Anything's beach reading if you have some shade!

New Years reading:



Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin - The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire

But, the small businesses, are the incubators for creating the bigger ones which then become almost like public goods by being so ingrained in the lives of everyone. — schopenhauer1

Lol

Every time someone equates capitalism with "free markets" - usually an American - a capitalist laughs at having successfully propagandized yet another moron into completely ignoring the issue of property rights and the means of production.

Every definition is a variation of the same thing. Private ownership, free markets, etc. — schopenhauer1

:rofl:

Nah, I'm not wasting my time with you. I'm just quite happy to point out that your understanding of a socio-economic system is limited to "hur-dur word is same".

What a surprise a capitalist suck-up can't even minimally define the term.

Stock buybacks are happening because the ROI in them is higher than the ROI in non-financials. No need to look to ideological factors. Follow the money. It's as simple as that.

In turn, btw, because capitalism is a failing system in which profitability is at record lows so financial markets are one of the last remaining pressure relief valves before the real economy has to actually explode.

An explosion in speculative activity is what always follows the decay and failure of the real economy. Capital follows the path of least resistance. And the resistance in the real economy is at record levels. The whole thing is being held together by the duct-tape of QE and PPP and record low interest rates. It's bleeding to death. Who in their right mind would park their money there? No sensible capitalist.

What the entrepreneur thinks is irrelevant, as is the rest of your entire post. We're done.

Cool, thanks for ignoring literally everything I wrote - again. Good to know that you cannot read and talking to you is a complete waste of time because you will address not a single thing I wrote. Till never again.

They will said, that they did these things.. They will say that if the workers who they exploited were clever enough, they would do the same, but they aren't so must sell the labor for an income.. — schopenhauer1

There is exactly zero link, in capitalism, between "cleverness" and reward, or "risk" and reward for that matter. I'll say it again: capitalism rewards profitiability. Markets are not warm and fuzzy altruists: they don't care, not one single bit, about personal cleverness or risk: the only metric markets reward is profitability. Any capitalist worth their salt will tell you this. Fairy tales about "cleverness" and "risk" are a postiori fairy tales retroactively told by capitalists to justify what the market, utterly indifferent to these dumb human constructs, have already engaged in. If a sack of rocks or a God-guaranteed business scheme would find a way to make people part with money, capitalism would reward it. You need to stop buying into the fairy tales capitalists peddle to dupe idiots into thinking they are worth anything at all, and pay attention the only thing the markets care about - profitability.

The order of causality needs to be reversed: it's not that capitalists are 'clever' or 'hardworking' or 'risktaking', and therefore they are rewarded. They are rewarded, therefore they are subsequently given the title, based on nothing but a tautological appellation, of 'clever', 'hardworking', or 'risk-taking'. Of course, there are plenty of clever, hardworking, and risk-taking people who are not so rewarded, on account of the fact that there is literally no link whatsoever between these things besides sheer after-the-fact contingency. On the contrary, there are a legion of stupid, lazy, risk-averse unremarkables running around with piles of cash. Profitability is not an index of any personal attribute; more likely it is an index of labor costs, monopoly, network effects, government regulation, investment flows, cultural and technical trends, and a whole host of utterly impersonal mechanisms which markets actually give a shit about. Compared to these factors, 'you took a risk' is about as relevant to markets as the color of a CEOs car.

Hell, it would be nice if capitalism did reward hard work and risk and innovation and intelligence. Then maybe the world would not be the crumbling, dying misery machine that it currently is.

The only thing that can be mustered here is the poor third world. — schopenhauer1

I don't understand why you think it is just the 'third world' that is affected by this. One of most palpable effects of offshoring - driven by the relentless search to squeeze profits from wherever possible - is a massive drop in the standards of life and working conditions for those in the developed world:

A summary of winners and losers of globalization: the winners are the global rich and Asia, the losers the middle classes of the West. They are squeezed between competition and indifference: competition of people who are able and willing to do the same jobs for a smaller wage, and indifference of their own rich compatriots towards their plight....The Western societies will then come to resemble what we currently see in Latin America: there would be rich people with incomes and pattern of consumption of the global top 1%, sizable middle class, but also significant number of people who are, in worldwide terms, relatively poor, with incomes below the world median. The Western societies will thus become much more heterogeneous even without a further increase in their own income inequalities.

http://glineq.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-abc-of-globalization.html

Capitalist globalization is simply a global race to the bottom: what starts as the exporting of production overseas washes back as the dragging down of living conditions for those in the global North. This is not something off in the far future. It has already happened as is accelerating as we speak. This isn't some localized issue that affects people far away.

