Sodium_nitride

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Inflation is something that occurrd in even ancient class societies. It is noted in ancient societies that they originally issued silver coins for daily use, but as the centuries passed by successive governments debased the currency until copper coins were being used, then iron, then zinc and now today most money is digital, being produced at close to 0 cost.

The reason why Inflation happens in class societies is that the state debasing its currency, or banks increasing their lending (both of which cause inflation by jncreasing the money supply) are easy ways for the ruling class to generate financial power and keep liquidity in the economy up.

Another aspect to this is selection pressures for businesses. "Inflation" and "deflation" are statistical properties of an economy. That means that they exist as the sum of many small interacting parts (the prices of individual commodities).

If any business lowers their prices pre-maturely while everyone else keeps up their prices, the business will loose profit and thus shrink relative to others. This is a strong disincentive against deflating prices except in dire circumstances (recessions) where you can safely expect everyone else to also lower prices.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The US government is putting the boot on your necks too. The empire isn't run for your benefit, it is run at your expense.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

The Chinese never found a way to make profit in spite of radically lower prices

Source? Your dreams?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Real late reply, but Kamala is a direct fascist.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

Trump openly

This is the real problem that libs have with trump. He represents and fulfills all of their ideals, but without the pompadour.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Which one are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Kissing g my homes good night

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

My logic (I don't live in the us but for the sake of argument, let's pretend I do) is that if a politician can commit a livestreamed genocide, and they win the election, it signals to politicians that there is no line they can cross that will make their campaign unviable.

It would be more ideal if the Democrats could have been punished for their war mongering years ago, but you never punish your representatives for crossing even the most egregious possible line, then you truly don't have any power over them and have fundamentally given up.

If tommorow, even 10% of the dems indicated in polls that they would not vote for kamala because of gaza, it would force the DNC to take a stronger stance on the issue because the race is too tight. If this had happened many months ago, the Democrats could have been forced in giving concessions. But the Democrat voter base has made sure that the demmocrat party has no need to give concessions. They have used themselves as meat waves to ensure that the genocide can continue smoothly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Some academics became liberals after having flirted with Marxism. This is relevant why exactly? I mean, I can cite many great minds who remained Marxists and even advanced the theory. Ever heard of Paul Cockshott? Alan Contrell? David Zachariah? Emanuel Farjoun?

These guys (and some others) actually worked on Marxist economic theory and modernized it. They lived through the collapse of the USSR and remained steadfast in their beliefs. And I haven't talked about countless other minds in anthropology, history, contemporary social studies and philosophy who have used dialectical materialism as a foundation to achieve great results.

And so I want to emphasize something.

every single one of them gave up and became an egalitarian.

Is blatantly and literally false.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I can perform a completely independent experiments in my house.

And I can scream into the abyss, it's just as relevant. The absolute majority of actually useful and relevant science is performed socially for social purposes.

I make a hypothesis that my stove can boil 1L of water in 10 minutes.

You aren't even supposed to do a scientific experiment in the way you have just described. Or rather, there is neither a universally agreed upon scientific method, nor would your described experiment hold up to any standards.

An actual scientific experiment into water boiling would involve at the minimum

  1. A model predicting the speed of boiling based on relevant variables
  2. A collection of many data, and preferably corroborated by independent sources
  3. Statistical analysis of the data (there are many methods to choose from) to gauge confidence in the model.
  4. Publishing or proofreading of the results.

However, at each of these steps, you have a choice of how to approach the problem. And this depends on what you are trying to do, and what the best standards in the industry are. The process has also changed over time.

And this reveals the problem of many people's metaphysical approach to science. They treat it as if it were a platonic ideal, or floating constant in the human minds pace. In reality, "science" is an industry with its ever-changing standards, culture, interaction with the rest of society, and a million other complexities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

The broader field of academia and getting scientific papers published is more of a governance thing than science.

You cannot separate the 2. There is no pure science out there which can be done without "governance".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

What the fuck are you talking about?

 

Despite no longer identifying with liberalism, I still make liberal mistakes. I have caught myself multiple times at this point saying that China is not doing this or that to help Cuba, or Palestine, or to combat some domestic issue. Then I do some digging and it turns out they are actually doing something.

As an example, I thought that China was abandoning Cuba with its energy crisis, but they are actually building solar plants. There are still problems, since the plants will take time to open, and still only provide a fraction of the energy Cuba needs, but this is just one project. I am sure there are more things going on behind the scenes which I just haven't seen yet, because they aren't flashy enough to make it to the front page of the news.

Basically, what I am saying is that I spoke first and investigated latter. This is because I was being lazy. I just want to remind everybody to not repeat my mistakes.

 

Sorry about the long post (shortest leftist wall of text be like)

When it comes to the "labour aristocracy" in the first world, I feel like many leftists wildly exaggerate both its size and wealth. This is often done to the point of erasing class conflict in the first world, as this article does. I might be totally wrong here, but i feel like these authors are making anti-marxist errors. The following points are emblematic of what I am talking about (emphasis mine):

The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.

This is just completely wrong when one considers just how many poor people live in the first world who obviously don't receive super-wages. US poverty rates alone are always above 10%, and that poverty line is widely known to be inadequate. The US also is significantly more wealthy than Europe, where the calculus is even worse. And that doesn't even account for the wild wealth disparities that exist in the first world.

When ... the relative importance of the national exploitation from which a working class suffers through belonging to the proletariat diminishes continually as compared with that from which it benefits through belonging to a privileged nation, a moment comes when the aim of increasing the national income in absolute terms prevails over that of improving the relative share of one part of the nation over the other

What it is saying is that when the working class share of national income becomes high enough, they start to want to exploit other nations as that becomes beneficial. However, the expansion of imperialism in the neoliberal era is also the reason for the stagnation of living standards in the imperial core. By accessing a larger pool of labor in the south, the position of northern workers is threatened. That's why Northern workers have fought against outsourcing, the very fundamental imperialist measure.

Thereafter a de facto united front of the workers and capitalists of the well-to-do countries, directed against the poor nations, co-exists with an internal trade-union struggle over the sharing of the loot. Under these conditions this trade-union struggle necessarily becomes more and more a sort of settlement of accounts between partners, and it is no accident that in the richest countries, such as the United States---with similar tendencies already apparent in the other big capitalist countries---militant trade-union struggle is degenerating first into trade unionism of the classic British type, then into corporatism, and finally into racketeering

I am not too familiar with the history of the trade union, but wasn't the degeneration of the unions largely a result of state and corporate action against the unions? They engage in union busting, forced out radical leaders, performed assasinations, etc. This seems like an erasure of the class struggle to the point that the unions are depicted as voluntarily degenerating.

I feel like these kinds of narratives, which are popular amongst liberals as well (liberals will often admit that weak nations are exploited. Example - America invades for oil meme) tend to justify imperialism to westerners. I have on more than one occasion seen westerns outright say that they don't want to fight against imperialism because they benefit from it. I think that's how a lot of westerners justify supporting imperialism. This kind of narrative ironically cements the power of imperialism

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