so desperate to make Marx's idea work that they've had to throw Marx overboard when he became dead weight. Had they stayed with him, it would have been too easy for their critics to show that Marx was just wrong in too many ways.

[promethean75]

Yeah, i know the process. In Ermerica, there were only a few major industries up for grabs (oil, railroad, textile, steel, etc), and a shit ton of little industries for the taking. But the big markets were already cornered by the power fams that were in cahoots with the wigs and the banks while the little industries built the Ermerican haute bourgeoisie.

By about the mid-20th century, the limits of the dream had been reached. It was shown that never any more than x percent of the people in an industrial nation would amass x amount of wealth. A few of us went from broke muddy immigrant to small business owner while the vast majority of us became even broker than we were before we got on the boat two hundred years ago.

There would come a few major technological leaps, and somebody somewhere would have the idea first. There would be the Fords, the Gates, the Zuckerbergs, but not very many at all. Then there is nothing new to invent, no tech field not already dominated by only a handful of people.

The natural monopolyptic order of capitalism took a few hunerd years to appear, but appear, it did, and now everyone's in debt because of the market machinations of these malfeasant monopolyptic monsters.

You know what a small business is today? Selling handmade junk nik-naks and accessories online. Show me a recent new restaurant chain anywhere in the world that hasn't failed. I'm tellin' you they've cornered the goddamn market, Mannie. Your whole uppermiddle class haute bourgeoisie is about to experience a rude awakening.