They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the “owners” of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.

Capitalism isn’t neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can’t control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can’t be exploited for profits, to violence. But they’re as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.

We don’t overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn’t matter, the system has a logic all its own.

The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that’s why we have to fight and win for a better system

Socialism or barbarism!

Thank you for the considerate response.

You might be more well equipped for Marx than you think. The Tao the Ching, and the I Ching are both works of dialectical philosophy. Marxism, when applied correctly, is a fusion of empirical materialism and dialectics. Whenever people new to Marxism struggle with his method, I always recommend the Tao te Ching. People raised with western rational model, like us, struggle with contradiction in our reasoning. Except when it affects our lives directly, our minds reject it. The Tao teaches us to stay with the contradictions, which is what is needed to perform a dialectical analysis, since dialectics is the logic of change, progression, and synthesis, relation and contradiction.

This along with the mention of Marcus Aurelius reminds me of when I first started trying to educate myself, and came across the work of Nick Taleb. Its a bit pitched to the right for my taste these days (although his sterling advice, “don’t be a sucker” is as good advice as you’ll ever get,) but at the time it is what got me into studying philosophy, Meditations was the second philosophy book I ever read. I don’t consider myself a stoic, but I loved that book at one time, as well as the Enchirideon by Epictetus.

Your claim of an imbalance in power between the workers and owners is at least an acknowledgement of Marx’s theories. Maybe you like that balance, lots of people have a fetish for “balance of powers” and maybe there’s something to that. Except the balance can’t be achieved, it always prefers the owners and requires historical amounts of civil unrest to make any reluctant progressive change at all.

I don’t appreciate being told that I’m in a cult, a cult that never existed, and certainly Marx never started one. Its dishonest, but I guess you picked it up somewhere. I def didn’t know what Marx was about before I studied him. Buy now if I don’t know an author, I don’t have to pretend I’m smart or know something I don’t, I just say I don’t know and if I am interested then I study them. Very simple and honest.

Here’s the thing they won’t tell you about Marx: when you’re a worker and you learn to read him, because he’s difficult, you realize that he confirms your experience as a worker and goes deeper. He proves what we suspect but that everyone tells us isn’t true. He removes doubt and provides a way forward –

– and then you study the history of the USSR and other 20th century socialist experiments and the doubt comes back. But Marx was, hands down, the greatest intellectual of the 19th century and should be read and studied by all. Not to indoctrinate into a cult, but to actually open peoples minds to what is possible, and how class rule, throughout history, has worked tirelessly to alienate us from our selves and each other. Capitalism is just the latest and greatest form of class rule.

But a better world is possible!

Clearly you’ve never read Marx in any meaningful way, which is unfortunate. If you think Marx is a “reductionist model” then you are cleanly, plainly, completely mistaken. Das Capital isn’t a pamphlet, its 4 unfinished volumes.

Your anti intellectualism is a sad affair, but propaganda is a hell of a drug. I love being told by people who haven’t studied Marx what he is all about. Do you also have strong opinions on Augustine, Hegel, Kant or Descartes? Have you ever read them?

Balance of power

What power? The power of workers? You might have more Marxist ideas than you think.

Its not a flaw, its working as planned. But yeah, our “market solutions”, basically any problem created by capitalism just gets exploited for profit. Even when the economy crashes its actually a good thing for the very rich, as it " disciplines" labor, moves people down and out of the middle class which lowers wages systematically, takes out a few competitors, etc.,

Things you hate? How can it be explained as capitalism if you won’t say what it is.

You act like there was never a guy named Karl Marx who proved this stuff, and debunked many myths about the economy, like 150+ years ago. It isn’t just a random thing like a superstition. In fact believing capitalism isnt responsible is almost a superstition.

Wages are flat while production has skyrocketed the last 50 years, a little longer than I’ve been alive. The system produces a few rich people at one end and a bunch of poor people at the other, that’s what it is meant to do, it’s what it does. It isn’t just an economic system, its the state and media as well.

People aren’t just blaming all their problems on capitalism like some petulant child. There are causes that are very clear and some more hidden, but its no secret and hasn’t been for a pretty long time.

Let’s dissolve them both in a vat of acid

Tankie Obsession: an Infantile Disorder (and its not a wonky translation, I mean they have the political education of a baby) by V.I. Lenin

Whatever, i should have just left it alone. I don’t get why you go to every instance taking the name communist, and then engage in a form of anti communism. You give power to our enemies ammunition. You may have a particular definition of what a tankie is, but we are about to enter an era of repression most likely, and you wanna pick fights with people who hate your supposed enemies. If you want to defeat "tankieism (what kind of vaushite language is this) then you would find the good faith ones and try and figure out why they, in good faith, have questionable views, and try to engage politically. Instead you otherize them just like any objectivist bourgeois liberal. And you wonder why I say you stand with libs?

Maybe I don’t know what you’ve read or whatever, but (for example) a biologist would know if someone who wasn’t a biologist was just like making biology noises, or if they were legit. I’m not trying to gatekeep, but this anti tankie behavior is lib behavior, its the same one sided “authoritarianism” that the stalinists believe in, justification for purges.

When two contradictory sides mirror each other, like positive and negative, they are one thing, thats basic dialectics. You can steelman all you want, a steelman is just a strawman made out of something shiny (and it prob took the owner too long to put together, but just stands there.)

If you want to move past where the tankies are, because you’re stuck with them now, then you have to dump your objectivist worldview.

Okay so reading your comments you are clearly very undereducated when it comes to what I would consider basic knowledge of communism. I guess that’s okay, I called myself a communist or a socialist when I was knew nothing too. And to be clear, I woke up in a foul mood, and you seem to have irritated it, so I’m sorry for being an ass.

