Politicians

Two points FC made in a thread at ILP,

"I am optimistic that power will no longer be attainable except by applied philosophy, within the next 12 years."

"[...where philosophy ends, we enter the courtroom.] From there, the fruits of this most intensely concentrated effort trickle into politics, which' task is the minimally interfere and do clerks work; in fact politics should be wholly reduced to the clerks work of legislative procedure performed by the most demonstrably capable minds."

I wrote recently about politics as the point of union between the human and the economic, as a kind of grinding-down of both man and world at the intersection of these. The politician itself is a being totally guided to the landscapes and topologies of 'an economic situation' and must make calculated decisions based firstly on economic considerations and facts; another philosopher I read once said that politics these days are entirely subservient to Economy, this also seems true almost without exception (think Greece, which attempted to place politics and humanity above economy, but failed due to the failure of their leadership and the total overpowering strength of their enemy -- but note that Greece did not fail on human (existential, meaningful, hopeful, truthful/self-honest) terms, perhaps they are the only ones to avoid that kind of failure so far).

The politician is essentially a kind of actor, who acts out various roles and uses language as masks and fluid images meant to mediate variously conflicting economic requirements to human perceptions. This is a system role, the role of an agent within the system and made by, for, and of the system, any given society and the plethora of its variously potent and/or necessary elements, laws and logics. The structure of society breeds its political actors as virtuality-points responsive to space and time dynamics, actors able to be sacrificed in an instant for the greater expediency of that structure and system.

Politicians have no nobility and no honor perhaps because they understand their sacrificial dependent role, that their own power is merely borrowed and has nothing to do either with the greater power of life or the greater power of the world... the politician is always trying to usurp more and more of both of these two kinds of greater power to himself, without tipping over the equation into his own ruination. A less philosophical role could scarcely be imagined, but it does raise the possibility of politics as art, something Nietzsche and others have noted.

The certain Machiavellian inclination to transform the political actingness into an art form unto itself succeeds in the sense of making itself radically available to the greater powers of life or world, but can never succeed in piercing into either such greater power, nor can it pierce into the union of those two powers, namely into philosophy.

Modern politics has become utilitarian and realpolitikal precisely because it is operating in the void of philosophy, as philosophy's bitch. Which makes FC's comments above even more intriguing. If philosophy is indeed moving into a dominant position then we are going to see a marked decrease in merely utilitarian, pragmatic-pathological paradigms. The old actors are going to be out of work. Looking at the total farce that is politics today (and too is media qua media of, by and for the political), maybe they already are.

"Modern politics has become utilitarian and realpolitikal precisely because it is operating in the void of philosophy, as philosophy's bitch. Which makes FC's comments above even more intriguing. If philosophy is indeed moving into a dominant position then we are going to see a marked decrease in merely utilitarian, pragmatic-pathological paradigms. The old actors are going to be out of work. Looking at the total farce that is politics today (and too is media qua media of, by and for the political), maybe they already are.
"


Indeed a Socialist Jew is leading the democrats and everyone from first to third place for the Republicans is either not a politician at all or very unconventional. But philosophy has not entered to fill the void that the politicians left behind: Donald Trump has. Top lel. This is because there are no philosophers anymore, save for us and some other scattered groups here and there- if there were any philosophers left on a larger scale then philosophy would have filled the void that Donald Trump is currently filling in the US.


I hope he wins too- this is the only election I have ever followed in my country. I check the latest polls every day, never before have I given a shit who becomes president of my country. Not because I agree with Trump's policies or think he would make a good president, but because if he wins it will bring us all one step closer to the apocalypse- and I think that's what we all really want to see anyway, deep down.


One thing I like about him is his policy of blockading the European migrants. A nation has the right to protect its culture from corruption by foreigners in times of mass immigration. I'm not afraid of a terrorist attack I just don't like people who were born in and programmed from infancy by a culture as primitive as the one in Syria or the Islamic world in general coming to the place I live and proliferating their lower human-types. I wish that Trump's honesty extended that far, he claims to want to ban Muslim entry for national security and to stop terrorist attacks, he should just come out and say that he doesn't want them infecting our country. Same with the Mexicans. And I assure you I'm not racist- racism has to do with people's genes, I just don't like people's memes. Besides, if we build a big Trump Wall around the US and kick everyone out, then all these races will be free to build their own visions of what human life is supposed to be and produce new forms of human life themselves. You can sort out what I'm joking about and where I'm being serious.


