It has nothing to do with "how well they did." They organized free societies in a revolutiony manner. It has to do with freedom, not material development. That matters too, but that's not what I'm talking about. If the Soviet Union had done great economically it would still be an unfree society (absent some disqualifying change) and that was true RIGHT from the start.
Boston Marathon Explosion - Today's Topics: Public Schools
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hodj
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Original wealth accumulated from people trying to organize labor appropriately to build proper irrigation and divide farming land up amongst ever larger growing populations. The way I see it, you're ranting against human adaptive strategies. NO DON"T USE THATONE, USE THIS ONE. But the one you want to use is discredited quantitatively, while the one everyone else is using has been the go to adaptation for centuries, if not, if you want to go back far enough to call surplus grain being held in after harvests for equitable distribution during dry seasons, then centuries. Millenia.
Another stupid strawman. Most people don't have the financial requirements to start a business because they don't have starting a business as their goal and thus have not been scrimping and saving and taking out loans and finding investors and all the other shit involved in starting a business that would LEAVE THEM with the (hopefully) proper preparations financially to open a business. Again, because they don't want to. Its like saying if I don't want to own a car I"m oppressed for not having the down payment to pay for the car.
I'm saying that the social contract implicitly requires the broader society to accept it, and they do, otherwise the system wouldn't exist as it exists.
Huh?
Oh I see...they're not sufficiently virtuous. That's why they can't afford to start a business.
lol
They accept it at gunpoint.
Loser Araysar
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hodj
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They organized short lived societies which cannot be used to judge anything because they lived for such a short time that the medium and long term fallout of their existence cannot be ascertained and compared to other societies. If one had survived for a decade or two, it would have been either a great example of the alternative you think is viable, or it would have ended just like all the others. There's no way to know for sure, but since the majority of these revolutions ended up pretty badly, estimations can be made.
Look, humans were absolutely free from the first time a human diverged from homo erectus until the first bit of land was roped off for agricultural uses, and life wasn't bad. But it wasn't great either. You're more than welcome to try it out for yourself. Just google Rainbow Family of Living Light and you too can live like a neanderthal for next to nothing cost wise.
hodj
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Labor value theory. Quantitatively debunked decades ago. Labor doesn't drive growth, capital does.
bad strawman as a replacement for an argument. I accept your token admission that you don't have a cogent rebuttal.
Citation required.
I'm just showing that it's possible. I mean those systems got up and running for at least a few years before they were destroyed by wholly external forces. The claim I was responding to was one of impossibility.
I kinda doubt humans were really free then. Unfreedom predates our species. Gorillas form hierarchical social structures and go to war with each other over territory and mates and shit all the time. They also live in trees and shit outside. We don't HAVE to take our cues from them. At the very least we can recognize that not doing so is preferable.
Labor is the act of creating value. How that value gets allocated after the fact is a question of
How is that not exactly the claim that you're making?
You want me to provide a citation that the Chinese government would resort to violence to protect itself?
It was evil throughout almost all of human history as usury and only became tolerated then finally encouraged only recently in historic terms.
Firstly, where are you getting that surplus labor value is debunked nonsense? Are you going to quote me Popper or Morishima in the next post? Surplus labor theory is easily observed by anyone in the very profit model itself, which is, essentially,what profit is:i.e., appropriated solely through the concept of the ownership of property. And it's this very concept, this ownership of property that, through our laws, somehow grants the right to appropriate profit for oneself through the labor of others, that forms the core of Marx's and his successors violent criticisms of the social institutions that capitalism creates.
What gives you the right to extract labor value from others just by virtue of the fact that you own property? Economics or political economy has never explained this, never explained any connection of property, labor, to capital. Nothing. It 'assumes' these connections as natural rights, and these 'assumptions' were created by wealthy, propertied men. Just because a concept is old doesn't make it irrelevant or outdated. The Constitution is older than Marx. Adam Smith is older than Marx. Just because you don't like what someone says doesn't make it incorrect, unfortunately:
Karl Marx_sl said:
The onus is on the political economist to explain these relationships, to deduce them. And they have yet to do so. Big fucking citation required, perhaps the biggest one in human history. This forms the basis of the argument which I'll get into in my next post, that of slavery.
hodj
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But we don't know that, because they didn't survive long enough to really judge.
