Mmm, tell me again how the US and NATO have not thought all that much about nuclear weapon deployment in Europe (?????).

Does it come from the same intelligence reports that say the US and the West don't like war?

Like, would it hurt you to stop writing paragraphs of completely obviously made up trash?

Oh I see the problem is that you can't read English. My mistake, carry on.

I went back and bolded the relevant bit to help out a foreign language speaker.

It's very likely that neither country has any appetite for large NATO bases or deployed nuclear weapons, which likely the US or NATO has not even thought about. The countries will be happy about one or two NATO squadrons that could be deployed to the countries in a crisis. And that's basically it and both countries know it: we have to defend our territory, inside or out of NATO. — ssu

Incredible. Can you teach this power of making things up out of thin air? Is it a scandi thing? Your fellow scandi has similar powers of complete fabrication. Is it just all that detective noir that you guys produce?

I liked the bit where you said the US and NATO have not thought all that much about nuclear weapon deployment. That was my favourite bit of completely incredulous fantasy.

Yeah lmao Putin bad so it's ok. Minorities have always been collateral damage so the US can retain geopolitical supremacy anyway so no biggie - especially if the goodies can stick it to Putin, which is the most important thing because this is all a video game anyway except for all the dead people maybe.

Anyway, this is what the Buffalo murderer was wearing and oh boy is it great that the US is funding these murderous fucking Nazis in Ukraine which are tooootttallly just a bunch of Putin propaganda and not something that will literally come home to fucking kill your own people!



Slava fucking Ukraine hey? So glad the epicentre of neo fucking Nazism in Europe is getting flooded with weapons after being destabalized to shit hey? Maybe gargling and regurgitating the propaganda ejaculate of the US empire is not the best idea hey? Can't wait to have these motherfuckers as part of NATO.

Man I was going to make a very angry serious post but now I am lolling and you've ruined my bad mood.

Anywhere where exchange is not impersonal: families, friends, strangers asking for directions in the street, co-workers passing pens to each other across the room. Market exchanges make up a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of our lives. It just so happens their influence is unimaginably deep. Their extensity does not match their intensity in society. Markets are parasitic on non-market exchange that happen everywhere, all the time, among everyone, at all levels. I'm not even charging you for this!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/biden-military-somalia.html

The US running 'special military operations' in Somalia. Can't wait till the US invades the US for violating the sovereignty of other nations' territory. Oh just kidding the US does in fact occupy its own citizens and kills them for funsies for doing things like being black and poor and existing in general. Will have to change my social media profile to a little Somalian flag in solidarity in the meantime. Slava Somalia! Or whatever State Department phrase du jour that Westerners like to peddle before forgetting it in about six months time. Probably because they are too busy losing their rights or being shot dead by racist mass killers inspired by the same people their government is funding overseas.

But maybe the Finnish won't let me talk about this because I'm not Somalian :zip:

The entirety of pre-capitalist societies, for instance.

It's actually a pretty good litmus test to figure out who actually gives a shit about Ukraine and who's support is purely aesthetic based on Russia losing because it is a comic-book villain: those who think that a Ukrainian victory(?) over Russia will lead to its independence and overall good state of being - anyone who thinks this doesn't give a shit about Ukraine and never has - or those who recognize that a Ukrainian win means it's (re)opening to Western plunder and economic subjugation for the next century. Zelensky was already half-way to instituting the latter when Russia attacked - for it's own piece of the pie, of course.

The cartoon intellect hath spoken

To be fair this assumes NATO has principals which it abides by, which of course, it does not.

No I think your line made a hard stop a few generations ago, evolutionary speaking.

After the American and Russian poster boy old farts die off who will direct American foreign policy and for what end, say in two years? Should Europe just wait it out? — magritte

Not sure what you're asking. American foreign policy will be consistent as ever: eliminate democracy in favor of market-expansion and the destruction of labor rights everywhere. Doesn't quite matter who is in charge.

Mm, from one set of murdererous freaks to another.

Imagine taking seriously the idea that Ukraine will be in any way, shape, or form independant even if they do drive Russia out. Yet more fantasizing.

Its gleaming future: shoe factory and interest rate bearer for the West. And all that juicy black earth, ripe for international agribusiness, to be sold at bargain basement prices, and eliminating local farmer control. How exciting.

