The Offtopicgrad Soviet: A Place to Discuss All Things Red

[Gary Childress]

My cat likes to torment small creatures it catches. Rabbits, OTOH don't seem to display the same tendency. It is perhaps in my cat's "nature" to do what it does and perhaps it is in a rabbit's nature to do what it does but the fact that they are different natures seems to me to negate the idea that (what we view as) sadistic tendencies are at the heart of ALL animals.

Lions may fight over prey, that's perhaps "what lions do" but humans are capable of many, many behaviors. The fact that you look at a lion's behavior over killed prey and say it is "greed" means that you have a sense of there being such a thing as excessive desire, doesn't it? I doubt lions have such a concept as "greed" and therefore they don't feel guilt over said behavior above like a human may.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

Animals aren't greedy; so I'm not sure what to make of it. I also think its a cop-out to blame human vices on our supposed 'animal side'.

You mean animals cant be greedy becouse they arent moral beings? Can you cop out fact that humans developed from animals and necessarily are in their subconscious part animals as well?

 

[Gary Childress]

You mean animals cant be greedy becouse they arent moral beings? Can you cop out fact that humans developed from animals and necessarily are in their subconscious part animals as well?

This seems almost like saying, "Mom, I hit jimmy with the baseball bat because I saw a lion kill a gazelle." Just because an animal does something doesn't mean it justifies us to mimic their behavior does it? We humans have our sense of morality. And as I say above, not all animals are ruthless carnivores anyway.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

This seems almost like saying, "Mom, I hit jimmy with the baseball bat because I saw a lion kill a gazelle." Just because an animal does something doesn't mean it justifies us to mimic their behavior does it? We humans have our sense of morality. And as I say above, not all animals are ruthless carnivores anyway.

I am not really trying to justify anything but rather grasp the truth. Lion kills baby lions in case he defeats alpha male of the pack so that he can mate with the liones. If he didnt act according to his nature and question his motives he would be a criminal. Human nature is much more complex becouse of presence of reason and the fact it is moraly aware and bound which this kind of act makes something unthinkable and abominable.

 

[Masada]

You mean animals cant be greedy becouse they arent moral beings?

No, I mean Lions are incapable of greed in any meaningfully human sense.

 

[Gary Childress]

I am not really trying to justify anything but rather grasp the truth. Lion kills baby lions in case he defeats alpha male of the pack so that he can mate with the liones. If he didnt act according to his nature and question his motives he would be a criminal. Human nature is much more complex becouse of presence of reason and the fact it is moraly aware and bound which this kind of act makes something unthinkable and abominable.

But what you are grasping doesn't sound like it's the "truth". It sounds like you're trying to take the nature of SOME animals and apply it to human affairs. What lions and other animals do does not necessarily have any bearing on what it means to be human. Sometimes humans can be brutal or unjust, but we can also be kind and caring toward each other. Furthermore when we are brutal or unjust we have the capacity to see that we are being so and we usually call that being "bad" to someone. Being caring or kind toward one another is usually called being "good" to each other. I seriously doubt lions or other animals have any such concepts as "good" or "bad" other than what comes naturally to them. They probably don't sit down after a kill and ponder, "when I killed that gazelle was I being fair to the gazelle?" Humans do. I'm a vegetarian so I know for a fact humans are capable of very advanced sentiments toward each other and even toward other sentient beings. To say that animal instincts are "more true" than human instincts is also a bit of a genetic fallacy. Perhaps we evolved from animals, that does not mean acting like them is more "true" to ourselves than acting human. I would think it's the other way around.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

No, I mean Lions are incapable of greed in any meaningfully human sense.