As for your last post, it's not clear that you read any of the link. Marx's point is that the idea that CEOs are rewarded for risk is plain wrong. A CEO is rewarded for profits. Not even capitalists give a shit that you took a risk. They care if you turn a profit, that's it. "Risk" is a retroactive feel good justification meant to inflate egos and nothing more, as well as to placate the stupid who do not take a single moment to think about how capitalism actually functions in practice.

And that's not to mention the fact that, in practice, capitalists are frequently shielded from the the very 'risks' they like to say they take on: though limited liability, massive world historical bails-outs as we have witnessed for the last decade, laws skewed to the almost absolute benefit of speculators like landlords, etc. When the most devastating global crash since the great depression happened in 2008, how many bank CEOs, who were personally responsible for it, got fucked? Not a single one. One single mid-tier French banker got thrown into jail, and that's it, Meanwhile, pensioners and homeowners got utterly rorted while investment funds gleefully bought assets on the cheap to add to their already inflated portfolios. When businesses fail, almost invariably, it isn't CEOs who suffer - it is workers. Capital protects capital.

To them, the hierarchy sustains. The capitalist class CEO has provided for them. — schopenhauer1

Sure, and this is what kings and lords said to their serfs too - and they were largely right. Which is exactly the problem. It is all the more reason that it was a good thing that we got rid of them. Being a hostage is more, not less a reason to demand emancipation. But I think that's enough for this thread.

I do not have concrete solutions and I do not have final answers. I simply have principles, and I hew to the apparently radical idea that a better world is possible. I have certain ideas regarding power and its limitation and so on, but they are not appropriate for this thread. Malatesta is always a nice go-to:

That’s all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don’t want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us therefore in detail how your society will be organised. And there follows a whole series of questions, which are very interesting if we were involved in studying the problems that will impose themselves on the liberated society, but which are useless, or absurd, even ridiculous, if we are expected to provide definitive solutions. What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organised? Will there still be large cities, or will the population be evenly distributed over the whole surface of the earth? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spend the winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge and drink wine from the Chianti district?

...We are no more prophets than anyone else; and if we claimed to be able to give an official solution to all the problems that will arise in the course of the daily life of a future society, then what we meant by the abolition of government would be curious to say the least. For we would be declaring ourselves the government and would be prescribing, as do the religious legislators, a universal code for present and future generations. It is just as well that not having the stake or prisons with which to impose our bible, mankind would be free to laugh at us and at our pretensions with impunity! ... But the fact that because today, with the evidence we have, we think in a certain way on a given problem does not mean that this is how it must be dealt with in the future. Who can foresee the activities which will grow when mankind is freed from poverty and oppression, when there will no longer be either slaves or masters, and when the struggle between peoples, and the hatred and bitterness that are engendered as a result, will no longer be an essential part of existence? Who can predict the progress in science and in the means of production, of communication and so on?

What is important is that a society should be brought into being in which the exploitation and domination of man by man is not possible; in which everybody has free access to the means of life, of development and of work, and that all can participate, as they wish and know how, in the organisation of social life. In such a society obviously all will be done to best satisfy the needs of everybody within the framework of existing knowledge and conditions; and all will change for the better with the growth of knowledge and the means.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-anarchy

Whatever happens will have to be the result of experimentation - a thousand flowers blooming, hundreds of them failing, worked out amongst people with stakes in the society they build together. But it will have to be better than this failing, decomposing system - it's either socialism or barbarism. That's the choice.

Well, in a thread on "overpopulation", the point is simply to focus the problem on the right issues, rather than the wrong ones. In any case, you don't believe in solutions at all. That there are populations at all seems to be an issue for you. This is as dumb as the ecofascists, albeit more benign and thankfully self-eliminating.

