Perhaps it’s not the best example of the point I’m trying to make, but still, big businessmen can do buy the courts, lawmakers and politicians at will.
I don’t believe in Class Struggle. It’s more about genetics and your ethnic group. That’s the primary value. Class is secondary, or lower. When push comes to shove, people don’t care much about those they work for, with, or against. People care about family. People care about clan. People care about tribe.
So appealing to “the poor”, the “middle class”, the “rich”, is unrealistic and impractical. This is another reason Marxism/Communism/Socialism fail, because, they ignore ethnic obligations, ties, connections, and loyalty. People are more loyal to blood, than they are to money.
Also people shed crocodile tears for “the poor”, when, realistically, nobody wants to be around poor people, not even other poor people. Why are there Gated Communities, except for the fact, people want to be away from and separated from the refuse and throwaways of society.
The way people talk about “the poor”, seems out-of-touch. Homeless people comprise most of “the poor”. Homeless people smell bad, sleep in their own urine, are not smart, usually addicted to drugs, almost always, undependable, unemployable, etc.
Class struggle only makes sense in Homogeneous societies, like Japan.
But how does Japan view “class”? Do they? Do they care?
I don’t think Japan and the Japanese have “class struggle” like Western civilization. Because, some ethnic groups have been dispossessed historically, and hence became “lower” or 2nd class.
We’re not talking about increasing taxes on doctors, engineers and miners, or at least I’m not, they’re upper middle to lower middle class, I’m talking about increasing taxes on the upperclass, the richest 1%, and redistributing it in the form of affordable housing, free education, universal healthcare and supplementary income for working and middle class citizens, not for alcoholics, (prescription) drug addicts, the idle poor and illegal migrants.
Not all social democrats think alike, let alone socialists.
Perhaps don’t increase taxes on wages at all, increase them on big businessmen, especially ones who’ve benefitted from fractional reserve banking, illegal immigration, offshoring, unsocial corporatism and vulture capitalism.
Or just spend the money we spend on corporate bailouts, subsidies and welfare, and on war, on free education and so on instead.
At a certain point, it’s virtually impossible to fail, unless you’re a rich crackhead.
Just invest much, most or all of your dozens of millions or billions in low-risk investments, and never touch the principal.
There’s other points too, but I feel like I’ve participated in discussions like these dozens of times over the years, and I really can’t be bothered to get too into it right now.
Don’t forget about the central bankers, corporatists and military industrial complexes of the world.
And it depends on how you define property.
If you define all property, or some forms of property collectively, then it’s not theft.
There’s always been and probably always will be some public property.
Government is public, infrastructure is public.
The air we breath, the water we drink and national parks are public, as they should be.
Some societies emphasize public and some private, but every society has a mix.
It’s not a question of if public property, but how much?
What runs better publicly?
What runs better privately?
Well, that’s very specific then, isn’t it? While I can agree that some forms of limits and taxation could occur in those areas; they are largely immune based on their political payoffs and bribes. Thus neither democrats nor republicans will actually impose taxes on them. Because they pay too much in political bribes. Thus you would need to attack State-ism and Corruption, before any realistic imposition could occur on reserve banking, off-shore loopholes, stock trading, etc.
In my opinion, federal money spent on “education”, welfare, public goods, etc. mostly go to waste. Example? Evidence? Proof? Look at all the brain-washing and indoctrination that gets pumped through the “public education system” nowadays. Teaching children that “gender is fluid”, homosexuality is “okay”, miscegenation is encouraged, etc. Because of all this filth, it should be defunded completely, as soon as possible. It’s broken. It’s just another extension of State corruption, the end-result of Stateism pushed way too far, with too large a central government. However, realistically, history has momentum, and it will only Stateism and Corruption will only continue forward relentlessly until Western society breaks down. Trump is the symptom of this, of the Public pushing back, against State corruption and bloat. Unfortunately, it’s not enough, not even close. Perhaps the only sufficient societal reset would be all-out civil war, to reestablish blood-ties, ethnic and racial solidarity, and ‘resetting’ public institutions. Until such a thing occurs, very unlikely as it is, more corruption, perversion, taint, and rot will spread.
“The rich”, meaning the specific groups you mention, will remain immune. They control the politicians (via lobbyists). And so, laws cannot touch them.
“Deep State”.
If anybody wants to investigate real corruption in the US, then look which companies, banks, and lobbyists pay both the Republican and Democratic parties. Some do. Why would a corporation pay both political parties, except, to gain something from either or both?