But communism isn’t something you believe, its something you do, and messing with tankies only helps the liberals. You should want to educate others about communism, but you don’t understand it; so your very communist urge to educate is good, but the subject you are concerned with is a liberal bugbear. I don’t doubt there are fake “tankies” on social media, its well documented that right wing groups try to infiltrate the Left, as well as state/military/police all have large social media teams used to manipulate public opinion. But taking this on as a project you are just becoming the dialectical opposite of a “tankie”: a bourgeois liberal, which is 1000x more bloodthirsty and destructive of an ideology. Because when you fight something without understanding it, you just become its dark reflection, or many times you become the thing you are opposing. This is apparent because you keep thinking I’m accusing you of being a tankie, you’re so worried you’ll get confused with them you engage in your own grassroots form of authoritarianism, underwritten by bourgeois liberals.

There are real Stalinists, and I have disagreements with them (and they can’t stand me) but they at least are trying to move away from liberalism (except when they become liberals per the mechanism described above), whereas your path to “communism” is just moving you closer. I stand with Stalinists on picket lines, in meetings, in actions, just as a function of the similar work we are doing. Stalin would have purged my ass, but they stand in actual solidarity with workers. What are you doing writing about “tankies” as your passion project? Which is funny since on your beehaw acct you just copy paste the same 3 paragraphs when discussing tankies, so i dont think you actually don’t care about writing or understanding anything.

I will never stand next to you with the work you plan to do, because I don’t stand with liberals against the boogeyman. So I just think you should either stop calling yourself a communist or actually start trying to do the work to become one.

Feel free to look for pro-tankie comments? Why would I look for that, I really want to see your anticommunist comments, where are they? Other than what you wrote above, throwing your lot in with neo-McCarthyism.

I’m not a Stalinist or subscribe to any “tankie” views either, though what those views are is determined by the aims imperialism so that could change. But I sure as hell don’t waste my time with “anti-tankie” documents, there are actual problems beyond some 14 year old Hexbear calling you a liberal

No, Hitler went after communists, socialists and trade unionists first. The whole reason the nazis were given power was to destroy the Left wing which had almost overthrown the bourgeois industrialists in the years after WW1. Ernst Rohm, a gay Nazi leader, was in charge of the night of the long knives when the Nazis cleared the ghettos of communists, socialists and Jews.

Homosexuals entered the crosshairs a year later when Hitler decided his good friend Ernst was a bit too close to power, which is why homosexuality became a crime to be purged over.

How do you do my fellow communists?

Me, a chad communist China supporter: Mao was good actually

You, virgin president of China: in this house we stan Deng, and Marx was wrong about class

For Marxists, the state is the institution that tries to resolve, with violence, the contradictions that are inherent within class society. So when class society no longer exists, then violence is no longer necessary, hence the state is no longer necessary, hence “withering away”.

This isn’t an all or nothing situation, just a theory. The laws of uneven and combined development indicate that this withering would happen in different ways at different rates. this process wouldn’t even begin until the whole world has become some form of socialism, and the social relations governing society would be much progressed. Its hard to imagine how this would work compared to our current situation

I disagree, but I appreciate you walking back the anticommunism. Paul LeBlanc covers about every argument for Lenin’s “opportunism” in great detail, I would recommend Lenin and the Revolutionary Party for a good description of Leninism before 1921. If you mean Leninism like “Foundations of Leninism” then yeah I’ll join you in calling Stalin an opportunist. But not even Paul Averich, anarchist critic of the Bolsheviks and historian, was willing to lay the authoritarianism of the USSR at the feet of Lenin. But I don’t want to legislate the tragedies of 20th century socialism. I’ll study it, but there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

I recently read a couple books by Cyril Smith who is pretty negative toward Lenin, and while I don’t really buy his premise, I think his emphasis on what was missing (an analysis on “sensuous human activity,” like in Theses on Feuerbach) from the Plekhanov-Leninist tendency of Marxism holds water.

If you want to discuss the history of the Russian revolution, I saved but didn’t post several paragraphs, but deleted them for the sake of brevity. Flattening the whole 100 years of Russian “socialist” history to highlight it’s worst abuses is just as intellectually lazy as flattening it to only highlight the best parts of it. I’m not going to apologise for Kronstadt or anything that came after, but the civil war period was horrible. And had the Bolsheviks not taken power, Kornilov or Kerensky would have, and instituted far more brutal oppression; if not just tried to restore the Tzar.

The organizing principles of the Bolsheviks and RSDLP should absolutely be studied leading up to Oct 1917, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, and Anton Pannekoek’s criticisms of Lenin.

But saying “firing squad” doesnt prove that communism leads to authoritarianism, although it references a time in history that was very brutal and oppressive. However, Its not as good of a criticism as you are capable of. I’m used to having discussions with people who probably aren’t critical enough of the Bolsheviks, so its refreshing to hear from you, in a way.

Communism is the struggle for a moneyless, stateless, classless society.

There’s no connection between a supposed ideology of communism, and authoritarianism. The “authoritarianism” arose as a result of material circumstances, not ideology. I’ve looked into the histories a lot and its very complicated. Not like you wouldn’t understand it, just that it can’t be reduced to a simple truism, cant be made succinct.

Let’s just say that the capitalists who hoard all the wealth and do nothing to earn millions and billions, who own the media and for whose benefit the state represents, aren’t too keen on movements that sometimes overthrow them. So it’s in their interests to paint socialism and communism in as bad a light as possible.

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Your great great grandmother cheated on your great great grandfather with this joke. So fucking old

At what point does an EM jamming signal just become electricity running through the wires? That’s what would happen in a so called Harrington event, right?