Let's talk about Critical Race Theory!

[noname223]

Me wtih a PhD in half knowledge am probably expert enough to comment on this heated topic. Probably many of our societal heated discussed get fueled by people who only have half knowledge. Maybe I just make it worse but I will try.

I think many concepts which are controversial might be not fully understood by the general public. I have the feeling many debates are not nuanced enough and rather contain a lot of hyperboles. It is more about winning the fight than to find the truth.

As I said I am no expert but I find some statements concerning this topic weird. First of all I am not fully in favor of all assumptions that are made by postmodernism about values and our inability to find truth. I think there is an objective truth. Though it is hard to find it.
On the other hand I agree that identities can be socially constructed. For example I think gender or race are rather social constructs.

There are different movement inside the CRT. Not everyone has the same opinion. I dislike the following notion. There could be no racism against white people. I am very opposed to that. There are different interpretations. Some say there can be no systemic racism against white people. Because racism is inside our institutions like the police or justice system. Others even claim there cannot even be individual racism against whites. Which is my point of view absurd. Though I am not sure how many follower this thesis has.

However the whole discussion about CRT just shows me the righ-wingers are as bad as the leftist in the culture war. Both groups like censorship a lot. This is why so many red states want to prohibit teaching this stuff. CRT is one ideology in a sea full of other ideologies. It is hypocriical to claim only minorities would like to censor. Both sides take part in this game.

So with this statement both sides can hate me. Lol.

What are thoughts about it? Maybe it is better these threads of mine get ignored. I think this could start some arguments. But I want to express what is going through my mind or what I have read in books or in the media.

 

[hungry_ghost]

I still can't quite figure out what CRT even is.

I think people can be racist against any race, including white people.

From the perspective of someone who is half-black, the black community has so many problems, most of which are their own doing.

It's not white people keeping them down, it's themselves, their mentality, their desire to make bad decisions, etc.

Obviously, America does not have a savory history when it comes to race relations.

But goddamn, you can only use that as an excuse for so long.

At some point, you have to take accountability for your own actions/path in life.

 

[newave3]

Critical race theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. It is a philosophy that is infecting everything from politics and education to the workplace and the military.

It's always YT's fault don't cha know. If you don't conform to the diversity agenda, you are causing trauma and harm.
Everything the left touches they destroy....period...end of discussion.

 

[Nolan96]

Things that make me despair so deeply for human civilization that I hope a nuclear bomb sets the atmosphere on fire and we all die painful deaths for 1,000 Alex

 

[jandek]

What I've encountered of CRT appears to be junk scholarship with little merit. I'd love to watch the race activists twist themselves into pretzels trying to analyze something like the Ottoman or Mughal empires according to their simplistic "theories." Academia is very corrupt and hypocritical, and I think it's buckling under its own contradictions. Ted Kaczynski's sketch "leftist" psychology is a dead-on accurate description of the modern activist-academic, in my experience. He was a professor himself at one point.

 

[WhatPowerIs]

What I've encountered of CRT appears to be junk scholarship with little merit. I'd love to watch the race activists twist themselves into pretzels trying to analyze something like the Ottoman or Mughal empires according to their simplistic "theories." Academia is very corrupt and hypocritical, and I think it's buckling under its own contradictions. Ted Kaczynski's sketch "leftist" psychology is a dead-on accurate description of the modern activist-academic, in my experience. He was a professor himself at one point.

He was an incredibly intelligent man. He had an IQ of 167. Astonishing.

 

[Unhirable]

However the whole discussion about CRT just shows me the righ-wingers are as bad as the leftist in the culture war. Both groups like censorship a lot. This is why so many red states want to prohibit teaching this stuff. CRT is one ideology in a sea full of other ideologies. It is hypocriical to claim only minorities would like to censor. Both sides take part in this game.

Both sides don't "like censorship."

Both sides are trying to WIN. They understand that the winners get to make the laws, the winners get to decide everything. Losers have NO POWER in government until the next election cycle where they might not be losers again.

This is 100% a valid tactic btw, because the side that doesn't use it usually loses and dies.

 

[earshurt]

The whole framing of the CRT conversation is stupid to me... conservatives and liberals seem to be referring to different things when they say "Critical Race Theory" and thus using the term gets us nowhere.

Teaching about historical injustices in school is A-OK, since that's all a part of our history and it deserves to be acknowledged. And you can't talk about history without talking about how history impacts the present, so discussion along those lines is fine too. However, I would prefer we teach kids to actually critically think about history and what it means for the present rather than enforcing the acceptance of any one "takeaway" without question.

 

[October112021]

From a Marxist perspective, it's anti-Communist identity politics that sometimes draws on pseudo-Marxist rhetoric to justify itself.