Amazing. You extrapolated a whole line of reasoning from literally nothing I said and then, having made up a fantasy, said that this fantasy - that you made up from scratch - is not fit for reality and so I must be a standard liberal. Very cool. Why bother chatting with me when you can just chat with yourself and then argue against yourself?

"A change of regime of property" would unravel these things. — schopenhauer1

Why do you think so? The removal of a capitalist class who owns the means of production does not entail any technical change in how those means function - apart of course, from what we now decide to do with them.

And I'm not answering questions about what ought to happen. That's already far afield. Again, if you think this is the best of possible worlds, then so be it. You've reached your conclusion. I don't care enough about what you say to change your mind.

How would a "new" system even fathom to unravel these heavily threaded factors of research, services, transportation, and production to a non-business system? — schopenhauer1

Why would anyone want to 'unravel' these things? What is being called for is a change in the regime of property. It's an issue of control, not technical ... whatever it is you are imagining.

As for this 'no-win' business - I have no tuck with it. I have nothing to say about that because it's useless and dumb and not philosophy and the kind of thing reserved for comfortable people who like to think they are radical contrarians while changing absolutely nothing. For what it's worth I am absolutely pro anti-natalist. I hope they all die of their own accord and we never have to hear from them again. Their consistency of theory and action is the best possible favour they could lend to the rest of the world. I support antinatalists wholeheartedly. May they all drop dead and never leave a trace.

So your point is that we can't change the system because we can't change the system. This is glib but are you really saying anything more than that?

Also, for what it's worth, I don't hate your posts. I just think they focus on all the wrong things; or at least, things I find philosophically uninteresting. There are posts I hate. Yours are generally not among them.

The point is to change the options available. And again, this is just a brand new point you've brought up that has nothing to do with your previous point and ignores my entire previous post. It's rude.

Also, it is in general, a really silly point. Do you think the revolutionaries who did away with feudalism sat on their hands because they were stupefied by the scale of the issue? No. The objection is ahistorical and frankly isn't one. It can be said of anything and anyone at any scale. That one lacks an imagination is not an objection.

:up:

"It" is so big, we just go back to staying in our lanes as described above — schopenhauer1

Eh, this doesn't address anything I said at all. And in any case sounds like what one says when one is comfortable, which billions of people are not.

Therefore?

We are as isolated as can be from our own subsistence.. — schopenhauer1

But this is simply not true. Literally anyone who works for a wage employs those means every time they go to work. The 'seperation' is a legal and conventional one. It has nothing to do with "remarkableness".

End of year list! 46 Books, 16 not by white men. Definitely taken a turn towards political economy and history this year, and I think the plan will be to try to get back to more philosophy next year, tho we'll see how that goes. Titles in bold are favorites. Starred titles were disappointments. Happy reading for the New Year all!

History

• Ellen Meiksins Wood - Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
• Ellen Meiksins Wood - Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment
• Ellen Meiksins Wood - Empire of Capital
• Jairus Banaji - A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
• Jairus Banaji - Theory As History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation

Political Economy

• Giovanni Arrighi - Adam Smith In Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
• Giovanni Arrighi - The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times
• Michael Hudson - Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
• Robert Brenner - The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy
• Robert Brenner - The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005
• Tony Norfield - The City: Global Finance and the City of London
• Radhika Desai - Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire
• Michael Roberts - The Long Depression: Marxism and The Global Crisis of Capitalism
• John Smith - Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis
• Intan Suwandi - Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism
• Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo – The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
• Nick Srnicek - Platform Capitalism
• McKenzie Wark - Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse?***
• Arundhati Roy - The Cost of Living
• Arundhati Roy - The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile

States and Revolution

• Theda Skocpol - States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
• Neil Davidson - How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?
• Charles Tilly - Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1992
• James C. Scott - Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
• James C. Scott - Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
• Hendrik Spruyt - The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of System Change
• Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski - People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism

Anthropology and Structuralism

• Georges Dumezil - The Destiny of a King
• Georges Dumezil - The Plight of the Sorcerer
• Georges Dumezil - The Destiny of the Warrior
• Georges Dumezil - Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty
• Marshall Sahlins - Stone Age Economics
• Marshall Sahlins - Islands of History
• Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Vladimir Propp - Morphology of the Folktale
• Roland Barthes - Elements of Semiology
• Roland Barthes - The Pleasure of the Text
• Claude Levi-Strauss - Myth and Meaning