I like to think Catalonia would have done well, though. Again. Don't know enough about the specifics of the Ukraine to judge. My mentor did excavation on Catalonian victims of Franco, its pretty intense stuff. Dude was brutal. Excavating mass graves isn't easy work either.
Eh chimpanzees and bonobos are closer, and they are interesting case studies because they are so close, to us and each other genetically, yet have such divergent behavioral patterns. Chimpanzees engage in brutality, heirarchies based on strength and gender, etc. while Bonobos mediate everything through sexuality and sexual contact.
hodj
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Yeah man religion also outlawed gay sex and eating shellfish. This isn't an argument.
Great Contradiction. Not to mention that all quantitative analysis of economics over the past 150 years has shown that labor does not drive demand, in fact capital does. The prediction that profits will be higher in labor driven economies is unsound because of this fact. This is one of the key principles of the theory and it has been utterly demolished.
Our eyes can be deceiving. But the fundamental numbers are not. And the fundamental numbers resoundingly rebut the idea that labor value theory works. If it did, North Korea today would be a shining example of modernity. Instead its all those countries who went with capital over labor who had all the success.
Ownership of the property was acquired in some fashion.
Not that that's relevant. What gives you the right to expropriate an investment of one or a group of people because you feel they didn't pay you enough?
History and anthropology answers this question. The original reason for organization was to make the construction of public works such as irrigation vastly more manageable and simpler. Everything else is an adaptation which increased complexity on top of this beginning. The right comes from being the one with initiative, trying to organize individuals towards a goal. If you don't like it, get on that little time machine, take your ass back to 12000 or so BCE and teach those dumb mother fuckers how to build an irrigation ditch without a headmaster ordering them to do so.
hodj
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Except you define all profit from the work of employees as unethical
Trying to create intellectual catch 22s to justify your eternal mindset of victimization isn't an argument.
Let's do a mental exercise. Let's go way back in time. Way back. We're in a village. We're all tribespeople. We used to hunt and gather most of our food, but that's become untenable, resources are becoming scarce, competition is up. But, Umbumbwey, the village chief, has just come back from a village down the river a ways, and they've come up with this great thing called agriculture. Its neat. You can grow food, right there, in your backyard. Food for everyone! Plenty is everywhere. But to make it work, Umbumbwey says, we all have to dig a ditch. A big ditch. It starts at the river and will go through ALL our fields. Hard work. But how are we going to do it?
Umbumbwey comes up with an answer. He starts ordering this person to go build shovels (lol we invented shovels) and this person to go survey the fields to find the best way to build the trenches around the village fields, etc. After all this, and more, the village comes together, and they build these ditches and the harvest is successful and everyone is happy because they aren't going to starve to death any more. And so all the people go to Umbumbwe, and they give him part of their crop in thanks for all his efforts in organizing the process and having the knowledge to make it all happen, and in the end Umbumwe has more food than any person in the village. Oh and it turns out, Umbumwey got irrigation canals built for all his lands in the process, for free. And as village elder, Umbumwey has the larger fields, the most wives, the most children to tend them, why by building those canals, Umbumwey has increased his wealth, his prestige in his society hundreds fold, and dinners will be held in his honor for ages, further increasing his status and wealth.
Were those villagers slaves? Did Umbumbwey steal their surplus labor from them in the form of making them build an irrigation canal for him?
Yeah it's amazing how leaving out quid-pro-quo arrangements for survival needs and begging the question about the virtue of the person doing the organizing makes things look a lot less exploitative. Weird.
hodj
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No I'm pretty sure the entire story was predicated on a quid pro quo arrangement for survival. Hence the parts about everyone being hungry and resources being limited by high population density, and the village being asked to work for the chief towards a goal which ultimately improved everyone's chances of survival, though those chances increased unequally.
"I'm so worried I missed something intelligent by skipping e every post of the last 4 pages"
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How were they working "for" the chief? He didn't keep the product of their labor (except as it interacted with his own land).
In a proper analogy, the chief would agree to show them how to set up agriculture, but he'd then own the fields they tended. But of course, that doesn't make your heavy-handed point.