Professor Adolph Reed (himself African-American)

Adolph Reed: Identity Politics Is Neoliberalism

Race theorist Adolph Reed says identity politics "is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics ... of the left-wing of neoliberalism."

bennorton.com

[Identity] politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature.

An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.

It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class

 

[Julgran]

Me wtih a PhD in half knowledge am probably expert enough to comment on this heated topic. Probably many of our societal heated discussed get fueled by people who only have half knowledge. Maybe I just make it worse but I will try.

I think many concepts which are controversial might be not fully understood by the general public. I have the feeling many debates are not nuanced enough and rather contain a lot of hyperboles. It is more about winning the fight than to find the truth.

As I said I am no expert but I find some statements concerning this topic weird. First of all I am not fully in favor of all assumptions that are made by postmodernism about values and our inability to find truth. I think there is an objective truth. Though it is hard to find it.
On the other hand I agree that identities can be socially constructed. For example I think gender or race are rather social constructs.

There are different movement inside the CRT. Not everyone has the same opinion. I dislike the following notion. There could be no racism against white people. I am very opposed to that. There are different interpretations. Some say there can be no systemic racism against white people. Because racism is inside our institutions like the police or justice system. Others even claim there cannot even be individual racism against whites. Which is my point of view absurd. Though I am not sure how many follower this thesis has.

However the whole discussion about CRT just shows me the righ-wingers are as bad as the leftist in the culture war. Both groups like censorship a lot. This is why so many red states want to prohibit teaching this stuff. CRT is one ideology in a sea full of other ideologies. It is hypocriical to claim only minorities would like to censor. Both sides take part in this game.

So with this statement both sides can hate me. Lol.

What are thoughts about it? Maybe it is better these threads of mine get ignored. I think this could start some arguments. But I want to express what is going through my mind or what I have read in books or in the media.

Lazy people will always find excuses to continue to be lazy. In this case, it's left-wing, black people. What they don't seem to want to contend with is the fact that there are a lot of black people who have succeeded in life and don't agree with the tenets of "Critical Race Theory" at all.

If society was as bad as they are trying to make it out to be, they could simply try to construct their own elsewhere, instead of trying to convert non-CRT people into followers of CRT. Usually, though, some left-wingers keep wanting to have everything for free.

It would be more interesting to see how CRT develops over time if black people looked at their own behaviour towards Asian people first. The CRT people would also be more credible if they hadn't decided to attack other black people in the USA during the riots of 2020.

 

[October112021]

Lazy people will always find excuses to continue to be lazy. In this case, it's left-wing, black people. What they don't seem to want to contend with is the fact that there are a lot of black people who have succeeded in life and don't agree with the tenets of "Critical Race Theory" at all.

If society was as bad as they are trying to make it out to be, they could simply try to construct their own elsewhere, instead of trying to convert non-CRT people into followers of CRT. Usually, though, some left-wingers keep wanting to have everything for free.

It would be more interesting to see how CRT develops over time if black people looked at their own behaviour towards Asian people first.

See, humanity as driven homo economicus who should be forever productive and forever active and desire more simply doesn't square with human nature.

We are monkeys. Apes. We say exist to loll in the grass and eat fruit. That's w,hat we should aim for. Automate everything we need to produce food and heat and homes and medical equipment, then work on ourselves with the extra time. Capitalism is temporary (albeit long-enduring) and it is not "natural". Human beings roaming the savannah a hundred thousand years ago certainly still " worked", but their labor was much more immediate and not mediated by techno-complexes of money and power etc. We need to vastly reduce that mediation while retaining the technology. You do that by directly seizing control of the means of production as a social class. Most things can be automated, including the invention of new machines etc.

But again, CRT is part of capitalism and is designed to prevent that. It's a race-based substitute for the kind of revolutionary class politics that could get us there. That's many Amazon and the big tech companies embrace CRT while wanting nothing to do with pan-racial working class movements.

 

[Julgran]

See, humanity as driven homo economicus who should be forever productive and forever active and desire more simply doesn't square with human nature.

We are monkeys. Apes. We say exist to loll in the grass and eat fruit. That's w,hat we should aim for. Automate everything we need to produce food and heat and homes and medical equipment, then work on ourselves with the extra time.

Well, you could be correct, but I believe that reality is horrible for a reason - namely to keep various creatures, like humans, from overpopulating their own societies - and there may never be a time in which humans just walk around, doing nothing, since that goes against both the hunter-gatherer kind of society, and capitalism, but I see that we at least disagree on this last point.

Capitalism is temporary (albeit long-enduring) and it is not "natural".

If it wasn't for capitalism, I don't believe that currencies would have been developed, which means that each person would have to trade good and services, instead of using coins. At its roots, capitalism is needed for trade to take place.

