IC please clarify for us

[promethean75]

... and how much more horrible would it be if that construction guy, by sheer luck, ends up buying a house he actually built years ago working by the hour for some redneck framer. Banks pay Pulte to pay contractors to pay white trash construction worker guys to build houses they will then sell back to the guys who built them at a %1000 percent price increase.

Like the guy who's worked at the auto plant for twenty years and still drives a 2002 Corolla in the year 2026 or some such nonsense as that.

And I'm not saying house builders therefore get a home and hottub assemblers therefore get a hottub. I'm just stopping a moment to observe the irony. Somehow a society has managed to allow for this kind of irony. Like this shouldn't be possible for so many other reasons... but the fact that a bastard who actually puts together cars 8 hrs a day for a living would end up with a clunker is just inconceivable.

[Immanuel Can]

Bro, i know all that. I'm saying that the fact that there is a democratic Left at all demonstrates a) the existence of a major ideological division in society and b) a conflict of interests between two or more classes in society.

Certainly a) is true; but b) is not. This is one of the things Marx clearly got badly wrong...so wrong, in fact, that the Neo-Marxists have almost completely dropped "class" as a category of critique, and gone to "race," "gender," and other such categories (called "intersectionality," when combined) to create an "aggrieved" revolutionary group where none existed. Marx was just that wrong.

These circumstances aren't produced by the Left, boss.

But the polarization we see today is largely caused by the Left. For "the right" needs no angry revolutionaries; but the Left is continually attempting to conjure them up. The Left is the "critical" wing, as they never cease to remind us; the "right" is said to be the conservative side...and that means that, to some extent, they are content to retain aspects of tradition, civilization and the status quo that the Left is continually dedicated to criticizing and destroying.

This explains why the vitriol on the Left always far exceeds that on "the right," except for on the extreme margin.

You're awarness of socialism extends as far as confusing the disasters in Russia and China as real Marxist societies,

Verifiably not the case. I've read Marx and Engels. I've even read Hegel, from whom they borrowed their bad ideas. And I know not just of Russia and China, but of Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Romania, Albania, Venezuela...every place where Socialism has set its jackboot down.

Because the bourgeoisie had turned real-estate into an investment scheme was a guy unable to find a job building houses.

Don't you know that "bourgeoisie" is an antique term, and referred to the mercantile and industrial middle class, not the aristocrats or elite? So you're blaming the middle class for the real estate bubble.

Can you support that?

[promethean75]

I'm not even disagreeing. 'Social movements' are not revolutionary movements, and only a nincompoop would say they were or that the Social Democrats pandering to them are real socialists. All you're seeing are sideshows created by working-class people so stressed out the worst of em don't even know what gender they are anymore. Social justice is not a Marxist movement, bro. Women's rights, voting, equal wages, abolishing slavery, racism and child labor... these are real Marxist concerns. The primary concern, the Marxus Operandi, was always to get the workers, even if they are homosexual transgender interracially married electric car driving netflix watching Mediterranean dieting one time Alanis Morissette listening-to over-under-socialized freaks of human nature who explain their feelings to personal AI surrogate companions in control of the products of their own elbow grease, their own mojo.

Long as the Right's got a willing audience for this neo-leftist theater it's created, nobody (you included) will notice Marx is being brutally stawmanned.

[Immanuel Can]

Social justice is not a Marxist movement, bro.

Yeah, sorry...it really is. It's totally Neo-Marxist. It comes from the Frankfurt School, actually. Look them up, and you'll find out.

You should also read a bio of Marx. You'll find out he was a really awful human being, actually.

[promethean75]

I'm certain of it. Here are some notable social justice movements in the last 20 years that Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas had everything to do with:

1. Black Lives Matter
2. Fight for $15
3. Women's March
4. #MeToo
5. LGBTQ

Horkheimer once wrote, "angry, underaged vegan pro-immigrant lesbian transgender incel global-warming activist Epstein island victims represent a new ideal for humanity and we at the Frankfurt school conspire to turn everyone into them to destroy the foundations of civilization and bring about a Jewish apocalypse or something... i dunno, but it's always Zionist related or evil communism at work or some such nonsense. A guy can't even do critical analysis of the effects of capitalism anymore without being a secret agent of Satan."

