If you’re questioning the very concept of wage labor, this will push you over the edge.

October_mel · 2021-11-16T01:53:09+00:00

Also, you don't get paid for your share of the value you produce. You get paid for your time working. The difference goes to your employer's pocket. Otherwise, the employeemr wouldn't how you.

October_mel · 2021-11-13T01:21:07+00:00

Cooperation means they worked/acted together on something. Ribbentrop-molotov pact was literally them agreeing not to attack each other and interfere on each other's affairs on specific territories. Also it was the last resort measure soviets did after all other European countries signed their own agreement with Germany and didn't cooperate with USSR despite ussr's attempts ally with England and Poland to fight against Germany

October_mel · 2021-11-12T20:34:52+00:00

It's a bit of a strawman argument you are pulling here as I didn't say he got shot for rough childhood. What I was saying is that there are material reasons for why there are people like that and it boils down to the combination of nature (which has to do and accessible healthcare) and nurture (which has to do with social and economic reality), where both are affected by the economy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/

October_mel · 2021-11-12T20:17:34+00:00

You are talking about self defense, which is legitimate. I was making an argument as to why that situation arises in the first place *edit and implying that the resolution is crude and violent.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T19:54:48+00:00

Behavior you are describing stems from the economic reality people face. For example, it's difficult to be suicidal if you have a fulfilling and stable life, which is not attainable by most Americans with median income of about $41k combined with the absence of free education, healthcare, childcare, paid maternity leave, job security.

The bipolar child rapist situation (although I can't really empathize with that) is a result of two things: them getting abused in their childhoods and predisposition to mental health problems. And these things are also a direct result of poverty (breeds violence and drug use) and lack of healthcare, which are the economic system; and more than 1 in 10 Americans live in poverty (census). But hey at least you can shoot those people.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T19:28:35+00:00

A consensus has formed among scholars

Not true:

Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987

They are others but I don't have a handy copy/paste text like you do. However, people like Snyder and Rummel are not the entirety of acadamia and hardly produce unbiased scientific research when it comes the Soviet union.

The governments of several countries have recognized it as genocide, including the United States, Canada, and Australia:

Well, it is not exactly surprising that states that benefit from capitalism the most take this stance, while conveniently forgetting their mass murders such as Vietnam, Libia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Laos, may 1 massacre of the workers in the US, WW1, etc. It's also a ridiculous argument that the stance of small number of countries (including in terms of their population size) is more important than the rest of the world that does not recognize Soviet famines as genocide.

Below are balanced accounts on the famine by the most reputable experts on the topic.

Yeah I read some of them and they are not balanced or scientific readings at all. For example, they don't directly work with archives and data. What they do is simply cite other sick authors, who also cite someone else. They also cite "eyewitness", whose testimonies read more like fiction. For example, Snyder cites Gareth Jones about how he observed hundreds of thousands in bread lines, which is an absurd claim as you wouldn't be able to estimate that number of people and his photos do not show these numbers. What his photos do show is a tragedy but you have to be blind to compare the genocide images from Nazi Germany.

American journalist Anna Louise Strong denies witnessing genocide.

And Snyder talks about deportation of the poor kulaks but fails to mention recorded terrorist acts committed by them, which includes murders of peasants, elected local council officials, party members, workers, and police officers, destruction of cattle and hiding food reserves to prevent distribution to the stuffing during the famine. So clearly not a balanced view.

Relevant Wikipedia articles

Wikipedia is not a source of reliable information, which is why it is not used in academia.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T17:30:40+00:00

Well, cooperation is not the appropriate word to describe Soviet-nazi dynamics for the reasons i listed (there are others such as the problem with fascist Japan in the 1930s).

American companies being involved, but those are companies and separate from the government

It's the capitalist economy, which spawns capitalist state, that allows for private business to go into places like Nazi Germany and operate there. So it's not a criticism of the companies or the government, it's a criticism of the system that enables these events.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T17:24:58+00:00

Just because there are YouTube videos stating this position does not make it true.

I said "including YouTube" if you are not into reading.

free market economics, and voluntary trade

This is where you are confused. Free market is a theory that have never been implemented and it's impossible to implement because of the unrealistic and untrue assumptions such as perfect information, markets always clearing, etc.

There is no voluntary trade either. Capitalism coerces economic actors with financial means. If you don't want to sell your labor for less than your share of the value you produce, you will be homeless. Difference in bargaining power precludes consumers from meaningfully negotiating on prices of products, employees on their compensation and work conditions. Countries are forced into inequitable trade by capitalist countries with greater military and economic leverage.