But again, CRT is part of capitalism. It's a race-based substitute for the kind of revolutionary class politics that could get us there. That's many Amazon and the big tech companies embrace CRT while wanting nothing to do with pan-racial working class movements.

What do you mean?

 

[October112021]

Well, you could be correct, but I believe that reality is horrible for a reason - namely to keep various creatures, like humans, from overpopulating their own societies - and there may never be a time in which humans just walk around, doing nothing, since that goes against both the hunter-gatherer kind of society, and capitalism, but I see that we at least disagree on this last point.



If it wasn't for capitalism, I don't believe that currencies would have been developed, which means that each person would have to trade good and services, instead of using coins. At its roots, capitalism is needed for trade to take place.



What do you mean?

1. Humans are now developed enough to consciously direct its own social development. But this requires a revolution against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie that directs it for us instead.

2. Trade can be abolished when the means of.production are socially controlled. Nobody need trade anything other than time.

3. Big business funds both CRT and conservative identity politics as a way to split the working class and support its own position. E.g.

These 18 Corporations Gave Money to Radical Black Lives Matter Group

Not every company specifies which version of Black Lives Matter it has contributed to.

www.dailysignal.com

These corpos are fine with both black and white nationalism, Christian identity politics, etc. What they hate is working class movements designed to empower the vast majority. they don't see race, nationality, religion etc. They see slaves who can be manipulated into work by certain identity based appeals. Again, see thar Adolph Reed story I pointed out up above.

 

[Julgran]

1. Humans are now developed enough to consciously direct its own social development. But this requires a revolution against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie that directs it for us instead.

Do you mean that the ruling class is stopping the normal people from buying their own farmland and becoming self-sustainable..? I don't believe that's the case.

2. Trade can be abolished when the means of.production are socially controlled. Nobody need trade anything other than time.

Do you mean that people should be forced into working jobs that they don't enjoy...? "social control" usually means that someone is still in control, which is usually the state apparatus. Then, money tends to trickle upwards to the fattened socialist upper class who don't contribute to society, instead of each person being responsible for their own sustenance working real jobs, including the upper class.

3. Big business funds both CRT and conservative identity politics as a way to split the working class and support its own position. E.g.

These 18 Corporations Gave Money to Radical Black Lives Matter Group

Not every company specifies which version of Black Lives Matter it has contributed to.

www.dailysignal.com

These corpos are fine with both black and white nationalism, Christian identity politics, etc. What they hate is working class movements designed to empower the vast majority. they don't see race, nationality, religion etc. They see slaves who can be manipulated into work by certain identity based appeals. Again, see thar Adolph Reed story I pointed out up above.

In the industry of "big business", there's both left-wing and right-wing companies. In what way is "big business" as a whole the root problem..?

 

[October112021]

1. The ruling class is indeed making it increasingly difficult to do so. Consider:

Does Monsanto Have A Patent Gene - 119 Words | Bartleby

Free Essay: I believe that if a company has a patent seed with a particular gene that shows up in a farmer’s crop should not be able to own that crop. There...

www.bartleby.com

The debate over right to repair in 2022

Taking a look at legislation and litigation happening this year in the debate between farmers and manufacturers over right to repair.

www.agriculture.com

Bill Gates Is Buying Up Farmland: 5 Reasons To Invest As Well

Bill Gates has taken on many roles over the course of his career: affable tech nerd, aloof billionaire, tennis player, visionary philanthropist. Before divorcing, Bill and Melinda Gates added a new title to that list: largest owners of US farmland. One way to get rich is to observe what rich...

www.financialsamurai.com

2. No; with socially (not centrally) controlled production, labor becomes free to develop without the intervention of any higher power.

3.Big Business 100% does not care about ideology. Ideology is a thing for them to manipulate. If it profits them to support CRT under certain conditions, they will do so. If it profits them to support Christian mationalism, they will do so. They produce these artificial divisions for their own benefit, to split the working class.

Thee bourgeois State does not oppose business, no matter how much it regulates (to harm small businesses and thrust owners back into the proletariat), or hands out welfare (to prevent social revolution). The function of the capitalist State is to mediate conflicts within Capital and to preserve the system. MUH GUBBMINT DOES IT is not socialism.

This is why big business

Always hedges its bets. To be sure, depending on their direct interests they may donate more to one party than the other, as in other nations. But both parties absolutely serve Capital. Not even Bernie Sanders is an actual socialist, being instead "the best friend the profit system ever had" as Franklin Roosevelt declared himself in a letter to Felix Frankfurter.

Top Contributors, federal election data for Bernie Sanders, 2020 cycle

This page highlights the top contributors to Bernie Sanders for the 2020 presidential election cycle. For more information, click through to the page.

www.opensecrets.org

The left-wing of Capital is not socialist in any Marxist sense. Rather, it correlates to what Marx described as "bourgeois socialism*:


A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems

We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.