[Immanuel Can]

I'm certain of it. Here are some notable social justice movements in the last 20 years that Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas had everything to do with:

1. Black Lives Matter
2. Fight for $15
3. Women's March
4. #MeToo
5. LGBTQ

Horkheimer once wrote, "angry, underaged vegan pro-immigrant lesbian transgender incel global-warming activist Epstein island victims represent a new ideal for humanity and we at the Frankfurt school conspire to turn everyone into them to destroy the foundations of civilization and bring about a Jewish apocalypse or something... i dunno, but it's always Zionist related or evil communism at work or some such nonsense. A guy can't even do critical analysis of the effects of capitalism anymore without being a secret agent of Satan."

Mockery is easy.

But so is research. And you haven't done enough...it's quite obvious. For instance, the founders of BLM were five "trained Marxists," by their own declaration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgEUbSzOTZ8. But as you suggest, Neo-Marxists don't care what the cause is. They'll use anything to produce the oppressor-oppressed "dialectic." As James Lindsay has to astutely put it, "The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution."

You can see this in what they have done with women. They were quite happy to use them as the "oppressed class" in the '70s and '80s. But as soon as the "trans" issue came along, they were more than happy to throw them to the wolves, in bathrooms, sports, and other women's spaces. When women's issues fail them, they have even come tell you there's not even such an actual thing as "a woman."

Marxists don't actually care about any of the particular groups they claim to advocate for: not class, not women, not race, not workers, not gayness, not disability, or body image, or any of the other myriad causes they've picked up and tried to use, then thrown away when it didn't serve their turn any longer.

They care only that they get the revolution they believe is necessary to advance Marxism.

[promethean75]

"the founders of BLM were five "trained Marxists," by their own declaration"

Comrades Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors are a part of a special elite Marxist intelligentsia who received their orthodox education from third generation Hegelian professors. It's said that Alicia can even recite the Communist Manifesto backward. Easily two of the greatest Marxist minds of this century.

[promethean75]

I don't like to use the word "oppressed" except in cases of being denied a vote and instances of segregation because it makes communists sound like pussies. I prefer to use phrasing like "unecessarily overworked" and "gratuitous labor" to keep my thesis free of moralizing and from dividing up good guys and bad guys. I like to approach the economy like a zoologist would approach a habitat shared by different species of animal to examine the behaviors of each species. Western liberal capitalist economies tend to be inhabited by Dawkinsian Suckers, Grudgers, and Cheats. The Cheat species isn't 'bad' in any moral sense, but it does exist to the detriment of the other two species sharing the environment with it. In our case, the Capitalists (Cheats) increase the workload of the other two species and can therefore be called parasites.

Btw, it wasn't 'capitalism' that brought the world an industrial revolution (remember, according to you, there is no such thing as capitalism... it's just a boogeyman made up by failures) but the sudden concentration of mass labor and production under the mode of capitalism. What made this explosion of growth possible was banks loaning printed money to wealthy investors.

But that very same explosion of commerce would have been completely possible under radically different modes of production... unless someone wants to argue that the capitalist mode of production is magical and gives workers special powers to produce shit they can't produce otherwise. Nobody would do that without being a numbskull.

You can't, therefore, say that human prosperity is owed to capitalism but human labor, as it has always been under any and all modes of production throughout history.

Alright, let's review. We discovered that the capitalist is an unnecessary parasite existing to the detriment of its neighboring species and is also not responsible for any kind of improvement.

You can't claim capitalists don't exist when communists start up but do exist when the world's industries and the quality of life are improved. This is a terrible inconsistency and a betrayal to intellectual integrity!

[Immanuel Can]

"the founders of BLM were five "trained Marxists," by their own declaration"

Comrades Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors are a part of a special elite Marxist intelligentsia who received their orthodox education from third generation Hegelian professors. It's said that Alicia can even recite the Communist Manifesto backward. Easily two of the greatest Marxist minds of this century.

I just love the phrase "greatest Marxist minds." It's like "most indoctrinated drones."

[Immanuel Can]

You can't claim capitalists don't exist when communists start up but do exist when the world's industries and the quality of life are improved. This is a terrible inconsistency and a betrayal to intellectual integrity!

You're right! I should not have adopted the Communists' own phony language, even when unpacking their own particular beliefs. "Capitalism" is a nonsense word. I should simply have said, "free markets." I accept your correction.

[promethean75]

It's like calling a pack of wolves taking down a caribou 'natural ecological balance' rather than violent predation. Makes it sound better even though the caribou would vote for some kind of reform if they could vote.

Free market. It's so free that if you don't have the means to compete (a marketable talent and a little capital to get started) you will accept a wage, pay taxes, and pay a rent or be arrested for loitering, homelessness or trespassing.

