what Marxism really is.....

[iambiguous]

and if someone makes you an offer that is below your expectation
stand up, shake their hand
say it was nice talking to them and walk out

Right, that will pay the bills.

[Mowk]

and yours is non-existent

Then what are you arguing about?

yours was a fairy dumb remark.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Wow Mo, in the course of a month you have called me a spic and a girl a bitch, because we disagree with you.

It's almost like these caricatures of a Republican you paint is really just a reflection of how you feel inside.

Maybe these "bitches" should know their place? Lololol.

All your theory is empty.

A women can be what ever she wishes even turn herself into a he if that's what floats the persons boat.

Still believe a women should be compensated fairly, people should be treated fairly.

AND ...people can work hard and not be, see above.

Sorry you don't come off as a nice lady.

Unless she disagrees with you, then she's a "bitch."

You're a spaz.

[Pedro I Rengel]

The truth is that women are not equal to men.

They should be treated with extra respect and extra care.

Honestly, if you don't understand this, you are a spaz.

It has nothing to do with ideology. You are just weak and a spaz.

[Pedro I Rengel]

So I think that you, Mo, are the bitch.

[Mowk]

Gee thanks, at least you didn't call me a commie bitch. Hey, maybe you are starting to demonstrate some discernment.

You demonstrated kindness and compassion so obviously, yet, I must have missed it. Dial down the rhetoric for Herbie's sake or ramp it up and I'll respond in kind.

I just got a phone call from some fuck, whose job it is to call me and begin the conversation "Oh, I'm glad you picked up... I was just getting my answering machine voice ready... That's someone's Job under capitalism. I've no idea if a Marxist would do that, but a capitalist sure will. And a call from Apple saying they have detected suspicious activity on my network... There are no Apple devices associated with "my" local network.

Shit, capitalism, socialism, communism, feudalism, fascism, federalism, and every fucking other ism should crack down on that crap. Really fond of the call ABC Specialty Siding, that calls under the guise of being an environmental impact survey.

I have just a few questions for you...

...Do you own or rent your home?
Me: Own
...How old is your home?
Me: 137 years...

Does your home have it's original doors, windows, roof, and siding.
Me: It's 137 years old, of course not.

And on a scaled from 1-10, how energy efficient would you rate your home?
Me: Hangs up.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Gee thanks, at least you didn't call me a commie bitch. Hey, maybe you are starting to demonstrate some discernment.

You demonstrated kindness and compassion so obviously, yet, I must have missed it. Dial down the rhetoric for Herbie's sake or ramp it up and I'll respond in kind.

I just got a phone call from some fuck, whose job it is to call me and begin the conversation "Oh, I'm glad you picked up... I was just getting my answering machine voice ready... That's someone's Job under capitalism. I've no idea if a Marxist would do that, but a capitalist sure will. And a call from Apple saying they have detected suspicious activity on my Apple network... There are no Apple devices associated with "my" local network.

Shit, capitalism, socialism, communism, feudalism, fascism, federalism, and every fucking other ism should crack down on that crap. Really fond of the call ABC Specialty Siding, that calls under the guise of being an environmental impact survey.

I have just a few questions for you...

...Do you own or rent your home?
Me: Own
...How old is your home?
Me: 137 years...

Does your home have it's original doors, windows, roof, and siding.
Me: It's 137 years old, of course not.

And on a scaled from 1-10, how energy efficient would you rate your home?
Me: Hangs up.

Well I mean you are a commie bitch.

But more importantly you are just a bitch.

[Mowk]

Well then...I guess ya just gotta be a bitch before you're bitchin', you just figuring you'll wear me out with your charm? Man, how did you get to be so cold?

All the telemarketing scams are a capitalistic phenomenon; the tracking, the identity theft, all hired help. The job, for the pay, they have a family to support. Who are these people that take such jobs? Who are these people that run such businesses? David Byrne...American Utopia...same as it ever was....

[Mowk]

So any "data" i've got to work with on the internet is post digital age, so it goes back say to 1980 and that's generous. Had to go back to books to get much information prior to that.

'Art Though the Ages" is an incredible historical reference.

Forced labor (slavery) has been systemic ever since we became agrarian. Can you name a civilization center of historic importance that did not have slavery?

What is the goal of slavery, cheap labor. What can a civilization build with an abundance of cheap labor? I say they could become developed.