 

[Julgran]

1. The ruling class is indeed making it increasingly difficult to do so. Consider:

Does Monsanto Have A Patent Gene - 119 Words | Bartleby

Free Essay: I believe that if a company has a patent seed with a particular gene that shows up in a farmer’s crop should not be able to own that crop. There...

www.bartleby.com

The debate over right to repair in 2022

Taking a look at legislation and litigation happening this year in the debate between farmers and manufacturers over right to repair.

www.agriculture.com

Bill Gates Is Buying Up Farmland: 5 Reasons To Invest As Well

Bill Gates has taken on many roles over the course of his career: affable tech nerd, aloof billionaire, tennis player, visionary philanthropist. Before divorcing, Bill and Melinda Gates added a new title to that list: largest owners of US farmland. One way to get rich is to observe what rich...

www.financialsamurai.com

I do agree with Bill Gates being a hinderance to the future freedom of people to own land. As for the two other points, those could also have an impact, but they may have a bigger impact on society in the future, as compared to today.

2. No; with socially (not centrally) controlled production, labor becomes free to develop without the intervention of any higher power.

I'm not following your logic here. What kind of labor becomes free, and how does that work?

3.Big Business 100% does not care about ideology. Ideology is a thing for them to manipulate. If it profits them to support CRT under certain conditions, they will do so. If it profits them to support Christian mationalism, they will do so. They produce these artificial divisions for their own benefit, to split the working class.

Thee bourgeois State does not oppose business, no matter how much it regulates (to harm small businesses and thrust owners back into the proletariat), or hands out welfare (to prevent social revolution). The function of the capitalist State is to mediate conflicts within Capital and to preserve the system. MUH GUBBMINT DOES IT is not socialism.

This is why big business

Always hedges its bets. To be sure, depending on their direct interests they may donate more to one party than the other, as in other nations. But both parties absolutely serve Capital. Not even Bernie Sanders is an actual socialist, being instead "the best friend the profit system ever had" as Franklin Roosevelt declared himself in a letter to Felix Frankfurter.

Top Contributors, federal election data for Bernie Sanders, 2020 cycle

This page highlights the top contributors to Bernie Sanders for the 2020 presidential election cycle. For more information, click through to the page.

www.opensecrets.org

I agree. Money is what makes the world go around, but how do you propose people should take ownership of their future..? Who would own these corporations, if not the current owners or the state..?

 

[October112021]

The people working in the corporations would control their productive property directly. All society would no longer need to have money to function because communication is virtually instantaneous and all needs can be communicated directly.

Marx's argument is that this will become historically necessary as a consequence of what Marxists call immiseration:

The German Ideology

The German Ideology

www.marxists.org

This "alienation" (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an "intolerable" power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless," and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless" mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a "world-historical" existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Does the bolded sound familiar?

[

URL unfurl="true"]https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.W_gvJaP7fMZd4YrDc4E_IwHaJd?pid=ImgDet&dpr=1.33[/URL]

This does not make the World Economic Forum a bunch of Marxists, though they use bourgeois pseudosocialist rhetoric to obscure their activities. Rather, the profit rate under conditions of universal competition is forever in decline. This necessitates them taking all productive property from the working class, by any means necessary, from taxes to prices. This will eventually get so bad that the workers have no choice but to revolt, to seize the means.
I'm not the only Marxist who understands things this way, btw.

This is the general outlook of r/stupidpol.

r/stupidpol

r/stupidpol: Subreddit focused on critiquing capitalism and identity politics from a Marxist perspective.

www.reddit.com

 

[Julgran]

The people working in the corporations would control their productive property directly. All society would no longer need to have money to function because communication is virtually instantaneous and all needs can be communicated directly.

I'm not sure how this would work. Do you mean that those workers would own their products, and then not need any money..? Wouldn't that leave us with the need for everyone to product everything for themselves then, or do you mean that they would trade those products that they own, with each other..? Why is this not possible today?

How does a local bakery and clothes shop, for example, work any differently..?

Marx's argument is that this will become historically necessary as a consequence of what Marxists call immiseration:

The German Ideology

The German Ideology

www.marxists.org

This "alienation" (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an "intolerable" power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless," and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless" mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a "world-historical" existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Does the bolded sound familiar?

I'm right-wing, but I agree to some degree - but humanity has to "earn" a left-wing kind of society, by building machines that do all the work for us. We can't just redistribute all our resource, as the world funtions today, as I see it.

[

URL unfurl="true"]https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.W_gvJaP7fMZd4YrDc4E_IwHaJd?pid=ImgDet&dpr=1.33[/URL]

This does not make the World Economic Forum a bunch of Marxists, though they use bourgeois pseudosocialist rhetoric to obscure their activities. Rather, the profit rate under conditions of universal competition is forever in decline. This necessitates them taking all productive property from the working class, by any means necessary, from taxes to prices. This will eventually get so bad that the workers have no choice but to revolt, to seize the means.