Mostly Philosophy

• Albert O. Hirschman - The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
• Gilles Deleuze - Foucault
• Gilles Deleuze - The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
• Charles W. Mills - The Racial Contract
• Jon Roffe - Abstract Market Theory
• Michel de Certeau - The Practice of Everyday Life (Reread)
• Hito Steyerl - The Wretched of the Screen
• Kathryn Yusoff - A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None***

Nice list! I'm about to finish Suwandi's Value Chains and when I'll do I'll do a quick write up of that and Smith's Imperialism. Did you like Family Values?

I actually would have to agree with you based on what I've seen. But what is your solution to the seeming need to gamble your resources and time and work to create a new venture that makes money? That seems to drive a lot of innovation and such.

Let's put it this way.. There are probably way more Fords and Edisons who don't just invest and tinker for the hell of it, but to make a lot of money, than there are Teslas who are doing it out of pure interest for public good or curiosity. — schopenhauer1

This is one of those memes that gets rolled out every now and then in defense of capitalism, but it could not be more wrong. In fact that this is so completely wrong is probably, for me, the major reason we need to get rid of capitalism. Can you even imagine the number of people around the world who have had to give up on their dreams, or who have abandoned projects because they were not considered profitable? The fact that capitalism selects for profit means that massive swathes of planetary potential is simply wasted, swept into the garbage bin of society, because it doesn't meet the artificial and extrinsic standard of profitability - no matter how useful, interesting, or even life improving those things might be.

I was reading the other day about a 'brilliant' team of scientists who have been trying to reverse engineer insulin production, and they have spent years on it, along with incredible amounts of funding. This was pitched as a 'feel good' story, like, 'look at this ambitious people-savers who want to fight the predatory pricing of pharmaceutical companies'. But can you imagine what's really happening? These people have had to waste their talents trying to come up with something we already have, in large quantities, able to be cheaply produced. But because of market imperatives, these people are literally wasting their lives trying to replicate what is already out there. What a waste. All the while people are dying for these stupid profit games. It's insane. And that not even to mention the structure of the market which is driven by utterly unproductive speculation in finance and housing, along with weapons and stupid shit like NFTs.

And then there's the obvious fact that everywhere you look, capitalism breeds sameness. You can see this most obviously in architecture, with more or less pre-fab buildings and suburbs that have become blights on our living spaces. Houses and buildings looks the same and look rubbish because what matters is cost, not actual people. Or else look at the state of cinema, churning out squeals and franchise productions one after the other, with original scripts being nothing but 'risks', no matter how good they may be. The same can be said for our music, our cuisine, our dress, our sports. Capitalism is anti-innovation. In fact this last example points up to how it gets even worse - because of these feedback mechanisms, not only does capitalism's selection for profit kill innovation, it creates environments in which the fostering of innovation is actively discouraged. It kills our dreams, and even our courage to dream. It's hell.

Check out Graeber's essay for more on these themes: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

I think the counter to this is small businesses. — schopenhauer1

Small businesses are in most cases even more exploitative of labour than big business. They are more likely to engage in off-the-books employment, while ignoring safety or health considerations. They are in general less subject to scrutiny and accountability, and are all the worse for it.

-

Also it's always fun to post right under someone advocating planetary genocide. Not surprising given that's the logical outcome of green fascism.

You can hear it in "idiosyncratic" or "ideolect". Something personal, quirky.

Yeah, nah, you just thought could Google your way to telling me what the 'real world' consisted of despite knowing nothing about the subject you're talking about, all while quoting literal propaganda because you could not even begin to define some basic terms among the most concequent for all of life on Earth.

The Heritage Foundation is right-wing rag whose measure of "freedom" is just how much markets are allowed to operate without any so-called interference from the government. That Singapore - an authoritarian single-party state that sues its opponents out of existence and functions as a model for China with sham elections - ranks at the top of it's "freedom scale" reflects the fact that its corporate and individual taxes are amongst the lowest in the world. Only Ameicans are stupid enough to think that capitalism equates to the so-called 'free market'. That's an asinine definition made by propagandists with no sense of history.

