Debt Rattle December 9 2023

[John Day]

Free markets are good, like Craigslist, but free markets are not “capitalism”.

“Capitalism” is a system where financial elites “own the means of production”, and the workers are paid some wage, and have no right to the things they produce, which are “owned” by the “capitalists”.
Who enforces “ownership”? That is a big cost. A constant concentration-gradient needs to be created where people need stuff they don’t “own”, and they have to work or trade/sell what they do “own” to obtain it.
This can be set up, as Henry Ford did, where the workers at his factories were paid “well”, about 3X what the workers at other factories got paid by Scrooge-“capitalists”. These Scrooge-capitalists hated Henry Ford, and predicted he would fail, but somehow his 3X-pay workers lowered his ratio of production-cost to product value, and he thrived, and his workers bought Ford cars.
“Fordist capitalism” accomplishes something through synergy of humans working together willingly, and cooperatively, and sharing a common goal to succeed, to make things good, make things better. Well paid workers also provide a “market” for products. Fordist capitalism works fine in synergy with state ownership of “natural monopolies”, like water, electric and gas utilities, trash pick-up, education and medical care.
Marx (Born 5/5/1818) came to adulthood as Europe was in the turmoil of feudalism changing over to industrialism, run by capitalists who owned factories, not lords who owned farmland. Workers were sick and starving a lot, and there were lots of wars in Europe as the old-masters jealously held power, rather than give some up to the new industrial-capitalist masters, and nobody fed the help, but kicked them off the farms.
Marx was good at economic analysis, and he saw the industrial capitalists as bringing change to the inhumane feudal system. Indeed, they were having to find ways to keep their workers healthy, instead of dying in their 20s, as was common.
Marx saw the agents of change creating “socialism” to provide for healthy workers at the least expense, and it was happening, which is how he got the idea. Bismarck, Germany’s “iron chancellor” accomplished most of what Marx had in mind in 1848, by the late 1880s.
“Socialism” was going well with industrial capitalism. The dominant form of economics was “Classical Economic”, where the goal was to minimize “rent”, which is the extraction of “value” from the economy, leaving more value to be spent improving industry, improving worker well-being, and improving infrastructure like roads, sewage systems and electric systems.
‘”Neoclassical economics” counts rent-extraction” as being just as valuable as industrial production, instead of subtracting extracted-rent from the productive-economy.
“Neoclassical economics” is a “lie” as pertains to how it engages human-understanding of processes deceptively.
Marxian analysis is consistent with classical economics. There is nothing wrong with it. Marx could not and did not describe how to do “socialism”, but rather saw it happening.
Marx was much impressed with the state bureaucracy of France, and later of Bismarck’s Germany, as they were able to accomplish big changes like providing for the needs of their societies at scale.
A certain class of financial elites used Marx’s doctrines to insert themselves into bureaucracy, just like today.
The Russian revolution was funded by powerful bankers in New York and also Germany, to destroy the Tsar, which it did. Again, a wealthy and powerful class sought to bring down the Russian state system, with an eye to looting Russia, which is happening again with “global financial capitalism”, which is far from the industrial capitalism Marx saw developing, and far from the Fordist-capitalism which was such a healthy model in the US.
The Japanese and later Chinese have copied aspects of the synergy between state and industry, to improve the well-being of workers, and improve state infrastructure to support farms, factories, roads, railways and ports. Cooperation between state and “Productive Capital” is healthy for the state, economy and workers, but the state is now controlled by “parasitic-capital”, rent-extracting-capital.
This obviously bleeds the productive economy, fails to maintain infrastructure, and worsens the well-being of workers, even sending the factories overseas, because Scrooge-capitalists can get circuit-boards made burning cheap coal for electricity, spilling pollution into pits, and paying workers starvation-wages, just like they always want to do out of selfishness.
Rentier-capitalists are blinded by greedy impulse, even though the Fordist-capitalist model does work well, especially with state sponsorship of roads, electric grids, communications infrastructure, pollution, fair-regulations, and criminal justice.
What we have in the US is crony-rentier-capitalism-with-regulatory-capture, which is like metastatic cancer, and I don’t mean that as an insult, just an analogy.

[kultsommer]

@WES
Garden plots in as another example on “why socialism doesn’t work”.

Your “story” is bit of a stretch hinting that majority of people are really lazy – not that some do not exist.
Most likely scenario is that slacker(s) would be scolded by the group. Most of the food if not all comes from those plots
and there is no luxury for fooling around.
Just in case and to “make you happy”, people in the Soviet Union had their own dacha sand plot of land.
Not once, on occasional TV watching, I had seen report that some unused plot of land, here in the US, was cultivated by the neighborhood and all sun burn participants looked rather happy in front of camera.
Also while ago I’ve read somewhere, that any small successful company (approximate quote) “has a proverbial guy who wears brown pants bit short, white sneakers and light blue shirt who does all the key work but is kept unseen while Newsom-like flashy presents the product to the public for double the salary.
How about the “socialism” arrangement between soldiers waiting in the trenches for enemy assault?
Speaking of war, Russian weapon production is not in the private hands but rather a State enterprise.
Even the most hart-warming company success story often starts with: “OK, I am gonna start my dream so the first order of things to find some chumps whom I am gonna pay next to nothing…and continue doing that as long as can” or “I am gonna partner with this guy and figure out how to fuck him up later when things starts to happen…”. All with plenty real life samples and not like your “story”.