But what you are grasping doesn't sound like it's the "truth". It sounds like you're trying to take the nature of SOME animals and apply it to human affairs. What lions and other animals do does not necessarily have any bearing on what it means to be human. Sometimes humans can be brutal or unjust, but we can also be kind and caring toward each other. Furthermore when we are brutal or unjust we have the capacity to see that we are being so and we usually call that being "bad" to someone. Being caring or kind toward one another is usually called being "good" to each other. I seriously doubt lions or other animals have any such concepts as "good" or "bad" other than what comes naturally to them. They probably don't sit down after a kill and ponder, "when I killed that gazelle was I being fair to the gazelle?" Humans do. I'm a vegetarian so I know for a fact humans are capable of very advanced sentiments toward each other and even toward other sentient beings. To say that animal instincts are "more true" than human instincts is also a bit of a genetic fallacy. Perhaps we evolved from animals, that does not mean acting like them is more "true" to ourselves than acting human. I would think it's the other way around.

Its been interestig discussion guys and I hope to resume it in the future in some more appropriate thread. Thx.

 

[Traitorfish]

Bourgeois and capitalist are not the same thing. I think TF knows far more about this than I do.

Yeah, "capitalist" describes a certain location within the wage-relation, while "bourgeois" describes a certain set of socioeconomic strata, and to some extent a social identity. You can be a bourgeois without being a capitalist, and you can be a capitalist without being a bourgeois. In Marx's era, a typical example of the former would be a self-employed professional, while a typical example of the latter would be a farmer who employs hands; the former was a "bourgeois" by value of education, culture, status and milieu, the latter a capitalist by virtue of his employing others for profit.

It's harder to think of contemporary examples, but that's because of the nature of the contrast itself: the "capitalist" is a role, and can therefore be depersonalised, built into structure rather than having to reside within a particular body, which is how it increasingly works today, while "bourgeois" is a personal identity, and not one that really exists in the contemporary world. The modern capitalist is unlikely to be a specific individual, wandering around the place in a monocle and top-hat, but rather appears as a whole managerial apparatus (corporate or state), few of whom would self-identify as members of a ruling class or could realistically be identified as such on an individual level (indeed, they seem prone to defensively protesting that they're just a working stiff too), but who as a collective play that part. A man is bourgeois at all times, but he need only be a capitalist between the hours of nine and five. On the other hand, those occupations that would historically have been lumped together (and whose members would have lumped themselves together) as "bourgeois" don't really possess any sort of collective identity. Just look at the Tea Party, a movement essentially comprised of provincial bigwigs ("millionaires against billionaires", I've heard it described), which raged with equal venom against Washington, liberal academia, the press and finance capital, as unambiguous rejection of any shared "bourgeois" identity as one could hope for.

You mean animals cant be greedy becouse they arent moral beings? Can you cop out fact that humans developed from animals and necessarily are in their subconscious part animals as well?

It's weird that you'd appeal to the subconscious, given how convinced Freud was of man's uniqueness in the world.

 

[Defiant47]

I should have known getting involved in Chamber discussions would elevate me to the next level in discourse.

Are those charities planted in vacum or interwined with the society and all of its aspects? What sort of progress you are talking about?

Is the free market planted in a vaccum, or is it intertwined with regulations and social programs that are orchestrated contrary to the concept of free enterprise?

Some are willing to work more and some less this way. Human nature is complex.

Human nature is complex, but my point is that there are people who are willing to work for charities and not for profit. There are also people who follow Kim Jung Un as the supreme ruler of North Korea.

It is not unfathomable that you could have a community (or a nation) of people willing to work for the community. There are already such people. And people act primarily in a way they were raised (see aforementioned examples about Kim Jung Un and other ideologies).

Please provide a citation for this. It sounds like propaganda to me.

I left all my old philosophy (and other) textbooks at my parent's place. I might also be paraphrasing it wrong. I can write down the name and author of the book if you really want next time I'm there.

But the entire thesis of capitalism is that even if wages are not equal, the standard of living increases for everyone. In addition, supply and demand dictates the worth of one's work. If there are already numerous artists for example, more than needed, then artistic skill is no longer a valuable resource. Nobody is looking for an artist, so an artist's work will be rewarded according to its value - pretty much nil. Thus, the contribution to society is dictated by supply and demand to allocate resources where they are most useful.

