RedCondor

Yeah, it's tough out there. But there are really good resources out there, in growing number. I'm kinda optimistic!

Oh, as narrowly as you pose it, not at all! Whoever manages capital best should manage it. If it's a three-way competition between workers, owners, and machines… may the best decision-maker win!

I don't agree with your first paragraph at all.

Capitalist countries were only able to edge out socialist economies by banking on their extant head-start and behaving socialistically (copying socialism in a light way—redistribution, worker advocacy, etc.).

As soon as they were able to claw it all back in the direction of pure capitalism all hell was set loose.

Socialism remains the way forward.

The Hindus invented the "cycle of civilizations" and reincarnation to fatalistically resign themselves to their caste system.

(Some benefit from this more than others.)

The article I took that from discusses the communist answer to that question at length.

https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/

1. Humans invented God (and HaShem and the Almighty). God has always been a human creation.

2. Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. […]

3. Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it.

4. People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. […]

5. Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. […]

6. Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.

China is wrecking the US, by the way. Good luck with that!

Every anti-socialist's favourite "socialist."

What a surprise! I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

If you want to believe this then that's on you.

I provide reporting about how the CIA manipulated the Chilean economy to create the perception that Allende was a bad politician.

In response you simply assert that Allende was a bad politician.

Do you see the problem?

I think the Americanized world will not survive America's decline, and this will soon become indisputable proof that it was America forcing its model onto others rather than anything organic.

Alternatively, palpably growing discontent with material conditions and depleting trust in America's ideological production considers the above account risible Whig history.

The competing account is exactly opposite: the hitherto antiquated idea of a benevolent liberal "end of history" is torn to shreds, as research made widely available even in English variously showcases that the CIA was involved in various genocides (such as Indonesia's) in order to preserve its geopolitical and economic supremacy, to say nothing of exposes about how the FBI tried to goad MLK Jr. into suicide, and other stuff of that sort.

Books such as Vincent Bevins's "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World" (2020) and Vijay Prashad's "Washington Bullets" (2020) are part of this budding understanding, whose foothold is firm both academically and in terms of popularity.

But I think in the end it's always better to hear it from the perpetrators themselves, such as in the words of the so-called "Wise Man" of American Foreign Policy George Kennan, who reported, from the U.S.'s own declassified archives:

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/...

As pertains to Chile in particular, far from a hands-off relationship that approved of Pinochet and sent a few economists, the CIA was deeply involved in _causing_ the economic crisis that the Chilean right attributed to Allende, as reported by the New York Times in 1974:

C.I.A. Is Linked to Strikes In Chile That Beset Allende

The Central Intelligence Agency secretly financed striking labor unions and trade groups in Chile for more than 18 months before President Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown, intelligence sources revealed today. They said that the majority of more than $8‐million authorized for clandestine C.I.A. activities in Chile was used in 1972 and 1973 to provide strike benefits and other means of support for anti‐Allende strikers and workers.

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/20/archives/cia-is-linked-to...

As for the idea that Chileans are broadly grateful for this historical path imposed upon them thus far: we'll see.

the stock market is exactly the opposite of real estate investing. Land is finite, capital is not.

This is where you go wrong.

Unlike posters defending real estate "investment," I'll criticize you from the opposite end: capital markets are a disguised form of the same old rentierism.

Watch out, lest you become a Clevinger.

Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workf...

13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)

To whatever extent you want to misuse the term, America has more of a caste system than China.

[Kennan] envisions all of humanity destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass,” with only the Chinese, Jews, and blacks remaining apart. “Could this mean that these three minorities are destined to subjugate and dominate all as an uneasy but unavoidable triumvirate the rest of society — the Chinese by their combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, and ant-like industriousness; the Jews by their sheer determination to survive as a culture; the Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the whites?”

https://newrepublic.com/article/117174/george-f-kennans-diar...

Cool joke.

I encourage anyone on the fence between this libertarian and I to read the "Concessions" essay I linked up above.

All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced by working people, and therefore people get to democratically decide what they do with them, through whatever decision-making forms they politically choose and consent to organize themselves under.

Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and capitalism.

Marketers take a lot of credit for achievements that don't belong to them.

Take, for example, Hayek's rather more honest commentary on vacations and human rights generally:

[The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is admittedly an attempt to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the altogether different concept deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution. It adds to the list of the classical civil rights enumerated in its first twenty-one articles seven further guarantees intended to express the new ‘social and economic rights’. (…) The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (…) What are the consequences of the requirement that every one should have the right ‘freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits’. (…) It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.

https://redsails.org/concessions/

The decay we witness today is simply the rollback of concessions copied from socialist states and artificially bolted onto capitalism to reduce socialist ferment. The consequences are predictable.

dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable.

Great posts, though!

Only if they lack political education.

Socialists will once again get to explain how the capitalist welfare state was an unsustainable scam paid for by neocolonialism. Demonized socialist projects will come to be seen in a more authentic, positive light, and the fight for worker and human emancipation from capitalism will resume.