How the humanity survived all those thousands of years?

[John Day]

@WES: Farming communes don’t work, as you observe. That experiment of taking the farmland away from Russian peasant-farmers, concentrating farming into big enterprises, owned and run by the state (for the benefit of the state) has been tried and always fails. The margins are really very thin in farming, and the work is hard, but it activates a certain pattern within humans when they are the boss of the farm and it feeds them. What financial capitalists discovered long ago is that the game for them to play is to bleed the farmer year after year, while always holding the option of taking the farm at an opportune moment. Bankers can’t farm, though.
I really think that nobody (practically speaking) can farm who did not grow up farming. It is just too much work for too little pay-out and you actually have to be smart and completely dedicated. It helps if you went to school with the other farmers in your area, too.

[oxymoron]

I’m finding almost every commenter here today worthy of attention. Kultsommer – I’m only disappointed in because I am a die hard fan boy (unashamedly so) of Dr D.

Phoenix Voice – I had similar thoughts re meal skipping (also doesn’t account for the huge fasting craze currently)

TAE Summary – that poem I saved as I found it to be so deep that I felt moved below my heart and above my gut.

Dr D and My Parents Said – Your optimism was very helpful today as I went to a party in one of Melbourne’s most expensive and old-money areas last night and was confronted by what I will refer in shorthand as – old friends, now a little lost to me, behind the veil of zoom/protected class, mass formation.
It was tough. I havent seen alot of these people in well over 15-20 years and I love them but now alas they work in gov policy, esg reg, a few just flew in from Geneva presenting on global communicable disease at WHO. A real shit show for this old fool on the hill. I felt cornered and gagged and quite confronted by the extremist I would be perceived as.
I left early and said just a few goodbyes – many of them I wont see again by choice.
Oh and why trust fund kids built on the back of empire that stole a continent through bloodshed now openly hate and fear Trump (they said as much last night) and by implication the guy who lives off0grid with a WOOD-burning stove (that clearly is killing everyone with it’s destroyer of worlds carbon) is beyond me.

D Benton – don’t worry buddy – I’m busy. I shit talk here but in the last 12 months I have, amongst other things –
1 built a 30 square meter light earth, double glazed wood heated music studio with drainage to be able to take refugees if necessary. By hand from junk only. (Thanks James for doing the wiring)
2 site cut and installed a 24,000 litre back up fresh water tank with first flush diverter and irrigation connections.
3 Side cut and dry stone terrace 2 x large new terraces and filled them with Macadamias, elderberries, grapefruit
4 enclosed top orchard of cherries, apricots, jujubes with galvanised bird wire over 2 inch pipe
5 thinned and wood cut next years fuel
6 raised kids, earned income, drunk piss and jerked off.

Oroboros – keep em coming
Dr John Day – big heart, big life and big news feed.
jb-hb – you are the spirit animal of the Gen X

Everyone else – Salute. I don’t feel completely insane here.

[Oroboros]

[Oroboros]

[Oroboros]

[Oroboros]

Bite Me

[Veracious Poet]

All of this talk about “economic” based governmental ideologies, but no concern/debate about the underlying “legal” mechanisms of *empowerment*?

You know, The real reality System that is throwing We The People under the bus, posthaste…

Now that The Age of Enlightenment has *officially* been extinguished, into a despised archaic relic of no-thing-ness, maybe your geniuses should define WTF actual Rule-Of-Law has deposed it?

Who are the bureaucratic regulators representing?

Got a clue?

Surely not The People, even a caveman could see that…

So, what legal foundation would the *majority* comprehend, desire, possess a willingness to unify in support thereof?

Perhaps CULTure Rot in The West is too advanced, to de-evolved beyond any semblance of Reason, beyond Sanity in any significant form?

Got a *serious* solution?

Inquiring minds want to know…

We now return you to your regular “programming”. 😐

[WES]

Kultsommer:

I saw “socialism” up close in Siberia in 1983.
What you said would happen, never happened in the USSR.
Your mistake is wearing western shoes.

The Russians were good people trying to survive in a brutally rotten system.
And the system was rotten to the core.
The system made good people look bad and fail.
All I had to do was watch people being people.
Many drank to try and escape their socialist workers paradise.
Everybody was waiting for the stupid communist true believers to do all the hard work, since this was the only way to eventually change the rotten system.
After being in Russia, I was no longer afraid of the USSR.

P.S. I saw fields and fields of harvested cabbage piled high on wagons, left to freeze and rot. The farm workers had done their part, but the system didn’t do it’s part.

One day a year Russian workers had to partake in harvesting farm crops. My workers spent the entire day lying beside a road, waiting for transportion to a farm, that never came! So that day the entire coal mine shutdown and harvested nothing!

I could go on and on about what I saw! So many stories!

[Michael Reid]

”
“Fordist capitalism” accomplishes something through synergy of humans working together willingly, and cooperatively, and sharing a common goal to succeed, to make things good, make things better. Well paid workers also provide a “market” for products. Fordist capitalism works fine in synergy with state ownership of “natural monopolies”, like water, electric and gas utilities, trash pick-up, education and medical care.
”
I like these ideas

[Author]

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