This is why I found that realization ironic. Capitalism essentially rewards profits to ventures that are deemed most useful to society. It rewards fewer profits to those that aren't needed (e.g. saturated). Thus, profits are awarded based on the value of a contribution. Communism seeks the same thing, but looks inwards towards the worker as well much more specifically. Capitalism does that as well, but to a lesser focus.

Capitalism might pretend to be "operating for the benefit of all of society" but observation and analysis prove the opposite to be true. The benefit to the rest of society is incidental. Capitalism is all about procuring wealth for privileged individuals, and creating structures to protect that privilege.

No, capitalism is about awarding profits to individuals who improve society through producing needed and "demanded" goods. One consequence of capitalism is the accumulation of wealth. Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, wealth is power. You can literally buy people's time with it, resources, and so on. When power becomes concentrated, corruption and greed become difficult to dethrone. We've seen this in numerous dictatorships.

Thus, we can conclude that capitalism has failed in establishing an efficient and equitable society.

Now, what it's claimed that free markets do is to allocate supply to perfectly satisfy demand. But that's a pretty out of date concept in itself, which only the descendants of the original believers in that tenet, the classical liberals, still believe. It should be readily apparent that markets do not function this way: they benefit the largest producers, the best marketers, and the best planners, when all that is put together. The best product doesn't become the most popular, the cheapest product is not always the most reliable, and buyers are not influenced solely in their purchase by the rational weighing of all the pros and cons of a product before purchase.

Homo economicus is a lie.

Indeed.

I thought you just said that capitalism distributes wages according to contribution?

I'm too lazy to go back and re-quote myself, but I'm pretty sure I said capitalism aims to distribute wages according to contribution. It fails miserably in this regard no less than the USSR failed to establish actual communism.

It's not a problem that can be solved within capitalism, so any answer I give you will only seem ridiculous. First, it's not up to me to decide how much you deserve, it's your fellow workers. But if you impoverish others so that you can have more than them, then that's unfair. In a system that rewards people based upon their contributions, this would seem commonplace.

In my opinion, you start becoming bourgeois when your material interests begin to lay with the capitalist class and order, and not with the working class and future proletarian order. If you decide that you stand to lose more than you'll gain by the changing of the system, and you're not okay with that, then you are bourgeois. In my opinion.

Damn. I'm too altruistic for it then

My only purpose of seeking wealth is to utilize it in a way that best benefits society.

Economic returns are not the same as social returns. The two do have a lot of intersections. In the sense that economic returns pay my wages and the taxes that support government services. But on the whole the relationship isn't 1-1 and in some cases economic returns might actually harm social returns. For example, when firms in China dump toxic waste in drinking water. From the perspective of the firm its a win because it saves a tonne of cash, but for everyone else? *shrug*

Externalities is indeed an apparent "oversight" failure of capitalism.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

I should have known getting involved in Chamber discussions would elevate me to the next level in discourse.

Is the free market planted in a vaccum, or is it intertwined with regulations and social programs that are orchestrated contrary to the concept of free enterprise?

Actually I was pondering competition as such and its importance for progress of society not so much just one particular part/option of it - free market.

Human nature is complex, but my point is that there are people who are willing to work for charities and not for profit. There are also people who follow Kim Jung Un as the supreme ruler of North Korea.

Surely not out of the compulsion of their nature....btw there are also child soldiers in Africa....

It is not unfathomable that you could have a community (or a nation) of people willing to work for the community. There are already such people. And people act primarily in a way they were raised (see aforementioned examples about Kim Jung Un and other ideologies).

People raised in the same way may act simillary for different reasons. I would be obedient to Kim Jung Un to survive. You perhaps to please him. Someone else with the hope that one day he will get the Hell out of there...