Now I don't see a lot of profit in feeding the homeless, yet there is a lot of volunteer participation and charitable donations, religious involvement that has had the greatest impact. Can we really call that an effect of capitalism, while it is concurrent with the data collected from the period involved. :shrug: I'm not putting many intellectual eggs in that basket.

People, aren't the demographics of the "discussion" a hoot.

[Mowk]

Shit communism is corrupt as capitalism, that's some piece of paper "The economic stand in for value" "The Means" rests between a human life and a human death.

[Mowk]

What Marxism really was... was a failure to deliver on its promise. That's what Capitalism is as well. The systems aren't about solving problems, they compete in the field of "which can stand" the most blame regarding ownership of the capital of human labor.

What a human Really is. What our planet Really is. What you Really are. What I Really am. If capitalism can reveal that I'm a capitalist, if marxism can reveal that I'm a marxist. If being neither can reveal that, I am neither. I am alive. I can't ask for any more. And why me, rather then the countless lives that have no choices. That's plural... when it gets down to just one choice it ain't much of a choice.

And just when and who limited our choice to just between a or b?

A bellwether... an interesting concept.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Settle down there Mo.

You're still a bitch.

I didn't read any of that surely stupid shit you wrote.

[Mowk]

And a fair demonstration of how immature you are.

[Pedro I Rengel]

Shut up spaz.

[Dan~]

Shut up spaz.

You need to know an idea before you can truly reject it.

[Mowk]

First amendment Pedro. While you are not bound by it, I believe in it.

Interesting that a pro capitalist would suggest I gather data from a website with a .org suffix. That's reserved for not for profit organizations.

Scratches head. Ok, so who really is your daddy?

[Mowk]

Shut up spaz.

What part of "products should be repairable rather then disposable" do you have argument with? What principal of capitalism does that not jive with? Is there a good argument against wasting less?

What part of voicing that opinion does democracy not jive with?

Keep up with the "program" you seek something else.

[promethean75]

https://www.quora.com/In-the-labor-theo ... chtenstein

[Urwrongx1000]

https://www.quora.com/In-the-labor-theory-of-value-lets-say-that-one-grape-and-one-watermelon-both-require-5-hours-of-labor-If-I-were-to-put-5-hours-of-labor-into-each-even-though-the-watermelon-would-be-much-more-filling-and-of-higher/answer/Rosa-Lichtenstein

Blah blah blah, Marxism and Economics don't mix.

You don't own your labor when you trade it for a wage. That's your responsibility, and your "fault".

If you don't like Capitalism, start your own business, and see how well you do.

"But this reason and this reason and this reason UR!"


Excuses, that's all you have, excuses. How about the countless hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the United States? You realize most new businesses fail, right? Oh, wait, facts don't matter to Marxists.

[promethean75]

"You don't own your labor when you trade it for a wage. That's your responsibility, and your "fault"."

As always, excellent thoughts urwrong, and in fact something anarchists found even more fundamental to the problem... and that is once property is taken by government and private entities, one is not free to not participate in the market (refusal to work, e.g.) somehow because one is not free to stake out property. It is already owned when they are born into the world.

So really the citizen has no other option, and therefore to interrogate him, as you do, and pretend as if he could have chosen otherwise (without incurring a criminal offense... loitering homeless and trespassing, e.g.), is rather ill informed and misdirected.

It would be another thing to say the citizen has a wide range of options to choose from, and that when he chooses to sell his labor for a wage unequal to the value his labor produced, he should have known better and done one of the other things.

In the west, you're either a wage slave, a capitalist parasite, a bum or an inmate (lumpen).

[promethean75]

And the grand irony is that the working class is footing the bill for all of the above. They startina realize this.

[phoneutria]

the citizen has no other option?

[d0rkyd00d]

Thanks for resurrecting this thread, I didn't see it previously, and coincidentally, I have just started reading Marx and a brief analysis of his life and work.

From my extremely limited reading thus, far, it seems as though Marx had a couple of brilliant realizations and ideas, but the extrapolation of those thoughts and ideas went off the rails. And of course, as I'm sure many intimately know better than I, putting these ideas into practice led to unfathomable atrocities, all in the name of equality, justice, fairness, etc.