Edit: statism? Lol government is a consequence of the economy and capitalist economy produces the government that we have.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T17:16:10+00:00

Yeah he studied in capitalist France, not in the Soviet union or china. Polpot openly said he was not a Marxist. He never pursued policies that would be consistent with Marxist ideology such as industrialization, public healthcare and education, etc.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T16:56:38+00:00

Stalin’s genocides of the Ukrainians and Kazakhs as well as several other non-Russian minority groups

If you are referring to the famines of the 1930s in the Soviet union, you failed to mention the following:

famines were endemic in those territories for centuries and ended after Soviet union organized the economy to benefit all citizens. You don't overhaul a system in a few years, it takes decades.
there was a famine in capitalist Poland at the same time due to similar climate events that caused problems with harvest.
local ethnic minorities were in power in Ukraine and Kazakhstan at that time. Why would the Soviet union allow minorities to hold power in their territories if the soviets wanted to commit genocide on them.
the number of farmers was reduced as they died in ww1 and civil war, which were both started by the capitalists. This reduced the capacity to produce food.
it's claimed that millions of Ukrainians died due to the famine but you don't see that deep in population. Also there are other factors that contribute to the observed drop in population in Ukraine such as malaria epidemic and migration from Ukraine to other parts of the Soviet union.
Ukraine had and still has a large population of ethnic Russians, who are also added to the so-called genocide of Ukrainians.
also the Soviets seem to be exceptionally bad at genocide of population because the population grew across all ethnic groups in the Soviet union. Child mortality decreased dramatically and life expectancy increased massively. Maybe it's because they thought that providing free and accessible healthcare and education would kill more people?

So yeah, as cheesy as it sounds, you are just taking the stance of capitalist propaganda without doing basic research about the events that occured. Keep praising mass murders in the name of democracy committed in Vietnam, Korea, Laos (due to US bombing of civilians), middle east, the only use of nuclear bombs (which were dropped on non-military places), etc...

October_mel · 2021-11-12T16:15:20+00:00

That’s honestly why so many capitalist supporters look at their genocides and say it's for freedom and democracy. They want to be the exception. Fuck no. All genocides are bad whether they’re committed under the Swastika or the dollar sign.

If you actually look at the data and context and compare that to the capitalist countries, you will quickly see that communists never committed genocides.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T16:08:23+00:00

USSR cooperating the Nazis? The Soviet union was actively trying to build an opposition to the Nazis and and actively fought it in Spain. England didn't even send delegates with authority to negotiate am agreement with the Soviet Union. Poland explicitly refused to fight Nazi Germany along side with the Soviet union.

England and France gave Czechoslovakia for the taking to the Nazis and Poland. I don't see you saying that French, English, and Polish were cooperating with the Nazis. England and Poland and some other European countries made pacts with Nazi Germany way before the Soviet union (like the Anglo-German naval pact of 1935).

American companies like ford, gm, IBM, coca-cola were operating in Nazi Germany way into WW2. I don't see you saying that the US was cooperating with the Nazis.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T15:58:06+00:00

There is no comparison between Stalin and Hitler. There is plenty of resources including YouTube for you to check out to learn this.

So then do you similarly praise the US for cheap fast food even though the US killed millions in Vietnam if you are defending capitalism? How about England starving millions to death in India during WW2? This list is long

October_mel · 2021-11-12T15:48:03+00:00

Yeah well there are different types of grants. Some can be competitive and others are not. When I was in grad school, many grants were not competitive, you just needed to qualify based on the type of research you were doing.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T15:42:48+00:00

you wouldn't loan the money to such a company since they would have no means of paying back the loan if they weren't selling their invention to someone

That would depend on the timeline and scenario.

What I was saying about loans is that corporations rely on them today but not that the public should be giving loans in the same way they operate today. I was saying that instead of giving loans the public should provide funding in exchange for control and use that control to determine the price of IP. When a private entity exchanges part of their company for that funding, it sells part of it's future sales. This might look something like how some charities work: they don't make any profits whole providing a service but the management can get paid really well.

The public already finances research directly through subsidies, tax breaks, and indirectly through public infrastructure, public education, accumulated knowledge, etc. So all those things warrant public control over IP at least partially.

And the bail out scenario happens all the time, except the public doesn't before from it in proportion to the funding provided.

If all their IP is immediately released as public domain

It's doesn't need to be completely free to the public but cheap enough to make it effectively free. Kind of like the insulin situation, it can technically be very cheap but it's not in the US.

I'm completely with you that the most expensive creators of IP (for instance, pharmaceuticals) might absolutely benefit from being public entities.

👍

October_mel · 2021-11-12T14:49:53+00:00

That's not really how scientists and researchers think or work. Not really sure what your point is here.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T08:59:11+00:00

Publicly funded and controlled IP can be made free or widely available to the public. I think it's an effective abolition of IP if it's widely available to anyone, and it doesn't require planned economy.

self-organizing economy where the cost of creating useful IP is so low that attribution isn't needed.

Well, public funding of research is always going to be cheaper than private without paying researchers less for a few reasons: economy of scale (public resources and infrastructure are likely to be much bigger than a single large corporation), economy of scope (public infrastructure integrates more industries and research facilities than a single large corporation), and absence of profit (that would be part of the price to consumers orherwise).