Yes Russia is absolutely losing and getting their ass handed to them in Ukraine but also they are Lord Voldermort and will conquer Europe if given half the chance so clearly all of Europe must immediately become an American foreign policy whore ASAP. This is totally not the reasoning of complete morons.

Likewise, I mean, I seem to remember askíng you to stop replying earlier in this thread, so it's rather you who can't contain your need to bully around — Christoffer

Oh you're quite right I will continue to point out how wrong you are about everything ever and are basically a war slut. Except for this one thing! But do continue to tell me how you don't care while caring a great deal, over and over again. I knew you couldn't keep away :heart:

Every time some hysteric waxes lyrical over Russia Bad, it's worth asking why they are. You'll either get the tautologous Russia bad because Russia Bad, or else the Russia Bad because it would like the West to fuck off from its borders, which is of course the only reasonable answer to anyone who doesn't think international politics is a video game.

And if the latter is the case, then there is no worse response on the planet to Russia Bad than: let's make the West nestle right up against its borders. It has all the logic of: if we add oil to these flames, these flames will get tired and go away.

You're welcome to ignore me. But you probably won't.

"Pax Americana is coming to an end. This is why we must continue and buy into pax Americana".

Gotta love it. The West basically did all it could to make sure Russia would respond by murdering Ukranians, and then, when it does just that, gets people to affirm that it needs Western unity now more than ever.

Geo-identity politics. How fun. This @Christoffer bloke likes to whine about substance and the employs the most vapid form of ad hom imaginable. I mean there probably is something to the idea of local knowledge but considering this bloke writes better stories than Harry Potter, he doesn't get to keep his geo-idpol card.

Oh, you hadn't heard that arguments are geolocked?

You wrote a three paragraph fantasy novella and I was complementing you.

I think you should shut the fuck up. You're not even on the same side of the globe so you have no idea what you're talking about. If you want to criticize alliances you should criticize your Aukus involvement more than commenting on us joining Nato. — Christoffer

No I think I will criticize anything I want, especially your overactive imagination, thanks. You can continue to cry about it, of course.

And as it so happens, AUKUS is a fucking joke, and I welcome your solidarity on that front.

I think @Christoffer should write the next Star Wars. A++ imagination.

The guiding light I follow in thinking about this is the exchange/production distinction. To the degree that capitalism ultimately makes a change at the level of production so that production becomes production-for-market, so long as this remains in place, I think what we have is still capitalism. A key notion here is that of market-dependency. If our social (and thus life) arrangements are dependent on markets to reproduce themselves, then, to put it bluntly, we're in trouble. It's simply a matter of imperatives and necessities: if even a democratically governed workplace will be subject to market imperatives, there's every chance that the planet-killing imperatives to further commidification and assestization will chug along regardless.

Ultimately the goal is going to have to be freeing ourselves from market-dependency. That's the left project of freedom. Actual freedom, and not the fuck-you-I-got-mine bullshit peddled by the right. And part of that is going to be abolishing, or at least severely curtailing, the private property form. That said, I do see democratic workplace ownership as an enabling condition of that state of affairs. People should decide how, where, what, and how much to produce, but instituting workplace democracy won't get us all the way there without putting into question market-dependency, without which even collective decisions will be severely constrained in their decision making wiggle-room.

Importantly, being free of market-dependency doesn't mean getting rid of markets tout court. I'm not sure that would be either possible nor desirable. But it would mean incorporating markets into wider circuits of social life in a way that does not make the latter depend on the former.

What should be added to this account of the birth of capitalism is the reciprocal interrelation between the impersonal production and reproduction and the emergence and development of the personal sphere itself. — Number2018

Yes. And this makes sense - insofar as markets are a matter of impersonal exchange, their generalization effects a 'disembedding' of exchange from social contexts. Nothing matters (in principle) outside the spot exchange, which means the only agents that begin to matter are individual market-actors, and not say, communities, groups, territorial bands, or even hierarchical relations. Social relations are (in principle) irrelevant.

The birth of 'the individual' follows quite nicely from the birth of generalized market-society. It is no surprise that liberalism - whose unit of analysis is precisely the individual, upon whom rights and obligation accrue (and property rights above all!) - is born exactly at the end of feudalism at the point at which markets become ascendant. The 'bourgeois revolutions', French, English, American and so on, all took place against the weight of feudal hierarchies and their appropriation of productive processes, all the better to champion the individual as the prime actor in history and society. And it is liberalism above all which championed - if not outright invented - the very distinction between the 'personal' and the 'public' - @Tom Storm.