Oh, I should have made clear. I consider nonlabor to be wealth earned through non-production and not working combined. I do think that if you come up with ideas that add value, this is work. You don’t necessarily have to start the company that builds your invention, say. I respect the work of the mind and it always, always has much prior work, in many different forms, before the Eureka moment. It all the siphoning off wealth by creating non-productive middle man finance shit, for example, that I am critical of. It’s gaming society and always has a political lobbying legislative side where the rich create out of nothing ways to make money out of not doing things. Yes, most rich people also go to work where they generally make huge amounts of money. If they are actually doing anything of value there, peachy. It’s their other sources of income that I am critical of. It’s parasitical. It also creates inflation, devaluing of the work and compensation of others and the utter impossibility of workers, for example, paying back their loans and/or keeping jobs. Check out fiat banking and the federal reserve and what these processes actually involve and how they entail unemployment, reduction of compensation, a shift of wealth away from those with less income regardless of work performed and a source of nonlabor income for the wealthy. A vast one.
I am not sure this even needs to be done. I would want their bullshit gaming the system banking and finance wealth production for no labor or value production bs cut off. Then we could see. People assume this is just a given in capitalism, but its not. And much of it was added after the formation of the US, for example.
Another area is yes, taking the idea that corporate charters are a priviledge back into action. The founders of the US were not just concerned about government tyranny. They had see what the giant pseudocorporations like the East India company could do and did do. Corporate charters included the idea that the company follow the law, for example. Well, that idea is gone and the conservatives who refer to the founders never seem to complain about this.
I would also look into lobbying and create enormous restrictions there. Election finance also.
It’s like a taboo to even question these things for certain parts of the right. They think that capitalism must have central banks. Their are illiterate when it comes to money creation out of nothing. They choose not to notice how we have an oligarchy that decides when we go to war, for example, and is essentially anti-democratic, abroad and domestically. If you criticize these facets of elite’s warped version of capitalism, then you supposedly are communist and want the USSR to come back now in the WEstern hemisphere.
Fucking A right. The commons is not a lefty thing. It was presumed by the founders. Of course one can try to figure out where the line is drawn, but conservatives, if they want to conserve traditions and uphold founder ideas and intentions would not just be pro all privitization.
And as if corporations are not, in many case, regions of fascism. These conservatives don’t seem to want to notice that there is a new feudalism, a new royalty. Yes, I don’t want anything like communism. But I don’t see how oligharchic feudalism with a new royalty is somehow meeting conservative values. It’s not. It has nothing to do with freedom, except the ever increasing freedom of the elites and the expense of the rest of the population.
They have no problem siphoning the commons when they want oil in some region or military intervention for their own purposes. And the surveillance capitalists got their whole realm via work done by government tech and development. Of course private companies created a lot there also, but they did it in a partnership with the public domain and using it. And of course they have no conservative values at all. The right to privacy is of no interest to them at all. And for some reason conservatives seem to be under the illusion that people are choosing to give up their right. Yes, this happens also, but there is no way to avoid, even by staying off line and paying in cash, the panopticon. This will only get worse with the coming and already here internet of things. Only a small part of the radical fringe of the right (God bless them) is concerned about this.
There is a set of triggers. You are critical of some facet of what gets called capitalism
bam, you want a Gulag.
People seem to have no idea what capitalism is and assume all this chicanery that has nothing to do with capitalism must be in capitalism. And under these illusions they keep opening the gates of the city to the incoming would be kings and queens.
Is this an objection to the notion that people can have anything in common?
Or just that they can’t have “class” in common?
One nurse is an entirely different person to another nurse, and yet if you got them talking they’d be all but guaranteed to have plenty to talk about - at least as far as work and types of interests go.
The same for fathers, the same even between all family members - they are a “group” of individuals by virtue of having things in common whether through one of many roles they each play in their life, genetics, or some other common ground.
“Selling wage labour” as opposed to “buying it and the use of money as capital” each serves a different distinct function, even though they can overlap to different degrees for each individual person. A “working class” individual will be more reliant on selling their labour in order to remain qualified to participate in the economy, having too little capital to no longer have to do that - i.e. “earning” money from owning the property that other people work with and thus having claim over any of the profits “gained” from paying workers less than they earn you. It’s a very broad distinction between the two roles, with every unique person having a different life experience of each of the two roles.
I’m not sure if it was Marx, but I think it was, who observed that a working class person would probably have more in common with another working class person from a far removed country than they would a capitalist from a nearby neighbourhood. Things overlap a little more nowadays with the “middle class”, but the observation will still stand to an averaged-out degree.
