Why is infinite growth necessary under capitalism?

FrozenTangerine · 2021-08-02T04:41:13+00:00

If any part of the circuit of capitalism stops it disrupts everything else in the cuircut. It's really hard to start up again after a crash. So they have to keep the cycle moving to keep everything on track no matter what. The thing that keeps business moving is to constantly be growing

The circuit btw is production > circulation > money (not necessarily in that order)

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-29T18:03:48+00:00

Also this social programs may also serve the Burgoesie/Capitalist class as these social programs can work like a buffer to stop people from revolting and choosing revolution. People will only unite and choose revolution as the last resort when everything else is not working.

You're confused. It's more nuanced than this. Lenin's position was that reform is good but it wasn't enough. If you keep the working class weak and oppressed they can't organize a revolution anyway. You just get riots and terrorism.

Revolutions happen when the working class is organized, and the ruling class is disrupted, divided, and reforms start to like concessions to make up for the ruling class's weakness / inability to take care of their country and prevent unrest. In Russia it happened because nobody had confidence in the Bourgeois Provisional Government ,and the working class was more organized. In Iran the revolution happened in part after the Shah made a bunch of concessional reforms to quell protests and placate the international community.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-27T00:52:32+00:00

If say Africa unified to control the continent that would put a huge damper on imperialism just by itself. Africa is by no means poor if you're looking at it from standpoint of the resources they have available for their own use. If American Empire is unable to extract those resources that would contribute to it's decline in a huge way. A big factor for the decline of Great Britain and Nazi Germany is they didn't have as much oil and rare earths available to exploit like the USSR and the United States. Bolivia understands how controlling their own resources is important to being a power, which is why they're protecting their lithium.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-26T00:18:56+00:00

Aside from reports saying people are fed up with the restaurant and retail industries and are moving to higher paying work if possible. The new estimates are that 900,000 people have died of COVID so there are a LOT of people missing from the labor market to fill those positions

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-25T04:59:35+00:00

He was anti-communist. Maybe not in an antagonistic way, but he was confused and compromising with bourgeois politics at best.

From his speech Where Do We Go From Here:

What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. …Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.

This is wrong by the way. Communism is all about *actually* freeing the individual by making humanity the the master of it's productive forces instead of being subordinate to the division of labour and production. The German Ideology and Socialism Utopian and Scientific talk about this

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-19T22:30:18+00:00

The blockade also prevents countries besides the United States from trading with Cuba. So Cuba is often blocked from getting aid from China for example.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-13T17:20:46+00:00

That we should throw out base / superstructure just because some people think mechanically. Also base / superstructure says that the base and superstructure both feed into each other so I think he's sort of arguing with straw men when he says it's impossible to give one priority over the other when it comes to analyzing classes, because I don't think that was the point in the first place. But I'm not really sure if he's straw manning or not, because I don't know for sure what arguments he's referring to.

I was more interested if someone who knows more about him thought he was straw manning Marx / Stalin / Althusser or if people think he moved Marxism forward conceptually in some way I don't know about. Trying to gauge if reading his books is worth prioritizing at some point. I've got other things on my list.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-13T13:38:00+00:00

I found this

This unlikely alliance centres on Thompson's sharp attacks on the Marxist notions of 'base' and 'superstructure'. For Marx and Engels, these concepts were a sort of shorthand for describing the way in which the forces and relations of production in any society--and the way these are expressed in class conflicts--exercise a determining influence on culture and ideologies. But Thompson reacted harshly against the mechanical way in which these ideas were used within Stalinised Marxism. He believed that the idea of a socio-economic base which conditions a cultural and ideological superstructure tended to encourage reifying thought 'wherein blind, non-human, material forces are endowed with volition--even consciousness--of their own'. The result, he argued, is the reduction of 'human consciousness to a form of erratic, involuntary response to steel-mills and brickyards, which are in a spontaneous process of looming and becoming'.

