AdelsonVLandis

"It means my family can buy better stuff than they could 40 years ago for a much cheaper price..."

This can mean one of two things. You may mean you are from one of the wealthier families who have benefited from the decline of US hourly wages. If so, you're in a minority.

If you mean it in a more general sense, I don't think you understand the concept of the terms inflation-adjusted wages or real wages. The man in 2012 making less in inflation-adjusted hourly wages than his father did 40 years ago can not buy more with his wages. The amount of food, clothes etc. he can buy after eight hours work is less, not more. I don't think you understand what I mean by real wages or inflation-adjusted wages. The average American working 40 hours a week can not afford as much food, clothes etc. as he could 40 years ago. Because real hourly wages have fallen over the past 40 years.

I don't think you read what was written. First, it says that this form of production has an organizational drive/inertia of its own. I don't think this idea would be that alien to most people here. Bureaucracies are created to achieve an objective. As the bureaucracy grows larger and larger, sometimes the original objective begins to get hazy, as the objective of a bureaucracy protecting itself becomes larger and larger.

Then it says "the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers". A repetition of what was said before. The means of production is not JUST about improving the standard of living for the society of producers. It is about other things. You're claiming it says somewhere in there that the standard of living will not rise for producers. It does not say that. You have not contradicted anything.

We live in a day and age of shareholders rights and profit and dividend being the key objective of corporations. This is actually codified into law. Layoffs, mergers and salary freezes/cuts are seen as good things. This is not a secret at all, just read Business Week or the Wall Street Journal. So the original point holds. "The means of production are not MERE means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers." You seem to be ignoring the word mere in that sentence, and the sentence before it.

"per capita GDP...the trend is positive"

The thing is, this article leaves a lot out. Per capita GDP has been rising. What has been happening to the inflation-adjusted hourly wage? It is below what it was in the early 1970s.

I look at the Forbes 400 and heirs like the Koch brothers, or the Waltons or the Mars family are doing well. Or entrepreneurs like Amway's Richard DeVos. Or upper middle class sons of lawyers and congressmen like Gates and Buffett, with rumored screwy mothers of the type that the sons don't kick back and relax once they hit $20 billion, they have to go on.

The majority of people are worse off. I don't primarily look at it as a "moral" thing, I see it as a broken system which will eventually collapse in some manner due to its internal contradictions - just as feudalism did, just as slavery in the US south and ancient Rome. This article is an example of this. Why not just tell the truth, that according to the government, the real hourly wage was better in the early 1970s, that things have gotten worse since then?

Stratification means the white, upper middle class, college educated Americans reading this have no idea what I mean. They are living in their own bubble of VC, congratulatory back-slapping etc. Born on third base and thinking they hit triples.

The point is, why are lying articles like this necessary? Why can't they just tell the truth? The fact that lying and propaganda, which the average wage worker believes no less than Russians believe Pravda, shows the weakness of the system. People don't buy these lies any how. They know. The majority of people - not the SF bay white upper middle class bubble of people.

The BBC...when is the BBC going to "discover" the famine they caused in Ireland in the 1840s? I guess they're too busy digging up the Chinese..."commemorate Empire Day, when we try to remember the names of all those from the Sudbury area who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British"...China had famines for thousands of years, including in the 20th century before the communists took over. The one they mention is their last one. The unusual thing is not the 1961 famine but that there have been no famines in China for a half century. Because the communists smashing the Four Olds and industrializing the country and kicking out the foreign imperialists got the country on track. Of course the British ignore the famines they cause, and dig up so-called famines by their former imperial conquests. China would not have had to industrialize so quickly if England was not threatening China from Hong Kong and so forth. That does not count of course. Thankfully, anti-imperialists are crashing into the US/UK all the time now, showing those hubris-filled imperialists who live by the sword shall feel the sword coming from the other end as well.

This might as well be titled I'm a teen in Gaza. Which Israel is bombing as I type. With bombs paid for with my US tax dollars. I consider you more fortunate - you have the capability to post somewhere like here, Gaza has been under siege for five years. Zionists have the ability to play for sympathy while they're starving Gazans with a food blockade, and building settlements in the West Bank.