 

[Masada]

Externalities is indeed an apparent "oversight" failure of capitalism.

Not at all. It's an essential feature of capitalism and the logical outcome of a system that prioritizes profits over people. That isn't to say that these issues can't be managed but it does mean that you can expect to see this kind of stuff happening all the time with regulators constantly playing catch-up. (I've worked in regulation and have no desire to go back for just that reason).

 

[Gary Childress]

Economics seems like a bit of a strange science to me sometimes. It seems like one of the few disciplines where so many of its adherents tell us NOT to meddle with nature. Rather an "invisible hand" is supposed to make everything go smoothly and messing with this "invisible hand" only messes up the economy. It seems to me like most other sciences try to manipulate nature to better serve human interests. I guess I still believe in a Keynesian approach to economics as opposed to Laissez-faire.

Was Keynes all that wrong about economics? Why have his views become more or less extinct in economics? I mean, didn't a Keynesian approach more or less get us out of the Great Depression?

 

[ReindeerThistle]

In short, Capitalism is in a moribund state, as the crisis after crisis in capital leads to more and more government interference to.prop it up in favor of the profiteers.

There IS government interference under socialism, it just benefits tje VAST majority.

Edit: we are still in the depression, imo.

That Smith "invisible hand" thing is BS. Marx turned all that on its head.

 

[Defiant47]

Not at all. It's an essential feature of capitalism and the logical outcome of a system that prioritizes profits over people. That isn't to say that these issues can't be managed but it does mean that you can expect to see this kind of stuff happening all the time with regulators constantly playing catch-up. (I've worked in regulation and have no desire to go back for just that reason).

Capitalism does not prioritize profits over people. It prioritizes profits for the people. If there is rampant competition, production efficiency will rise, products will get cheaper, and consumers will be able to afford more things. Thus, the most ethical thing that anyone can do is to seek profit as much as possible.

Of course, the theory is wrong. But it does make "theoretical" sense.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Wow, and to think I let you answer questions in AAR.

You need to read some Marx, my friend, and discover the nature of profit, and where it comes from. Then you would not hold high this product of ritualized exploitation of man and his capacity for labor.

EDIT: Pick up Volume 1 of Capital from your library, or even find it online if you like, and read the first three or four chapters. There's more practically useful information there than in the rest of the tome, and it'll explain precisely how you're wrong and why, instead of just telling you so.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

Even the intro to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy has a lot to say that explains it.

 

[W|M]

Economics seems like a bit of a strange science to me sometimes. It seems like one of the few disciplines where so many of its adherents tell us NOT to meddle with nature. Rather an "invisible hand" is supposed to make everything go smoothly and messing with this "invisible hand" only messes up the economy. It seems to me like most other sciences try to manipulate nature to better serve human interests. I guess I still believe in a Keynesian approach to economics as opposed to Laissez-faire.

Was Keynes all that wrong about economics? Why have his views become more or less extinct in economics? I mean, didn't a Keynesian approach more or less get us out of the Great Depression?

While Keynesian policies certainly helped reconstruct the American economy and make it provide more for its citizens, it was World War II that got America out of the Great Depression.

 

[Defiant47]

Wow, and to think I let you answer questions in AAR.

You need to read some Marx, my friend, and discover the nature of profit, and where it comes from. Then you would not hold high this product of ritualized exploitation of man and his capacity for labor.

EDIT: Pick up Volume 1 of Capital from your library, or even find it online if you like, and read the first three or four chapters. There's more practically useful information there than in the rest of the tome, and it'll explain precisely how you're wrong and why, instead of just telling you so.

Somehow you keep completely missing the point of view I am eschewing. I am explaining capitalist theory from the capitalist perspective. Not "what actually happens when you place man in a capitalist society" which is analyzed at length by Marx in Das Kapital.

So no, I am not "wrong". Capitalist theory doesn't try to explain how we really should set up an oligarchy of the bourgeois and how it's better for the common man to be oppressed and powerless. That would be stupid.