I agree, but we have been told that we will eat the bugs, own nothing and be happy - so, will we not be happy..? We better call Klaus and ask him

 

[October112021]

Right. And this "own nothing" stuff is the start of world Communist revolution, again not because Schwab and the big capitalists are all Marxists and want it, but because they have no choice but to take productive property from the workers, because if you adjust for inflation their profits are way down from their historical highs in earlier decades.

And in so doing, they create the preconditions for actual Communism, because the workers no longer have anything to fight each other over, and the only thing that makes sense is to do the same thing to the capitalists. Once this is done, it doesn't make sense to go back to the old ways. Does this make sense? Because this is what Marx meant. It's the essence of Marxism, which basically nobody, including most Marxists, understand.

Once the working class does own nothing, and the bourgeoisie also owns nothing, the concept of ownership becomes irrelevant and the natural thing to do is to start operating without it.
Now of course conservatives don't want to let it get that far. They want to maintain their status as proprietors of small capital etc. They'll fight it on a nationalist-right basis first, killing the homos and whatever they think Ackshually Caused It. And the left as such is in the pocket of the capitalists. Both sides lose, and ideology is ripped off of human existence like a bad scab, and then the possibility for Communist revolution exists.

 

[Julgran]

Right. And this "own nothing" stuff is the start of world Communist revolution, again not because Schwab and the big capitalists are all Marxists and want it, but because they have no choice but to take productive property from the workers, because if you adjust for inflation their profits are way down from their historical highs in earlier decades.

And in so doing, they create the preconditions for actual Communism, because the workers no longer have anything to fight each other over, and the only thing that makes sense is to do the same thing to the capitalists. Once this is done, it doesn't make sense to go back to the old ways. Does this make sense? Because this is what Marx meant. It's the essence of Marxism, which basically nobody, including most Marxists, understand.

Once the working class does own nothing, and the bourgeoisie also owns nothing, the concept of ownership becomes irrelevant and the natural thing to do is to start operating without it.
Now of course conservatives don't want to let it get that far. They want to maintain their status as proprietors of small capital etc. They'll fight it on a nationalist-right basis first, killing the homos and whatever they think Ackshually Caused It. And the left as such is in the pocket of the capitalists. Both sides lose, and ideology is ripped off of human existence like a bad scab, and then the possibility for Communist revolution exists.

I'm not sure what those diagrams show, and I still don't see how you mean the world should work - in a concrete sense.

If I return to the example of the local bakery and the clothes shop, and then I add a trucker who transports goods, and we also take into accounts that all those businesses are run by self-employed business-starters - what's the wrong in that...?

 

[October112021]

What the diagrams show is that the rate of profit is in terminal decline in capitalism.

This does not mean year on year profits, where companies post profits that are higher than each year before - "record breaking profits" being a cliche now in the corporate world. What it means is that, if you take the profit rate and adjust it for inflation, then average it out, profits among the biggest competitors on the market are way down from where they would have been decades or centuries ago.

This is because capitalism produces labor saving devices, what Marx called fixed capital. Profits are extracted from surplus labor, and there is less surplus labor in the system when corporations automate everything. Ironically, the more productive capitalism becomes, the less profitable it is (again, once you account for inflation). This means that capitalists have to become more exploitive as their system becomes more productive, resulting in a Great Reset.

(One might be inclined to say "well, they're just being outcompeted by small businesses", but no lol.

Report: Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business

Small businesses have been in steep decline. In this report, we argue that anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations is largely to blame and present three reasons to bring a commitment to fair markets for small businesses back into antitrust policy. The report won an award for...

ilsr.org

The United States is much less a nation of entrepreneurs than it was a generation ago. Small, independent businesses have declined sharply in both numbers and market share across many sectors of the economy. Between 1997 and 2012, the number of small manufacturers fell by more 70,000, local retailers saw their ranks diminish by about 108,000, and the number of community banks and credit unions dropped by half, from about 26,000 to 13,000. At the same time, starting a new business appears to have become harder than ever. The number of startups launched annually has fallen by nearly half since the 1970s.

As stunning as these figures are, there has been remarkably little public debate about this profound structural shift taking place in the U.S. economy. We tend to accept the decline of small business as the inevitable result of market forces. Big companies are thought to be more efficient and productive; therefore, although we may miss the corner drugstore or the family-owned auto repair shop, their demise is unavoidable, and it's economically beneficial.