Such a claim would seem as broad as if you replaced the term “working class” with either “male” or “female” though. Mechanics or mothers have more specific experiences in common, and it’s easy to identify them as a group even if each member is a very different person overall. But the same concept goes for gender and class simply by virtue of having a significant part of one’s unique life in common with other people. The reasoning therefore goes that it’s odd that “class consciousness” wasn’t a particularly binding ground to say “you have something in common with a bunch of other people and thereby qualify as a distinct group”, when other broad things like gender, job and family role always were seen as legitimate common grounds to substantiate a “group”. Therefore wouldn’t it be interesting to see if raising “class consciousness” went anywhere towards rethinking normalised economic strata and perhaps revolutionise economics?
In short, just like any other group can have common struggles by virtue of things they have in common in their life, why can’t “broad economic role” be a common struggle by virtue of having that in common with separate/other/different people?
The struggles of parenthood and jobs don’t make you a victim any more or less than your economic role, even capitalists have their own common struggle by virtue of their common economic situation - even though they’re all completely different people. Working individually or collectively to overcome these difficulties is what everyone does, so why is it particularly bad if the working class do the same?
It’s funny that both political groups - for and against the notion of “class struggle” - each complain about the others complaining over nothing.
Where is the introspection, and impartial personal evaluation? Less hypocrisy would go a long way to resolution, in my opinion. But then, it occurs to me that that’s the whole point - to not resolve things. People love to externalise their anger and frustrations upon a common “enemy”. It’s been a while, but I think this is a point Nietzsche made in “Beyond Good and Evil” - that “wrong” is socially defined by what the other tribe with whom they war does differently to them. We see the same thing on this forum all the time. I’ve still never read “Human, all too human”, but it probably covers similar themes - at least the title rings true on this “very human” behaviour.
So welfare is no trouble, so long as the country is rich enough to afford it for a scarce enough population?
Similarly, I’ve brought up the topic of how Capitalism works best for poorer countries with an abundance of people.
I think Social Democrats and Communists tend to have so much beef with each other because they’re annoyed that the other group is approaching progression in “the wrong way” when they could be combining their resources and have more of a chance of success. A Conservative might quip that they’re both right, but whilst Social Democrats pursue reform and regard revolution as too extreme and unnecessary, Communists regard anything short of revolution as insufficient and only serving to tinker with a fundamentally broken system and therefore justify it staying mostly as it is. It’s an ongoing trend in my country for all the left wing parties to collectively outnumber the right wing parties by a significant margin, but the right wing still consistently gets in because there’s less variation that’s more consolidated in the fewer number of parties.
“I don’t believe in Class Struggle. It’s more about genetics and your ethnic group. That’s the primary value. Class is secondary, or lower. When push comes to shove, people don’t care much about those they work for, with, or against. People care about family. People care about clan. People care about tribe.”
On the contrary. People are much more willing, in general, to fight alongside work friends regardless of “ethnicity” (I guess we’re all 19th century anthropologists now…) against some, say, uncle they fucking hate.
“Genetics” and “white” are far more of a social construct, than “class” or “citizen.” It is one of the most unnatural views on life, and nothing in nature reflects this bias or method of selection.
I don’t mean I look down on sexual racism, the reason after about 10 generations there is so little mixing between black, Indian and white skinned people in the US. I mean, if we are gonna dictate who has to like who sexually, it’s over. I just mean it, like plain old racism (subtract the pejorative from racism, literally the doctrine of using so-called “race” as a method of selection and preference), is a construct. Also, that anything is a construct doesn’t itself say anything against it. I don’t discriminate against racism a priori. Some of my favourite people are racists. But we’re philosophers, neh? Let us be accurate:
Racism is a social construct.
This is blatantly false.
People are far more loyal to family than to jobs, work, and corporations. The “single-mother-working-60-hours-per-week” does so, because of her child, which is proof of my claim.
No child, no loyalty.
What if your coworker is a white man like yourself, and your half-brother is the son of a black man?
To be sure, capitalism is a lot of industriousness and intelligence, but it’s a lot of dumb luck too, being at the right place/time.
If Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg had’ve been struck by lightning before becoming billionaires, someone would’ve come along with about as good a product, perhaps even better months, maybe even just weeks later to fill that niche, but because they weren’t, Bill, Jeff and Mark are billionaires, and their former competitors, about as industrious and intelligent as they are, may only be middle or even working class.
It’s because of how modern free markets works, with intellectual property and mass production.
If something’s first, the best or one of, it spreads everywhere, and a handful of families end up controlling a sector of the economy, even tho they may only be a little better at what they do.
And they just get better and better at what they do, buying up the competition and hiring more and more people who’re good at what they do.