It would behoove you to actually try and understand what capitalism was designed to do in theory, so you can more aptly explain to capitalist enthusiasts how the theory falls short of reality. "Capitalism is great... in theory... and here's how it fails"

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I don't think capitalism is great in theory. What capitalist theory states, either in earnest or irony, to be its goals are irrelevant, because it in no ways reflects how capitalists actually behave, or what capitalism as a whole does and has done. And in the end, what it produces is infinitely more important than why it has produced that or what it intended when it set out.

That, and I think you're plain wrong about what capitalists think capitalism is supposed to do. Economists might say that, but that's because they play the role of theologians in all this, not critics. The very rare ones, like Galbraith, for example, who actively criticize the functioning of the system, are almost invariably Marxian to begin with, which does nothing to vindicate the general tendencies of the great mass of economists who do nothing but apologize for the system.

I do not feel obliged to engage capitalism on an equal footing, because I do not believe capitalism to be equal to socialism.

 

[Defiant47]

I don't think capitalism is great in theory.

You believe that workers should be paid according to their contribution, so you're already in agreement with a lot of capitalist theory.

Would you also be OK with inequity for the purposes of improving the standard of living of everyone? Is it more important that Tom and Timmy each get paid $30K, or is it OK for Tom to make $900K if Timmy still makes $35K? If such "benevolent inequity" is fine, then you're fine with the goals of capitalist theory.

You can check out some of Margaret Thatcher's strawman arguments about this. "You'd rather everyone be down here than for some people to be up here".

What capitalist theory states, either in earnest or irony, to be its goals are irrelevant, because it in no ways reflects how capitalists actually behave, or what capitalism as a whole does and has done.

That's a dangerous argument to be making as a communist since the decades of propaganda would turn that right around in your face. Replace "capitalism" with "communism", sprinkle in the godforsaken misunderstanding of the USSR as "communism", and you've lost all your audience.

Understanding all the levels of a system is going to be a worthwhile pursuit.

And in the end, what it produces is infinitely more important than why it has produced that or what it intended when it set out.

Which is why we need to change it, but constructing the "why" and the "how" are still essential. That's why I enjoy the lessons of Das Kapital (which I will admit I have not read fully from the source). I don't want to just point fingers at how the bourgeois are right now and that it's wrong. I want to explore all the intricacies of how this came about and why this system works the way it does, and what it was meant to do, and so on.

You don't just point at a factory and explain that it isn't making what you need. You go inside and learn what it's trying to do, how it's failing, and why it's failing in contrast to what it's trying to do.

That, and I think you're plain wrong about what capitalists think capitalism is supposed to do. Economists might say that, but that's because they play the role of theologians in all this, not critics. The very rare ones, like Galbraith, for example, who actively criticize the functioning of the system, are almost invariably Marxian to begin with, which does nothing to vindicate the general tendencies of the great mass of economists who do nothing but apologize for the system.

That's because you're starting out from a (likely well-researched) position of "you're right" and so all the theory and discussions advocating the opposite are evidently "wrong" and "apologetic". For the people who actually sit down to understand capitalistic theory, that's how it's meant to be.

It may not be fair, but it is "correct" for a CEO to be paid $50 million dollars in one year when his plans and strategies make the money $60 million dollars. It is "correct" for an abundant resource such as McDonald's employees to be paid next to nothing. It is "correct" for an abundant resource such as stone to be cheap. And so on.

Of course, this assumes the system is effective at establishing worth. But to show people you know what you're talking about, you really need to understand how the system was intended to work in the first place, not just how it fails.

I do not feel obliged to engage capitalism on an equal footing, because I do not believe capitalism to be equal to socialism.

It's not about equal footing. In fact, you can do what I do: use this theoretical framework as further ammunition. Explaining in detail how capitalism is intended to work and identifying the exact place and methods in which it fails is effective rhetoric.