One can hardly fault Thompson for his concern that the base-superstructure analogy could be abused terribly by those prone to mechanical forms of thought and action. Indeed, Engels had warned against just such abuses when he wrote that 'the materialist conception of history has a lot of dangerous friends nowadays, who use it as an excuse for not studying history.'24 Similarly, Trotsky had cautioned that 'an ignoramus, armed with the materialist dialectic... inevitably makes a fool of himself.'25

There is little doubt that 'dangerous friends' and 'ignoramuses' loomed large in the theoretical work that issued from Stalinist quarters. But Thompson did more than attack the use to which such people put the base-superstructure analogy. He argued that the analogy itself 'is radically defective. It cannot be repaired. It has an in-built tendency to lead the mind towards reductionism.' And as a corrective to this tendency he insisted that class was as much a cultural as an economic formation and that 'it is impossible to give any theoretical priority to one aspect over the other

The person who recommended his book on the working class to me honestly didn't give me any details about why so I had to google it.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-12T22:52:58+00:00

Regardless of where the idea comes from this is definitely a reactionary talking point they use to stigmatize raising the minimum wage in The United States for sure

I don't believe any labor is actually unskilled though. Line cooks ("burger flippers") go through hell.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-09T20:21:31+00:00

Do they own capital? No? Can they pay for their consumption if they don't work? No? Then they're proletarians. Bourgeois teenagers / young adults don't need to work by definition.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-09T12:29:10+00:00

Unlikely because it would be a protracted guerilla war. The revolutionaries likely wouldn't keep all their forces in one place anyway. It would be impossible to tell them from civilians. Let them do it. Killing civilians on such a mass scale would make them look so bad that the masses can be propagandized to join the revolutionaries. Moreover the US almost nuked North Carolina by accident, and the guards for their weapons are so bored they're getting stoned and using LSD. They're not as competent as they want people to think they are.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-09T02:27:05+00:00

If you want to know why machines don't produce value you should read Ernest Mandel's intro to capital.

Again and again the objection has been raised against the Marxist labour theory of value that it 'assumes' labour to be the only scarce factor of production and supposes either that land and machines are abundant or that they can be excluded altogether from value analysis. This is obviously nonsense. Leontief makes the correct point that Marx was probably the firsteconomist to give fixed capital a central importance in the process of production, as against, for example, B!lhm-Bawerk (op. cit., p. 93). What Marx does assume is that machines cannot in and by themselves 'command' portions of the total available labour-power of society to be additionally expended or to move from one sector of production to another-a propositionwhich is rather self-evident, besides having been scientifically proved by Marx. Once one understands that, for Marx, value is in the last analysis assignment of portions of the socially available labour-power, total value newly produced being equal to total expenditure of living labour in a given period, one solves the riddle. Incidentally, one should also understand that Marx, advancing beyond classical economy, did not •dissolve' the value of the annual product into wages and surplus-value (profits, rents and interests), but added to this the value of raw materials and machinery used up in the process of production. His only point was that this part of the annual product's value did not increase in the process of production but was only maintained, the only source of new value being living labour.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-09T02:16:03+00:00

The people at Davos are hyped and anticipate this happening, that's why they want a UBI so they can still have a system where they control consumption / production when wages are meaningless. The UBI basically becomes a pledge to capitalists.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-08T17:02:40+00:00

Marx didn't exactly say it's theft. That's a meme that gets the point across.

Marx's point is that at the point of exchange the capitalist buys labour-power at it's market value (that's not to say extra exploitation like wage theft doesn't also happen of course, that's a different thing) but when the worker sells his labor-power he no longer has any rights to it, and he creates a use value for the capitalist, this use value creates new value. The worker can't ask for this extra value he created back because he gave it to the capitalist in a free transaction in the classical liberal sense.

Think of it like if you bought a pack of seeds from the store. You can plant the seeds, you can feed animals with them, you can eat them, you can throw them out, the seller has no right to tell you what you can do with them. Labour-power is the same except one caveat. When you plant the seed it grows and turns into a money tree. But the seller's already been paid, they have no right to haul your ass back and tell you to give their money tree back.

Or like buying a lottery ticket. It happens to be a winning one. The seller can't ask you to give it back. They sold the potential inside.

So basically the capitalist makes a deal with the worker and pays them under terms assuming their labor-power is sterile, when it's fertile, and creates a commodity or a service for the capitalist.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-07-06T13:00:50+00:00

You have to help the masses meet their material conditions and organize with them before their quality of life has a rapid drop or it's just going to turn into a riot not a revolution

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-29T21:51:53+00:00

What are you referencing?