[Immanuel Can]

It's like calling a pack of wolves taking down a caribou 'natural ecological balance' rather than violent predation. Makes it sound better even though the caribou would vote for some kind of reform if they could vote.

No, "Capitalism" is an invented idea, not any reference to anything that actually exists. Nobody has an "ideology of capital," and nobody literally "worships capital," despite how badly the Marxists would like us to think the contrary. It suits their agenda, you see, to cast the controversy as between two "-isms," two ideologies, rather than a case of one "-ism," Marxism, trying to destroy free markets. It just sells so much better, if you can accuse your opposition of malevolence, or of being indoctrinated in the same sort of way Marxists themselves are.

But nobody should be fooled.

Free market. It's so free that if you don't have the means to compete...

Why not? There are plenty of people who've successfully competed in free markets...and enriched us all by doing so, though their inventions, their improvements, their solutions to our problems -- things we joyfully pay for, because they're so good. And that's to say nothing at all of the jobs they've created in the process, which we use in order to provide for ourselves or feed our families. In a free market society, after all, there are no slaves; people can sell their labour or their ingenuity to whomever will pay for it, and don't have to work for anybody for whom they don't want to work.

The device you're typing on right now is a product of free human ingenuity and free markets. You gladly shelled out thousands of dollars for one. Nobody forced you to. And now you use it to share your views online, and maybe even to shop, do your job, contact your friends...

That's what free markets do. They free up human ingenuity, and create wealth for all who will take the opportunity. However, they don't create wealth for layabouts, freeloaders, addicts, drifters, and non-workers, it's true. For that, you would need another mechanism.

[MikeNovack]

Stop IC --- if you ever took Economics 101 you would have learned that there were requirements for a market to function as a free market. Some of them "no "player" more than X% of the market, able to enter or leave the market in a relatively short time, etc. your course probably went into estimates of these values, like 2% and 6 months.

That's why pork production can be regulated by a free market and milk production does not << the biology of pigs is different from the biology of cows -- pigs have lots of babies at a time and CAN have litters twice a year (well almost all breeds of domestic pigs can) and a piglet grows to market weight in only a few months. Cows have one baby at a time, once a year, only half the calves are heifers, and the heifers take a couple of years before they on turn have babies (and so produce milk)

A pig producer can respond to higher pork prices by sending more pigs, a lot more pigs, to market in less than a year. That will be free market theory result in the price of pork coming down. REASONABLE TIME. The dairy farmer can't respond to higher milk prices that way. He/she needs to know what will be the price of milk 5-10 years in the future because it takes that long to substantially increase milk production.

And "free markets" not directly connected to "capitalism" (which often has markets with too few "players" and/or other "monopolistic" features). A "communist" society composed of independent communes might have free markets between the communes.

[Immanuel Can]

Stop IC

No thanks.

And "free markets" not directly connected to "capitalism"

That's good; because there's no such thing as "Capitalism."

[Walker]

"Could be"? You "could" go with the story that the moon is made out of blue cheese. But why should you?

You need a better reason to believe.

Says the guy who believes the talking snake story.

If looking beyond belief requires seeking the absolute within situational dependencies such as language talking that limits communication and thus communication of the infinite in action, then we can say that before electronic transmissions of blended vibrational frequencies that we call harmony, music, and vocalized lyrics, real time messages were transmitted in ways that are now judged as quaint and superstitious, but never-the-less were real enough to affect the actions of even the most intelligent humans. For example, the ancients could predict with fair accuracy one celestial body eclipsing another during a particular future confluence of space and time, and when the strangeness in the sky did occur as predicted, then other co-occurring phenomena, including human interactions, were interpreted as reactions to the inevitable eclipsing occurrence than had been predicted by the brainiacs, but withheld from the great unwashed just in case. In this way, when humans were part of the natural world and did not yet recognize their innate, dominionesque authority over the critters and everything else within reach, back in the days when everyone was what we now call ignorant and superstitious because of their tales, snakes likely did speak in the ways of snakes to be accurately translated by humans who, because of their oneness with the elemental forces of nature, heard the ill intent in the snake transmissions by absolutely groking the meaning rather than seeking limitations in narrow, culturally dependent language that denotes the totality of snake messaging with a single word. As an aside, perhaps the declining reading comprehension of ivy leaguers is due to seeking only one meaning in a shower of related multiples, any one of which could be a springboard into philosophy for those seeking more than a reason to throw peanuts from a branch.