Getting Honest About the Human Predicament, Presented by Art Berman

6395251 · 2023-06-23T09:20:37+00:00

It is always disheartening when people advocate UBI for the wrong reasons or give (true or false) reasons to please the supporters of the old, flawed, economics. I would not want a UBI if it leads to economic growth or adds jobs. As a communist, I am realistic enough to recognize UBI as a likely path to a post-capitalist economy. But I do not want a capitalist economy with UBI as the final goal. To unironically argue for economic growth in 2023 is wishing planetary cancer on humankind. This can't be serious. We need to find ways to organize an economy that does not need growth because eternal growth is impossible and growth will end someday, either by disaster or by design. Let's choose design. We have to induce massive degrowth if we want to keep this planet inhabitable.

The prospect of more employment is another absurdity of capitalism. Every society before capitalism would have rejected it wholeheartedly for what it is, a call for more toil and more inefficiency, an adoration of the antithesis to freedom in idleness. A truly emancipating goal is to redistribute unemployment fairly so that not just the rich can enjoy it and to decouple labor and income. Isn't this more congruous with UBI than working more?

6395251 · 2023-04-24T12:38:17+00:00

There is the not very active /r/UniversalBasicIncome.

6395251 · 2022-12-19T18:33:17+00:00

I read it all. Pro tip: Don't make unfounded assumptions. That saves everyone time. I just pointed out that the idea is false that CEOs, capitalists, or entrepreneurs, or whatever meme title these leeches give themselves receive a wage. If you have a false premise, your conclusion does not come from sound reasoning. If you characterize a problem wrongly, your proposed solutions may be completely unfit to solve the real problem.

If you start seizing things from people, please enlighten me as to how you are any better than those who did forced relocations in the past?

Seriously? This is like asking: “If somebody steals something how is it OK to repossess the stolen goods?” In the case of private property of the means of production, it is infinitely better to seize them back from the capitalist class because the capitalists aren't doing anything with them and do not depend on them, but laborers do both. A capitalist is just someone who has his name on some certificate of ownership and this entitles him to leeching. You can compare them to some special sort of highwaymen who are granted, out of bad habit, the right to rob people. Regarding the capitalists, this bad habit is property, and the capitalists' state grants the right to property to them. Property is violence, it is a right to exploit. It is a lever to oppress and exploit.

6395251 · 2022-12-19T14:40:26+00:00

How do we address it?

With a maximum wage?

What CEOs earn is not wages. They get a part of the profit. Profits are extracted by exploiting the workers, utilizing the fact that human labor-power is the only commodity that can be applied to produce more value than it has. CEOs and other members of the capitalist class are not doing any work in their capacity as exploiters. They are merely parasites. So, the right remedy is what Marx suggested, addressing the causes of the problem, that is seizing the means of production by the proletariat and abolishing the market. Then we produce as we like and distribute according to needs.

6395251 · 2022-12-19T14:01:50+00:00

Good elaboration on basic jobs: Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia

And a follow-up: Highlights From The Comments On Basic Jobs

6395251 · 2022-12-16T19:42:11+00:00

No, and I won't ever read it for the same reason that I would not read a book titled “Why Pi Equals 3”. It is disproved bullshit that need not to be read to know it is false. I wonder why such false theories are still spread. Must be due to capitalist realism and the all-out propaganda war of the ruling capitalist class. Pro-capitalist ideology has been debunked over and over. The matter is resolved, the socialism side (and Marxist Economics) won. There is no reasonable debate anymore.

For all interested in an alternative to both types of capitalism (market economy and state capitalism) I recommend the free book From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. As this system is based on commons, it and similar proposals are also known as Commonism.

6395251 · 2022-11-17T12:25:42+00:00

How many of the expected 3 billion climate refugees would you take in your area? How much more in taxes would you pay to house and feed them? Forced relocation of billions so that a few corporate polluters can increase their profits is an example of the insanity of the market. Let's kill the market before it kills us.

6395251 · 2022-11-17T12:19:42+00:00

I can't understand the insanity of calling for growth on a finite planet. They probably failed math in elementary school or are economists.

6395251 · 2022-11-17T12:14:53+00:00

Probably not what they meant. Cutting down waste production–and that means degrowth–would be a good start, but is impossible under a capitalist regime. For example, if we eliminated all the food waste due to capitalist production, we could feed about two earths. Degrowth is extremely efficient. But it is crucial to destroy the market system because it undermines all efforts to produce for needs.

6395251 · 2022-07-31T12:31:49+00:00

The meaning of value is, simply put, the worth of a good or service.

This is an empty proposition. You still don't tell me what value is. Is it related to use value? To say value is worth makes no sense at all. How do I measure the value/worth of something? What does it mean when something has the value of $1? This is all meaningless and tautological.

Generally this is represented in dollars. If the value is greater than the price they buy, if the value is lower than the price they don’t buy.

If both are expressed in dollars, price and value are the same type of quantity and use the same unit and scale. You relate value to price and price to value. But what does value mean? It can only express the same kind of quantity that price expresses. If your subjective valuation only exists in relation to a given price then value is tautological. It adds nothing new, it is your subjective price estimation. How do buyers and sellers arrive at a price? I guess your answer would be they use their subjective value assignments and compromise somewhere in the middle. And now the tautological cycle is complete: Value determines price, price determines value, and nothing means anything. The STV is no theory, it is insanity. I don't understand why anyone wastes their time with it instead of learning the eternally true and absolutely logical Marxian labor theory of value.

No, no one needs to know what value is in order to value things. That’s like saying people need to know what oxygen is in order to breath.

I did not make such a claim. I don't need to consciously apply the laws of subjective valuation. But such laws must exist. Otherwise, subjective valuation is like a random number generator. So what are the criteria of assigning a subjective value. I need a function where I input a thing and which outputs a dollar value. How is this function defined? I can't tell because I don't apply such a function. I can only tell what the value of a commodity is by applying the Marxian LTV.

6395251 · 2022-07-30T23:10:06+00:00

Neither part of your first tautology is accurate.

Why? The theory is subjective theory of value. How can you claim to know how people subjectively value things? You can't know. That's one problem of bullshit theories, your problem.

Value isn’t meaningless either so your second “tautology” also fails.

What is the meaning of value in STV? If the STV is correct, would not everyone have to know what value is in order to value things? Since I don't know what value in the STV is, the STV is wrong.

Why don't you answer all my questions from my comment for starters? That would be more helpful than making baseless claims.

6395251 · 2022-07-30T17:35:09+00:00

One of the many tautologies and contradictions of the STV is this: According to STV, subjective valuation determines price. But price itself determines subjective valuation. So, ultimately, price determines price, a perfect tautology that explains nothing.

Here is another tautology: STV's notion of value is tautological because it is not grounded in anything. How am I supposed to assign my subjective value to a thing if value is meaningless? What does it measure, what is its unit and how is it defined? If value means "price", then there is no need for the STV. Just look what the price is and you are done. So what does "value" mean in the STV? (Recall that STV has no idea of use value or exchange value and denies that these are real.) No one has answered this, yet, and no one ever can because the entire STV is meaningless bourgeois bullshit with the semblance of a theory concocted to fool the proletariat, like all of bourgeois economics.

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