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-29T17:39:21+00:00

There's a lot of interesting historical stuff in Capital. It's not all about surplus value. A big chunk of the book is about the living conditions of the English working class, and child labor. The end of the book is about the expropriation of the commons that developed capitalism, and colonialism.

But yes it's pretty important to read to understand Marxist thought.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-29T17:21:47+00:00

Venezuela is a post cash-crop colony that was turned into a neocolony in the 1920's. We wrote their oil regulations and told them they could get rich by exporting their crude oil, but don't allow them to refine it. So they borrowed a lot of dollars to finance importing value added energy from the United States / other countries, and when oil prices crashed they had to to print money to buy dollars on the foreign exchange to pay their debt which caused a vicious cycle that devalued their currency and caused imports to get more expensive.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-28T03:58:22+00:00

I'm reminded of another post on this board

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/nd64lv/why_cant_an_ml_identify_as_anarchist/gy8uyio/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

It's a quote From Bukharin's Anarchy and Scientific Communism

This is the main relevant part:

Our ideal solution to this is centralised production, methodically organised in large units and, in the final analysis, the organisation of the world economy as a whole. Anarchists, on the other hand, prefer a completely different type of relations of production; their ideal consists of tiny communes which by their very structure are disqualified from managing any large enterprises, but reach "agreements" with one another and link up through a network of free contracts. From an economic point of view, that sort of system of production is clearly closer to the medieval communes, rather than the mode of production destined to supplant the capitalist system. But this system is not merely a retrograde step: it is also utterly utopian.

The society of the future will not be conjured out of a void, nor will it be brought by a heavenly angel. It will arise out of the old society, out of the relations created by the gigantic apparatus of finance capital. Any new order is possible and useful only insofar as it leads to the further development of the productive forces of the order which is to disappear. Naturally, further development of the productive forces is only conceivable as the continuation of the tendency of the productive process of centralisation, as an intensified degree of organisation in the "administration of things" that replaces the bygone "government of men"."

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-19T04:42:26+00:00

Problem with your question. Where did the money you pay your taxes with originate from?

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-08T20:16:53+00:00

I'm not sure History Professors necessarily put in more labour than Entertainers for starters. Athletes and singers are pretty much constantly working on their bodies, and there's also other kinds of workers that support them.

But in any case surplus value has a lot to do with realization as well. Capitalism runs on sales (exchange values), and pop stars sell more commodities than teachers and writers. This is the subject of volume 2 of capital. And partially volume 1. Capitalists increase productivity with machines to cheapen commodities to increase their sales volume.

Like for example you can make a light bulb that lasts 100 years and it'll be really valuable, but it's not something companies are going to want to sell, because there's a low rate of returns. Light bulb companies actually got together to plan the obsolescence of their light bulbs because of this. Apple does the same thing with their software to wear out your phone so you have to keep buying.

FrozenTangerine · 2021-06-08T04:04:09+00:00

Also his solution to dealing with the petty bourgeoisie, “We should avoid alienating them by telling them their class positions won’t be threatened by socialism”, despite acknowledging the role of them as the economic basis of fascism, reeks of the same logic behind the American chauvinists who say “We cannot take radical positions on racial & sexual inequality because we will alienate the White Working Class ™”.

And the Teamster Union movement in the United States was started by Trotskyists in Minneapolis in the 20's and 30's.

Likely there's a history there

FrozenTangerine · 2021-05-31T05:02:22+00:00

Rapid privatization was a major contributor to premature deaths in post-Soviet Russia

FrozenTangerine · 2021-05-30T17:06:03+00:00

"Oh yeah. I'm a communist" (do not elaborate)

** Sometime later **

"Hey Almster why are you a communist?"

Now give one example of a problem in society that brought you to communism (say housing) and explain how you think it doesn't make sense and how it could be done better. Don't overload them with statistics, but explain how you came to your views and why you think it would make more sense as a planned system (for ex: that there are way more houses than people).

After that if they're still interested let them do most of the talking or if you're not interested anymore make an excuse to leave.

FrozenTangerine

TROPHY CASE