This isn't new. Historically, many great teachers of the workers have got around this with a little cleverness.

It'll happen again.

Only if they lack political education.

Yeah the CPC eliminates poverty whereas the USG wages war.

There's no comparison.

I mean, I don't know what to say other than "this is wrong, as is clearly explained by the submitted link."

The problem with this kind-of-definition is that it doesn't explain what makes capitalism unique.

Slavery and feudalism also percolate wealth upwards, and, relatively speaking, capitalism provides more goodies to more people. You risk landing on a situation where, like Nietzsche, you believe injustice to be ineradicable, and to just defend capitalism as the best of its ilk. If you insist on a simplistic and moralistic explanation, people will quickly turn on you when they realize something's amiss.

As the essay explains, making a deeper study pays off.

I disagree with all your empirical assertions about DPRK, etc. but let's put that aside.

I think you underestimate two things:

1. The impossibility of straying from Marxism from a strictly scientific/historiographic point of view: It's similar to trying to chart an independent path from Newton or Darwin. Marx simply was the one who coined some plain true scientific observations, so your only two options are to artificially depart (towards incorrectness), or to try to pass off Marxist observations as personal novelties (as, say, Marshall McLuhan did). This is sussed out as soon as things begin to get politically interesting, and gets called a scandalous trick as soon as it's exposed (by both opponents and supporters). I think rigor and plain-speaking honesty is the better way.

2. The relationship between understanding Marxism and one's own economic situation. Marxism appeals to two large camps of people: people who pursue the truth no matter what, and toilers for whom settling for a wrong choice isn't an option. As the essay explains, "The West" has temporarily immunized itself from Marxism not in a rhetorical or cultural sense, but simply through sheer resource transfer. This is going away, and so Marxism is coming back.

In the end, the whole semantic discussion, which rarely points to any specific improvements and instead pleads for rhetorical or stylistic improvements, is a bit reminiscent of back in the 90s or 00s, when many well-meaning commentators argued that "feminism" had had its heyday. They argued it had become a rather toxic term, and that it was time for "egalitarianism" or some other re-skinned, watered-down variant that was more inclusive, to really make headway.

Of course, in the ensuing years feminism simply steadily gained ground until it became a national fixture, warts and all. This is basically what's going to happen with the supposedly-banished Marxism.

100%.

Starting from the bottom:

1) Calling someone a bad writer isn't an insult, it's an honest appraisal of their literary talents.

2) Where's the insult? They themselves said they're the child of a CIA agent and that they think Russian culture is stagnant and worthless. I simply repeated exactly what they said but emphasizing how vile it was.

3) Again, where's the insult? They accused me of delusion, I said that they can choose theirs.

4) I told someone that they have a wrong theory of statecraft. Again, are you saying that telling someone they're wrong crosses a line? Is this a safe space for... being wrong?

5) Again, I fail to see the insult.

From my perspective, you seem to be arguing that all my engagement should take on the superficial form of "civilized engagement", even when people are saying rancid or provably incorrect things, attacking me, and mass downvoting me. I don't swear, I don't insult. This place has a problem with ad-hominem, as shown by the funny reactions to this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32213156

Regarding this:

There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views.

I think this is very much what's at stake, but I have the opposite view: contrarian views deserve a little support from neutral parties and authorities if they are valid and the prevailing challenge to them is subpar, not additional responsibilities to coddle those who dismiss the unfamiliar from a position of smugness. Other than simply kowtowing to "might makes right", why should the members of the numerous and overpowering status quo have less responsibilities than challengers to it? You can say that them's the breaks, that's how things are, but it's a construct just like everything else on here.

You probably think that I "generate work" for you with my posting, but what you'll find is that in the absence of communist types (ideally many and more belligerent ones than me), this place will continue to descend more and more into people talking about the need to exterminate the Chinese, the importance of appreciating the fundamental IQ differences between races, the need to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco at the human level, the celebration of war as a cult of death. You'll find that, as a mod aspiring for "neutrality", you'll have banished anyone who might care to "organically" oppose those views, and that suddenly upholding "neutral" law and order will mean enforcing fascist takes.

But this is just HN, so it will be a farcical and goofy version of what you'll be witnessing happening everywhere else in society. I don't expect you to do anything differently, but at the very least you should stop blaming me for people finding Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin quotes scandlously upsetting to their own poor understanding of history.

This is like a cop saying they're trying to be fair in mediating between the dozen people mobbing me and unjustifiably downvoting all my posts, and me for simply saying well-founded, well-cited things that disagree with the liberal ethos of this place.

Why so much self-delusion? Just let it be, ban if it makes you happy, you know just as well as I do that this place is crawling with fascists.

If possible, though, I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone. My MO is always the same: keep cool, cite quotes that upset people because they tarnish the images of their idols. You keep saying I'm breaking the rules and attacking people, and I don't see where?