But our new report suggests a different, and very troubling, explanation for the dwindling ranks of small businesses. It presents evidence that their decline is owed, at least in part, to anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations. Drawing on examples in pharmacy, banking, telecommunications, and retail, it finds that big companies routinely use their size and their economic and political power to undermine their smaller rivals and exclude them from markets.

)

As to how the world will function without property of any kind? Nobody actually knows. We can speculate - Marx thought it would initially take the form of nonfungible (non-interest-bearing) labour vouchers, which could be spent but not accumulated; these would replace money until eventually there was no need for such exchange. I'm not married to this concept. Nobody planned out capitalism in full before it emerged from feudal social relations, after all.

With regards to modern small businesses, they simply won't exist well before Commmunist revolution. We envisage a scenario in which Capital has swallowed everything . The small businesses will be dispossessed far before then.

What rightoids get mad about is this socializing tendency within capitalism. Capitalism bears the seeds of socialism, just as feudalism contained the seeds of capitalism (small burghers, guilds etc.).

 

[Julgran]

What the diagrams show is that the rate of profit is in terminal decline in capitalism.

Sure, but the diagram basically only says "rate of profit", and doesn't show to whom the declining profits belong. For example, these numbers could be showing the general profit statistics for all companies in the stated countries, or something else - it's not clear.

This does not mean year on year profits, where companies post profits that are higher than each year before - "record breaking profits" being a cliche now in the corporate world. What it means is that, if you take the profit rate and adjust it for inflation, then average it out, profits among the biggest competitors on the market are way down from where they would have been decades or centuries ago.

This is because capitalism produces labor saving devices, what Marx called fixed capital. Profits are extracted from surplus labor, and there is less surplus labor in the system when corporations automate everything. Ironically, the more productive capitalism becomes, the less profitable it is (again, once you account for inflation). This means that capitalists have to become more exploitive as their system becomes more productive, resulting in a Great Reset.

(One might be inclined to say "well, they're just being outcompeted by small businesses", but no lol.

Report: Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business

Small businesses have been in steep decline. In this report, we argue that anticompetitive behavior by large, dominant corporations is largely to blame and present three reasons to bring a commitment to fair markets for small businesses back into antitrust policy. The report won an award for...

ilsr.org

)

Are you sure that the profits are actually decreasing in this way...? I mean, companies tend to not want to continue operating if they are operating at a significant loss. Also, couldn't it also be said that the profits of those companies actually are increasing, but inflation and other factors are acting as profit inhibitors..?

As to how the world will function without property of any kind? Nobody actually knows. We can speculate - Marx thought it would initially take the form of nonfungible (non-interest-bearing) labour vouchers, which could be spent but not accumulated; these would replace money until eventually there was no need for such exchange. I'm not married to this concept. Nobody planned out capitalism in full before it emerged from feudal social relations, after all.

Do you mean that worker-led companies would still sell products, and then the consumers would use vouchers to buy those products..? How would that be different to using money, in the way we do today..?

With regards to modern small businesses, they simply won't exist well before Commmunist revolution. We envisage a scenario in which Capital has swallowed everything . The small businesses will be dispossessed far before then.

Sure, but as I understood it, you are thinking that capitalism has a negative effect on society, or is financially immoral - so my question is how this applies to those small businesses that I mentioned.

 

[October112021]

Sure, but the diagram basically only says "rate of profit", and doesn't show to whom the declining profits belong. For example, these numbers could be showing the general profit statistics for all companies in the stated countries, or something else - it's not clear.



Are you sure that the profits are actually decreasing in this way...? I mean, companies tend to not want to continue operating if they are operating at a significant loss. Also, couldn't it also be said that the profits of those companies actually are increasing, but inflation and other factors are acting as profit inhibitors..?



Do you mean that worker-led companies would still sell products, and then the consumers would use vouchers to buy those products..? How would that be different to using money, in the way we do today..?



Sure, but as I understood it, you are thinking that capitalism has a negative effect on society, or is financially immoral - so my question is how this applies to those small businesses that I mentioned.

1. Yes, that's what they're showing. Profits are down, adjusted for inflation, across the board. small businesses are always the worst hit, but it's beginning to seriously effect the major corporations also. And they are the ones with the power and position to pull off a Great Reset, using pseudosocialist rhetoric to justify taking the productive property of the working class, which includes small businesses (whom this will effect the worst).

]You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend."

- The Communist Manifesto

2. The companies at the absolute commanding heights of the economy don't have a choice, and will absolutely murder (through prppertylessness) millions of people to buttress their positions. They don't believe in free market economics - that's a religion for the superstitious plebs.

3. The difference would lie in their nonfungibility. You work eight hours, get your labor credits, and spend them, but you can't put them in the bank to stack them (and this would go for everyone). But this was just Marx's vague idea, and he never seriously propounded the idea - Marx was extremely careful not to say what Communism would be.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

- The German Ideology

In other words, the actual shape of Communist society will emerge in the event. Do you understand? Marx rejected what he called Utopian Socialists, who planned a society in advance and wanted to cajole everyone into implementing it.