The Greeks certainly blundered by placing Politics above Economy- but their real failure was allowing themselves to be colonized culturally and intellectually by foreign tribes of humanity, specifically Asiatic strains of thought. They allowed the Greek ethos, the Greek idea of Man to be effaced and corrupted. A nation, through its pre-history, accumulates the myths and stories that one day the poets and philosophers transform into an affirmative ideal, a vision of what human life is supposed to be: it is the production of this new human type that all politics serves- to protect, cultivate, and extend its hold over the consciousness of the species. Without it, without such an Ideal, all politics can ever be is an extension of economic power. The US is losing its human-type.


Trump at least, besides not being a politician, has the additional virtue of what Nietzsche called "a will to blindness." Sometimes it's very smart to not want to know certain things- wisdom sets limits to knowledge in another Nietzschean phrase, if it helps preserve your ethos from being corrupted by the influences of another. The Greeks were fatally incapable of such a will to blindness.

Hahaha, he just fucking won South Carolina.

About politics serving economy more than anything else. This is true for both the politics of Power and of Alliance, the only two that have existed so far.

Because philosophy is not equivalent to the value it affirms, because the creative deed of philosophy forms the basic asymmetry between affirmation and the value affirmed, between the passive ground of meaning and the activity of thought, philosophy ends up re-absorbing its own inhibiting, passive feature and determined being at its utmost limit of active engagement with Being: one affirms that the Truth is a Good, in the Socratic scheme, but hereafter the fact that a thing is True becomes one of the basic tests as to rather or not it is Good, and only the true can be good. If philosophy could perfectly mirror the structure of world-becoming which it has taken to be the counterphilosophic signature of illusion and falsehood, then it could engage in the purity of its daemonic energetics of surplus the very question of Being which has so eluded it, for it would finally be able to point to something beyond itself and render its value as philosophy equivalent to the value which it has affirmed through philosophy, by means of its own processes: because it has not been able to do so, we may say that, while man used to bring into existence the smallest of events in wake of the greatest thoughts, now the greatest of events are called into being only as a way of understanding thoughts, just as the politics of Power had to be enacted and seen through to its end in order for us to understand the doctrine of Alliance. The possibility of catastrophe at the utmost limit of thought, at which point the scheme of world-history must become a medium for the reorganization of philosophy's content, as is represented by the figure of Plato's philosopher-king, is the possibility that the Truth can only be seen through the dark glass of materiality, of, perhaps, evil, or a philosopher-tyrant. Therefor thought must now learn to regulate with the same effectiveness as it regulates its internal contents the external world-scheme in which these contents are reproduced, organized, and reflected upon. In this way, philosophy ceases to be philosophy once its goal is met, and afterward calls itself only by the name of Life: up till now philosophy has only dressed the soul of man in the thousand gilded threads of transformation, of impregnation, of life- like the worm in the process of awakening to the butterfly, and it is only life that can unspool this wondrous cocoon and reveal to us as human nature all that has been silently matured. Life pulls the thread from a philosopher's ideal in a different way each time; for Heraclitus, the thread was taken hold of in the child of the world-aeon having its sandcastles washed away at the tide of history, for Kierkegaard it was suspending reason in faith at the moment of Abrahamic sacrifice, for Nietzsche it was in willing the eternal recurrence, for Empedocles it was jumping into the fires of Aetna. One here runs the risk of approaching the question of world-history too philosophically or without enough philosophy and freezing it into position, so that, without the necessary dynamic tension, a theory of action- a politics or external scheme, may emerge within which the content of philosophy cannot reproduce itself in anything other than the form in which it appeared to us before: while philosophy may be only the cocoon, if life is nothing more than the act of finding its thread and unspooling it then, when the moment of revelation comes, no butterfly will appear- nothing will appear.