Of course, this does not make what Marx said factually incorrect, as Peter K has broken down the math in the OP. So if anything, it is a problem without a solution (if one views extreme inequality as a problem, as most I'd like to believe most do).

A thought I am trying to flesh out (and if it has been fleshed out in the preceding 40 pages, please advise!), is not how we can flatten compensation completely, but rather how we can inexorably tie the highest compensation to the lowest compensation, in a way that meaningfully reflects the prosperity & growth of a company or country's economy, without severely discounting the labor required to make such things possible.

As I've said elsewhere, it seems one of the best tools to do that is taxation, but what other ideas been discussed historically?

[Pedro I Rengel]

A thought I am trying to flesh out (and if it has been fleshed out in the preceding 40 pages, please advise!), is not how we can flatten compensation completely, but rather how we can inexorably tie the highest compensation to the lowest compensation, in a way that meaningfully reflects the prosperity & growth of a company or country's economy, without severely discounting the labor required to make such things possible.

As I've said elsewhere, it seems one of the best tools to do that is taxation, but what other ideas been discussed historically?

From Hitler's Speech to the Workers of Berlin (10 December 1940)

"We see that the primary cause for the existing tensions lies in the unfair distribution of the riches of the earth. And it is only natural that evolution follows the same rule in the larger framework as it does in the case of individuals. Just as the tension existing between rich and poor within a country must be compensated for either by reason or often if reason fails, by force, so in the life of a nation one cannot claim everything and leave nothing to others.... "

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Adolf_Hi ... ember_1940)

Just in case anybody got any ideas of forgetting.

[d0rkyd00d]

Some other interesting lines from that speech:

It is interesting to examine the life of these rich people. In this Anglo-French world there exists, as it were, democracy, which means the rule of the people by the people. Now the people must possess some means of giving expression to their thoughts or their wishes. Analysing this problem more closely, we see that the people themselves have originally no convictions of their own. Their convictions are formed, of course, just as everywhere else. The decisive question is who enlightens the people, who educates them? In those countries, it is actually capital that rules; that is, nothing more than a clique of a few hundred men who possess untold wealth and, as a consequence of the peculiar structure of their national life, are more or less independent and free. They say: 'Here we have liberty.' By this they mean, above all, an uncontrolled economy, and by an uncontrolled economy, the freedom not only to acquire capital but to make absolutely free use of it. That means freedom from national control or control by the people both in the acquisition of capital and in its employment. This is really what they mean when they speak of liberty. These capitalists create their own press and then speak of the 'freedom of the press.'


It is self-evident that where this democracy rules, the people as such are not taken into consideration at all. The only thing that matters is the existence of a few hundred gigantic capitalists who own all the factories and their stock and, through them, control the people. The masses of the people do not interest them in the least. They are interested in them just as were our bourgeois parties in former times - only when elections are being held, when they need votes. Otherwise, the life of the masses is a matter of complete indifference to them.

To this must be added the difference in education. Is it not ludicrous to hear a member of the British Labor Party - who, of course, as a member of the Opposition is officially paid by the government - say: 'When the war is over, we will do something in social respects'?

It is the members of Parliament who are the directors of the business concerns - just as used to be the case with us. But we have abolished all that. A member of the Reichstag cannot belong to a Board of Directors, except as a purely honorary member. He is prohibited from accepting any emolument, financial or otherwise. This is not the case in other countries.

They reply: 'That is why our form of government is sacred to us.' I can well believe it, for that form of government certainly pays very well.. But whether it is sacred to the mass of the people as well is another matter.

The people as a whole definitely suffer. I do not consider it possible in the long run for one man to work and toil for a whole year in return for ridiculous wages, while another jumps into an express train once a year and pockets enormous sums. Such conditions are a disgrace. On the other hand, we National Socialists equally oppose the theory that all men are equals. Today, when a man of genius makes some astounding invention and enormously benefits his country by his brains, we pay him his due, for he has really accomplished something and been of use to his country. However, we hope to make it impossible for idle drones to inhabit this country.

I could continue to cite examples indefinitely. The fact remains that two worlds are face to face with one another. Our opponents are quite right when they say: 'Nothing can reconcile us to the National Socialist world.' How could a narrow-minded capitalist ever agree to my principles? It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today. But we have solved our problems.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Adolf_Hi ... ember_1940)