The first phase of the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. *Certain thinkers criticize social antagonisms and suggest fantastic solutions thereof, which the mass of workers is left to accept, preach, and put into practice. The sects formed by these initiators are abstentionist by their very nature — i.e., alien to all real action, politics, strikes, coalitions, or, in a word, to any united movement. The mass of the proletariat always remains indifferent or even hostile to their propaganda*. The Paris and Lyon workers did not want the St.-Simonists, the Fourierists, the Icarians, any more than the Chartists and the English trade unionists wanted the Owenites. These sects act as levers of the movement in the beginning, but become an obstruction as soon as the movement outgrows them; after which they became reactionary.

Also, Marx doesn't really think capitalism is immoral. He doesn't believe in morality as a transhistorical concept.

Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The Communists do not preach morality at all.

They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.

Communist theoreticians, the only Communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of the contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.

- The German Ideology

What is "a fair distribution"?

Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?

- Critique of the Gotha Programme

 

[Julgran]

1. Yes, that's what they're showing. Profits are down, adjusted for inflation, across the board. small businesses are always the worst hit, but it's beginning to seriously effect the major corporations also. And they are the ones with the power and position to pull off a Great Reset, using pseudosocialist rhetoric to justify taking the productive property of the working class, which includes small businesses (whom this will effect the worst).




- The Communist Manifesto

2. The companies at the absolute commanding heights of the economy don't have a choice, and will absolutely murder (through prppertylessness) millions of people to buttress their positions. They don't believe in free market economics - that's a religion for the superstitious plebs.

3. The difference would lie in their nonfungibility. You work eight hours, get your labor credits, and spend them, but you can't put them in the bank to stack them (and this would go for everyone). But this was just Marx's vague idea, and he never seriously propounded the idea - Marx was extremely careful not to say what Communism would be.



- The German Ideology

In other words, the actual shape of Communist society will emerge in the event. Do you understand? Marx rejected what he called Utopian Socialists, who planned a society in advance and wanted to cajole everyone into implementing it.


Also, Marx doesn't really think capitalism is immoral. He doesn't believe in morality as a transhistorical concept.



- The German Ideology



- Critique of the Gotha Programme

That's interesting, but how do you conclude that capitalism has a negative effect on society..? I'm still wondering about your posts #9 and #11 above. Does capitalism only function properly when talking about small businesses, and not large corporations - or not at all..?

 

[October112021]

That's interesting, but how do you conclude that capitalism has a negative effect on society..? I'm still wondering about your posts #9 and #11 above. Does capitalism only function properly when talking about small businesses, and not large corporations - or not at all..?

It isn't that it has a negative effect on society per se. It's that it has an inevitable, logical trajectory, which we're calling the Great Reset, that it must inevitably pass through. It must reduce the whole society to essentially paid slavery, with the opportunity to own productive business and "advance" in the world gone for the overwhelming majorityw. It must reduce everyone and everything to rentier status. Check this out.

People face biggest drop in living standards since 1956

Wages will lag soaring prices meaning the biggest drop in standards since 1956, says the OBR.

www.bbc.com

People worldwide face biggest drop in living standards since 1956 - BBC

Generation rent: Millennials rent everything in their lives - should we all follow suit?

The booming ‘sharing economy’ is allowing millennials to enjoy the benefits of owning without the bother of buying.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Millennials are beginning to rent everything, even clothes, because everything is too expensive to purchase - the Torygraph

Living standards declining in 90% of countries — UN – DW – 09/08/2022

The UN's Human Development Index has declined globally for two years in a row for the first time in 32 years amid the combined effects of climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

www.dw.com

- Living standards declining in 90% of countries

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker [...] All means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become a means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment, they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process [...], they transform his life into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods of the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of these methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse [emphasis added]. [...] Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

- Capital

Yes, liberal politicians are "in on it", to the extent they realize it's their goal, including Obama and Biden. Yes, they stoke inflation through government spending - in order to raise profits artificially for their corporate overlords. Yes, conservative politicians are " in on it ", including Trump and DeSantis and Giorgia Meloni. But they aren't the ultimate beneficiaries. Neither even really is Schwab ANF the WEF. The beneficiary is Capifal, an artificial social abstraction.

For example: is the Great Reset Biden agenda because Been actually is a deep green environut? No lawlz.