It’ll be next to impossible to meaningfully compete with them.
It’s a casino economy, winner takes all, losers get nothing or scraps.
Even some libertarians argue intellectual property is a violation of our rights.
Some individualists argue property that’s never been or couldn’t possibly be routinely physically occupied or used by the owner should be considered abandoned, up for grabs, even if they pay taxes on it.
Now, we don’t have to take it that far, but in exchange for permitting the existence of intellectual property, a social construct, a coercive monopolization (copying what people do is not a forceful, fraudulent or violent act), the property should partly belong to us all i.e. social corporatism.
Bill Gates may be superior to the vast majority of workers, but is he really millions of times superior?
Is he God?
No, but he’s millions of times wealthier, so wealth is not necessarily an accurate representation of value.
I’m not claiming all individuals are equal, I’m not saying all classes are equal.
It’s impossible for anyone or anything to be equal.
The working class are more beneficially productive than the underclass, the lower middle class, when taken as a whole, are probably more beneficially productive than the working class, the middle class more than the lower middle and so on, but once you become upper class, the richest 1%, or the overclass, the richest 1 10th of 1%, arguably things tend to get screwy, and wealth is no longer a reliable measure of a person’s value.
Parodites,
But really, a class can be a
mathematical concept or one that derives from a substrate of social structural underbelly, and depression as a fine gradient that can cut both ways.
That individuals struggle, and not classes is an indefinite competition between vague and clear affiliation through identification.
That the misidentified groups . consisting anywhere between 1 & up to a majority make the difference between individual and social points of view - indefinite both, probabilty wise , should . qualitatively premise any such presumption as to downplay or emphasize the relation. between Marx and Nietzche.
The idea of social contract between Hobbs and Russeau showed contradiction in the expected absolute terms. but in fact could not Jefferson’s genius prefigure both Into some kind of comfortable union ?
After all the Frech Revoluion was preempted by the American, and thus born of the logic of illogic.
Class struggle need not concern the material or pure dialectic born out of confusion, nor be it a winning play of upper controlled classes.
The necessity of one can trump the contingency of.the other, Marx was important because he utilized this appearent contradiction, not that is.It was in some way inherent in ‘Man’ 's Nature in some manner.
While we are on it, isn’t one’s intrapersonal struggle foreshadow the ensuing interpersonal conflict? Isn’t.that.which brings.on solutions so called.finally, and should not be the key between the private and public understanding not in terms of.exclusive.domains of.powers to will, but, instead.the public’s innate, yet.closed.off.apprehension. of.the above.strata’s ‘understanding’?
You fit in precisely into that ‘class’ who uses the struggle to his own preference.
And how can that be argued? You tell me.
yes and in my book ‘the charade of western civlization’, chapter 47, i take this nietzschean concept and extend it to address the impossibility of a homogenous system of laws applicable to everyone in a society in which conflicting classes of bourgeois and proletariat compete over labor force. in so many words i draw the same master/slave distinction that N made, between these two economic classes, and settle on the conclusion that the bourgeois and its ‘state’ resents, in the same way the slave resents the master, the criminal activities of those enlightened anarchists who recognize the illegitimacy of a legal system that attempts to bind and obligate citizens of conflicting classes to a system of laws which does not benefit them both, equally.
for instance, the bourgeois and its state criminalizes wage earners who don’t pay taxes, while big businesses are not obligated by law to do the same. then, when the tax man comes to my door and i bust a cap in his face, the bourgeois and its state resents me, as the slave resents the master who acts capriciously and with no regard to the ethics of the slave.
anyway the essential message of the book is that a cooperative system of laws defended and enforced by a set of axiomatic principles - from which the concept of ‘intrinsic rights’ develops - cannot exist in a society in which all citizens do not share ownership of the means of production.
so i haven’t actually written this book but if i did, i’d put all this stuff in chapter 47.
If you put half the effort into political thinking that you put into Nietzsche’ dissection of the genealogy of logic,
You would actually be a decent political thinker.
Instead of this…
Ununderstanding copypaste of a pamphlet.
See you made the mistake of proving that you actually are capable of philosophy.
If I were you, I would walk down to the nearest socialist headquarters or college and demand to have my balls back.
well i’m only a derivative thinker because the stars say so. capricorns don’t usually start projects, but they finish the fuck out of em. so that’s what i gotta do. i’m am marx’s ambassador at ILP. it is my fate.
bro. i stopped doing philosophy before you made your first ‘clan of hooded philosophers’ video walking around in circles in your room. rememba that one? i do. it was pedro’s big debut.