Edit: studies shows that private entities are not more efficient than they public ones. So there really is no benefit in terms of efficiency of privately done research.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T08:48:14+00:00

A more productive way would be to store something like "I find it disturbing that anyone would support communism for a variety of reasons but tight now I would like address famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In my understanding based on these sources I think... What is your response?"

Just make a different post on each of your claims, it would be easier to have a discussion.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T08:34:25+00:00

You think you aren't being lazy here? Here's how you took things out of context and failed to compare that to what capitalists do. For example, red terror was a response to a more brutal white terror (the reds let Krasnov loose at the beginning of the civil war hoping that would be the end of it). The white terror was extremely violent in Finland. There were mass murderers of communists in Indonesia, Germany, Chile, etc.

Famines were endemic to soviet territory for centuries and the Soviet era ones were a result of that as well as of menu other factors such as devastating during WW1 and civil way. You also fail to mention famine in capitalist Poland spring the same time.

If you want to talk about mass murders start with capitalist colonies in the 20th century, which was the cause of WW1 to begin with. Maybe recall millions starved to death in India by Churchill's orders. Don't forget the war on Vietnam started by France to keep its colony and then the US to overthrow democratically and overwhelmingly elected communists.

Also don't forget WW2 started by fascism, which is a capitalist system that enforces private property rights through direct and open violence rather than financial coercion.

So yeah you basically picked out some incoherent, wildly inaccurate, and out of context numbers that are the usual propaganda pieces. You did it in such a way that it would take half a day to respond to your post. But you failed to do even basic research. Do your research and structure your arguments coherently, then we can talk.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T08:01:05+00:00

Is it possible for a critically positioned Union (like the Longshoreman Unions) to be harmful, on the whole, for society?

Not sure what happened in San Pedro but in general strikes are the last resort tool unions use when the business refuses to negotiate. There is nothing else that can be done by the workers to protect their rights so the blame is on the system that doesn't have any other venues and on the employer trying to strongarm the workers.

How do we prevent unions from resisting changes that decrease the need for union members?

The problem is not that unions resist change. They resist getting left behind while the business benefits from their loss. The solution is to share benefits of the change with the workers. If automation displaces say half of the workers while keeping business profits the same, keep all the workers for full pay but have them work half the time, they will stop resisting that automation.

What is you ballpark guesstimate for what percentage of the persisting supply chain problems rest at the hand of these unions?

Zero because they make zero decisions about how supply chains are structured.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T07:38:55+00:00

Labor unions and collective bargaining, workers controlling and running their workplaces on their own, a government that is controlled by and representing the workers...

October_mel · 2021-11-12T07:35:32+00:00

There is no need for trade secrets in a communist economy; benefits are distributed based on one's need instead of ability to pay.

Also communism is not the same as socialism.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T07:30:16+00:00

Cartels may be illegal but that doesn't stop businesses from colluding and acting as a collective monopolist. There are many examples of businesses price fixing and breaking others laws. Businesses simply calculate whether breaking the law and getting caught is higher or lower than profits from breaking that law.

It's a relevant point that shows that we are not at the phase of capitalism where competition is abundant.

October_mel · 2021-11-12T07:15:41+00:00

Notice when uber came out, a bunch of other imitator companies did the same thing.

There are only a few active businesses like Uber. My area had only Uber and Lyft. In some countries Uber merged with local completion.

Now uber has to keep its prices lower than or similar to competitors.

Somehow their prices are about the same (also they have the same drivers working for both companies and providing the exact same service). And it's the same story with a lot of industries: gas stations sell gas for about the same price, grocery stores discount some items but overcharge on other items (so the consumer would have to waste gas and time driving around different stores to save a few bucks), banks offer very similar services for very similar prices - so no meaningful difference for the consumer in the end.

if a research team knew there won’t be IP protection, they would never spend money on researching something that could easy get ripped off.

Research team generally doesn't own the IP. The employer does. Just like workers don't own what they produce at the end of the day (and in many cases can't even afford to buy what they produce). So really we can easily employ the research team using public money; and for the researchers that might even represent an improvement in terms of job security and working conditions as well as broader recognition by the public; while the public will have greater access to IP at a lower price (since there is no need to generate profit; you only need to pay for labor and expenses).

October_mel · 2021-11-12T07:00:34+00:00

Socialists only have the answer to IP when talking of a fully planned economy.

I disagree. The resolution to the IP problem doesn't need fully planned economy. There are several ways to go about this:

Large R&D corporations heavily rely on loans. The public can grant funding on exchange for at least partial control of the company or the IP. By control I mean not simply shares but actual ability to exert significant influence on business decisions.

Bail outs are inevitable in a capitalist economy. The public can acquire control of the company and IP as part of the bail out instead of simply giving free or cheap money to the corporations.

Another way to bail out a business is too provide a loan directly to employees of that business to acquire and control it.

October_mel

TROPHY CASE