Biden Vows ‘Consequences’ for Saudi Arabia After Oil Production Cut

Angered by the kingdom’s decision to team up with Russia, President Biden signaled openness to retaliatory measures, including a halt to arms sales and allowing price-fixing lawsuits.

out.reddit.com

Biden uses environmentalism as a rhetorical smokescreen to continue pushing lithium I heavy electric vehicles to the petit-bourgeoisie while working around the clock to glut us in oil. Under a rationally controlled, socialized system, a gas shortage would be a great opportunity to actually go solar or nuclear. But no, we cannot.

 

[Julgran]

It isn't that it has a negative effect on society per se. It's that it has an inevitable, logical trajectory, which we're calling the Great Reset, that it must inevitably pass through. It must reduce the whole society to essentially paid slavery, with the opportunity to own productive business and "advance" in the world gone for the overwhelming majorityw. It must reduce everyone and everything to rentier status. Check this out.

People face biggest drop in living standards since 1956

Wages will lag soaring prices meaning the biggest drop in standards since 1956, says the OBR.

www.bbc.com

People worldwide face biggest drop in living standards since 1956 - BBC

Generation rent: Millennials rent everything in their lives - should we all follow suit?

The booming ‘sharing economy’ is allowing millennials to enjoy the benefits of owning without the bother of buying.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Millennials are beginning to rent everything, even clothes, because everything is too expensive to purchase - the Torygraph

Living standards declining in 90% of countries — UN – DW – 09/08/2022

The UN's Human Development Index has declined globally for two years in a row for the first time in 32 years amid the combined effects of climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

www.dw.com

- Living standards declining in 90% of countries



- Capital

I do agree about the renter sentiment.

However, I'm having a hard time agreeing with the quote at the bottom, since I can't see how my previous example with the small businesses puts the workers into such a oppressive state of being. The quote sounds like it's trying to explain that a worker who works for a large corporation is exploited, but how does the voluntary trade between a few local business people - like a farmer who sells eggs, a trucker drivers, a baker, and so on - lead to exploitation of them...? If I understand it correctly, you mean that not all people has the ability to contribute to society in even such a small business environment - is this correct..?

 

[October112021]

I do agree about the renter sentiment.

However, I'm having a hard time agreeing with the quote at the bottom, since I can't see how my previous example with the small businesses puts the workers into such a oppressive state of being. The quote sounds like it's trying to explain that a worker who works for a large corporation is exploited, but how does the voluntary trade between a few local business people - like a farmer who sells eggs, a trucker drivers, a baker, and so on - lead to exploitation of them...? If I understand it correctly, you mean that not all people has the ability to contribute to society in even such a small business environment - is this correct..?

The point is that those small business people won't exist under the continued trajectory of capitalism, which inevitably trends towards Great Reset conditions because of the declining rate of profit and the need for big capitalists to dispossess the small ones to keep up their profits. What Marx is describing is the future development as he sees it and not necessarily what existed in the 1860s.

Big business wants to undermine proletarian self-sufficiency. So it undercuts the small farmer by rolling out government subsidies for agriculture and pays the small farmer not to produce, to "keep prices down", while it snaps up property and starts factory farming. It also implements things like " right to repair' that legally keeps farmers from fixing their own equipment, patents GMO seed so they cannot be shared, etc. You see how that works? Given enough time, big capital hegemonizes everything. We are projecting into the future here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-decline-of-the-small-american-family-farm-in-one-chart/

 

[Julgran]

The point is that those small business people won't exist under the continued trajectory of capitalism, which inevitably trends towards Great Reset conditions because of the declining rate of profit and the need for big capitalists to dispossess the small ones to keep up their profits. What Marx is describing is the future development as he sees it and not necessarily what existed in the 1860s.

Big business wants to undermine proletarian self-sufficiency. So it undercuts the small farmer by rolling out government subsidies for agriculture and pays the small farmer not to produce, to "keep prices down", while it snaps up property and starts factory farming. You see how that works? Given enough time, big capital hegemonizes everything. We are projecting into the future here.

I agree, but I also see capitalism as an ancient system that has served society well, and the Great Reset is a fairly new idea in the long run.

Do you believe that capitalism worked somewhat sufficiently until the 1860s, then...?

 

[October112021]

I agree, but I also see capitalism as an ancient system that has served society well, and the Great Reset is a fairly new idea in the long run.

Do you believe that capitalism worked somewhat sufficiently until the 1860s, then...?

Absolutely. Marx thought that capitalism (which had only existed since about the 1500s, and then in embryo) was enormously productive at first.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

The Great Reset isn't being implemented because it's a good idea. It's being implemented because the capitalists have to do something to get that rate of profit back up.

 

[Julgran]

Absolutely. Marx thought that capitalism (which had only existed since about the 1500s, and then in embryo) was enormously productive at first.

I see!

The Great Reset isn't being implemented because it's a good idea. It's being implemented because the capitalists have to do something to get that rate of profit back up.

That seems to be the case, yes.

Let's hope that we can come up with a better system soon.