But listen - I'm not debating capitalism with someone whose knowledge comes from a single Google search. I don't debate with kindergarden level ignorance.

Time for you to tell us what you mean by "capitalism." And what countries do you imagine are capitalist countries? — tim wood

A socio-economic system in which one class, the working class, has been seperated from the means of production, which are controlled and owned instead by a seperate class, the capitalist class. This in turn leading to the pursuit of profit as the defining motive of all socio-political life. Capitalism is a more or less global system with the US right at its very heart. There's nothing fictional about it, and you would do well to minimally educate yourself about the world you live in.

The alternative of course is to liquidate the capitalist class and place the means of production back into the hands of the working class, who make up the vast majority of this Earth. This latter would be a true democracy, one in which the economy would be placed back into the hands of the people, unlike the pseudo-democracies we have today in which impersonal market mechanisms that systematically favour capital over workers continue to immeserate billions of people across the planet.

So, I've thought about more communal living, but it's not easy; what happens if you come to dislike the people sharing the land with you? — Janus

I'm not sure. It'd be something I'd like to explore more.

If it's not being rented out, it's personal, as far as I understand. Although there are probably lots of debate about land and its use.

own property — Janus

Private, not personal property! I.e. property used for making capital - not your toothbrush and couch.

Yes, I could be wrong about that of course. I acknowledge I am speaking from within my own limited imagination. — Janus

I'm just saying: between planetary eugenics and the end of private property, one of these stands out as far more harmful than the other.

While I would have no moral objection; I don't think I could overcome my aversion as the thought of consuming human flesh. — Janus

It'd be communal lunch I'd imagine.

So, it seems to me that even if we could, even if we were willing to, immediately end capitalism, that it would involve a great deal of suffering and death. — Janus

Just saying this doesn't make it true. Ending a regime of private property doesn't inherently involve "a great deal of suffering and death". In fact it ought to alleviate much of it.

Although I am not averse to eating just one single billionare just for funsies and as an example.

"It's not practical to end capitalism so mass planetary eugenics and human ecocide is all we're capable of".

No.

The avowed aim of corporations and governments is to bring poorer countries up to a first world level of prosperity and consumerism. — Janus

That's a dumb aim. It's ought to be change our patterns of consumption so that we don't end life on the planet as we know it.

The world economy would collapse. — Janus

Our measures of "the world economy" are basically rigged bullshit geared towards the growth of corporations and the valorization of capital. Being held hostage to shitty measures of economic growth is not a reason to commit mass ecocide.

Any curtailment of business as usual would involve immense human suffering, — Janus

This is your brain on capitalism. No, it would not. Curtialment of business practises under capitalism in which waste, excess, and low cost manfacturing is a necessity would result in immense human suffering. In fact, it already results in immense human suffering. What is needed is a change in the way we structure our economy, not systematic world ecocide.

It's a hard fact to face, but seems inevitable unless someone can come up with a magic solution. Can you imagine any? — Janus

Idk if you've been paying attention but there are these things called fossil fuels which we need to keep in the ground. There is also this thing called capitalism which we need to end for good. In fact the former is premised on the latter. It takes a tragic lack of imagination to imagine that planetary eugenics programs rather than changing the economy is the solution to climate change. Green fascism is still fascism, not the least worst part of which it is born out of sheer laziness of thought and inconsideration.

The left has gotten carried away with taking their hyperbole literally and now has lost even further credibility. They are trying to use this riot as their best evidence of a right wing world gone crazy. — Hanover

Please, don't confuse the CNN-"left" for the left kthx.

Jan 6 is nice and spicy. Lots of spectacle. Good visuals. Fits nicely into a Harry Potter view of the world where baddies are isolatable and ridiclious. It's the perfect excuse to not say anything about the material conditions which gave rise to it. Apologists for capital - both liberals and conservatives - couldn't have organized a better energy-sink to talk about a concequentless nothingburger for months on end if they tried. That there wasn't a repeat of Jan 6 when Pelosi all but defended insider trading by congress shows that most of the hand-wringing over the incident is purely aesthetic.