I tried to acknowledge what Lasch was talking about in the last paragraph of my response to Jamal. But the internationalization of markets is not in any way opposed to the centrality of states. In fact the centrality of states underlies the internationalization of markets, without which the latter could not take place.

I’m surprised you didn’t include the existence of owners/employers as a distinguishing feature of this socioeconomic system. — Xtrix

Heh, it would have needed at least another paragraph, and things were getting a bit long. I could only gesture at it in the last line regarding changes to labour that follow from changes to production. But yes, the owner-employer relation is the next step - it follows from (or with) production being geared towards markets. Because once the latter begins to happen, market actors themselves begin to take direct control of the production process. Before the emergence of capitalism full-blown, labour tended to have, in a broad sense, control over their own means of production: land in particular, would be theirs to do with as necessary (even if this 'necessary' included having to harvest for a lord).

But once capitalism emerges, workers comes to be dispossessed from such means: they become 'free workers' - freed from their lands such that their only means of production are their bodies alone. Land - and capital - starts to belong directly to merchants, or, at this point, capitalists. And they do this in order to squeeze out 'efficiencies' from production, and root out any resistance to the market-orientation of production. Hence, for instance, the importance of 'enclosure' movement in England, among other historical turning points. It is at this point that the owner-employee (capitalist-worker) relation takes definitive shape. But in the order of things, free labour follows from the institution of capitalism, rather than precedes it.

We can imagine a world where production was controlled by workers and yet geared towards markets. Would this still be considered capitalist? — Xtrix

I think so, yes. Certainly a far more conciliatory capitalism than we know, but to the degree our conditions of life are dictated by markets - and not the other way around - this would still be a case of capitalism ascendant. I'm not 'against markets' per se - they undoubtedly help solve coordination problems, under certain conditions - but they need to be a tool among others in our arsenal of life. We must put them to use for us, rather than putting us to use for them.

It's great that the guy who just murdered 10 black people in the US was inspired by the same Nazis that the US is handing a couple of billion dollars to in Ukraine. I'm sure this won't be a problem down the track at all.

palace economy — frank

socialism — frank

Thanks for playing.

What we think of as capitalism developed hand in glove with money and banking. Separating them would be a leap in the dark. — frank

You're welcome to read the OP for why this is an irrelevancy.

So the Bronze Age economy was not capitalist. It was clearly socialist — frank

This is an anarchonism so terrible it does not deserve attention.

Still not sure why you want to talk about priests or what that has to do with anything.

One of the ancestors of free markets was an aspect of the Bronze Age palace economy. People brought their wheat and other goods to the palace. Priests would then take a cut for the palace and distribute the rest to the people. — frank

First, I don't know why you keep referring to 'free' markets, rather than markets. Not sure what this qualifier is doing. Second, this is far from an impersonal spot exchange, and fits quite nicely as one of the modes of social exchange that defines pre-market society. Not sure what point you're trying to make here. "Free markets" is something Americans like to say because they don't really understand the term, and has to do primarily with international trade and the absence of protectionist policy. But that's not what we're talking about, really.

This is one of the things I wish I could get across to some leftists. Money and banking, which are both products of a laissez-faire environment, aren't just objects in our world that we can extricate ourselves from by wearing red bandanas. — frank

I'm not sure why you think 'money and banking' is a target here. Money absolutely facilitated markets, allowing for impersonal exchange to be even more impersonal. But part of the reason I've emphasized that capitalism takes root at level of production rather than exchange, is to make clear that money and banking is, at best, a peripheral problem, and certainly not a central one. In fact there's nothing wrong with money or banking per se - only what we do with them. Far more interesting - and worth abolishing - is the private property form, which is a enormous limiter to human potential.

Failing how, though? I've been pondering this for a while, and I still don't quite understand other than it has to do with the 1970s. — frank

Here you go:

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/a-world-rate-of-profit-a-new-approach/

A followup question might be: how much does neoliberalism allow capitalism to abandon states, that is, nation states? — Jamal

I think the state remains as important as ever. What does happen though, is that the state fundamentally changes in its function and orientation. Where once it functioned - at least in the West - as a social bulwark to market generalization (via social security, investment in infrastructure, efforts at redistribution, etc), it now functions more and more as a simple police apparatus. That is, instead of taking care of your population, it's much simpler to punish and incarcerate them. As it so happens, the latter affords more opportunities to profit, even though it may, in the long run, be more expensive for all involved. Related to this, the rights of property above all else are the focus of state action: the state exists to protect - and expand - property rights. All other rights - like say, rights to be in control of one's own womb - are negotiable. Workers rights above all, are subject to destruction by states, instead of protecting them. It is a concerted and sustained political effort.

On the foreign policy front, the is state still vitally important to maintain overseas markets, along with expanding the reach of 'open markets'. This usually means negotiating so that companies have access to production in poorer - although somewhat stable - countries like China, Indonesia, or Vietnam. It takes enormous state organization to ensure that all this happens smoothly so products can be manufactured there and then shipped in to the core nations. And then of course these war to subdue threats to market generalization - which is a partial explanation of what is happening in Ukraine right now.

And the other thing states do, more and more - I think maybe among the most consequential and least talked about - is to take on private risk. That is, private business risk is 'offshored' to state, who bear the burden when capitalist markets fuck up. The political economist Daniela Gabor has a really, really excellent and easy to read paper [PDF] on this topic. From the abstract: "The state risk-proofs development assets for institutional investors by taking on its balance sheet: (i) demand risks attached to commodified (social) infrastructure assets, (ii) political risk attached to policies that would threaten profits, such as nationalization, higher minimum wages and climate regulation, (iii) climate risks that may become part of regulatory frameworks; (iv) bond and currency markets risks that complicate investors’ exit". This 'taking on investment risk' tracks with the increase of financialization: states can function as lenders of last resort and prop up 'too-big-to-fail' institutions without which everything goes tits-up.

One thing to note is that while states are important, this has very little to do with state sovereignty. States do all this, but not because they are sovereign, but because they are largely held hostage by market forces: states are largely the bureaucratic systems of market actors in all of this. This is most clear in places like the EU, where states more or less simply do not have control of their own fiscal or monetary policies. Which again means, in lieu of actual governance, they are reduced to a simple security apparatus. International "trade agreements" like GATT and NAFTA do the same on a global scale. So there's a kind of separation of 'the nation' from 'the nation-state'. Insofar as nations have anything to do with it, it's as a scape-goat: nationalism blossoms to compensate for the abandonment of the state for the people. Instead of blaming capitalism, migrants, minorities, sexual deviants, and colored people are blamed for decaying societies. The separation of nation and state makes the nation something deadly.

Also I haven't said anything about currency but oh boy states and currency and the necessity of states to try and keep currency under control for the sake of markets has basically driven the last 80 years of global history.

I don't care if there happens a 'mass suffering' in Russia — M777

No, I suppose you don't. Because people like you are monsters.

Sure it does, if you're a neocolonial idiot who has not paid attention to how every attempt as regime change by the West has led to tragedy and mass suffering.

In any case these are stupid hypotheticals not worth entertianing any more than asking what if snow white had eight rather than seven dwarves.

So what?

Seriously, anyone who talks about 'regime change' has learned nothing from the last twenty years and has brain rot.

Not sure how this is relevant. Half-dead murderous old men don't seem to really have an issue ruling anywhere one turns.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people really, genuinely think that removing Putin from without is an actual, real life, not fairy tale, option.

A Note on Neoliberalism, Financialization, and Debt

If the above defines capitalism, what is this thing called ‘neoliberalism’ that people often talk about? It means many things, but for this note, it can be said to represent one further step in the generalization of impersonal exchange. Neoliberalism is what happens when not just economics becomes a matter of impersonal exchange, but politics and governance too. That is, when governments themselves become subject to market imperatives: hence mass privatisation of previously ‘public goods’, along with the treating governments as market institutions themselves: not governing for the sake of people and populations, but for the sake of markets, which substitute in place of political governance.

Finally what does financialization have to do with this? We often hear about the rise of financialization, and the predominance of ‘speculation’ and debt, but what does this have to do with the above? Well, one answer is that the above model of capitalism based on markets is, in a word, failing. Markets - the exchange of goods - simply no longer deliver the kinds of profits that is generally sustainable and re-producible (and reproducibility is one of the things that defines capitalism!) As such, cooporations no longer look (just) to selling stuff to make their profits, but to making money from money itself: not commodities but assets (housing, stocks, debt) are now the key to making profits. Although they are sustained by markets, they are parasitic off of them, even as they engender larger and larger crisis at the level of markets themselves - and vice versa. In a word, the rise of financialization is an index of capitalism in crisis.