The politics of Power may have too much tension, that of Alliance, not enough. Philosophy has come to a standstill because world history has stalled with this alliance politics, and the content of philosophy has become too great to require anything less than the World as a medium within which to reorganize itself. Philosophy will continue when the world is woken back up by a new theory of the act. You saw a glimmer of a new theory of action, a new politics, when the US landed men on the moon, but that died. The conclusion of World War Two was the conclusion of the Politics of Power, a politics that had existed for 4,000 years, into man's earliest recorded history. It is the politics of empires, of Rome: you expand your empire as much as possible and build up a military force, and then as you occupy more and more foreign lands you exercise that military force and charge one group of people large fees to protect them from other foreign lands. Simple formula: larger empire=more foreign occupation=more chances to fee one group for protecting it from another rival. You also exact tribute fees from everyone that stands under the sun of your dominion for no other reason than you can. After World War Two, (which was, along with WW1, the inevitable result of nation states behaving in this way) what we call Nato was formed, and it represents the new political scheme, the Politics of Alliance. Now nations- most importantly the USA, instead of expanding an empire and charging to protect people or exacting tributes, protect people not only freely but at their own expense, so as to hold the chessboard in the same position as long as possible and prevent the escalation of any dynamic tensions in international relations. Systems of international law were also developed to assist this new politics, ie. Nuremberg trials, Geneva conventions, etc. That's why we have troops in military bases all over the world, on the border between North and South Korea for example. This is why we spend so much more on our military than everyone else, a complaint levied by people who think that the money is going to research and development or building up our own tanks and such. We spend ten times more on our military than any other nation only because the USA has formed so many alliances and has to protect a lot of other nations- that's how political force is gained in this new scheme. Because this system has made the dynamic of world-history so stable- it has after all prevented an inevitable world war Three so far, there has been great economic benefits for the world in general, and the massive cost of protecting our allies is compensated for by the fact that all these nations are economically benefiting and paying us back through trade. However, many believe that this compensation is wearing thin, and that the USA is now losing much more than it is gaining by keeping the game of international politics so stabilized and participating in this politics of alliance. It seems as though this alliance based politics is leading the USA down the road of the British, and that we are becoming nothing more than a debtor nation that basically functions as a kind of bank for the rest of the world, incapable any longer of being the innovator in technology or the superpower that we were. If this is true then at some point we will either lose our political power, revert back to the old politics of power before it is too late and we have lost too much influence, or another nation will become a superpower and revert the world back to the politics of power. Right now the USA is still strong enough that if we told our allies to start paying us large tributes or we will stop protecting them, then they would have to. This would end the alliance-politics and the doctrine of power would be resurrected. Trump's certainly not bringing a new theory of human action, but reverting to the politics of power is what he is attempting to do with his policies.

Rather or not that's a good idea is anyone's call- but it would sure be fun to watch.

Economy used to supply and feed power (state power); now economy has taken the dominant place over (political) power and the roles are reversed, politics now exists only to feed Economy. What is Economy? Simply the exercising of capital. So what is capital?

Having a lot of money has always ensured an easy life of pleasure and paying other people to enslave themselves for your own comfort and convenience, only now under capitalism this equation has become the form of life as such and thus has overturned 'power', I would say that Alliance politics is only a sign of how and where the logic of capital relations has replaced the logic of social relations, political relations of power and control: power and control and sociality are based on prevailing ideas and ways of sentimental relating between people and groups, it is based on expectations and on history/the past of the culture in question, you have a king or emperor and all the tiers below that where everyone secures their life by the method of fetishizing political power (power to enact within the range of an idea/s) and "having a lot of money" is just a nice side effect of that, like an earned reward. Now that reward becomes the central factor in human relationships, as you can see with Trump just having a lot of money and being a clown guarantees political power these days. Capitalism quickly becomes a game of having enough initial investment required for any act, not least of which in politics; those who have money already are the only ones able to play that game. Politics today simply exists to justify money to itself.

So fetishizing material products and the comfort and convenience of being able to buy another person's wage-slavery for your own benefit replaced fetishizing the capacity to secure acts within political spaces. A political act is inherently an act based on an idea, whereas an economic act is devoid of ideas. If Plato were alive today he would shit (or shoot) himself.

The void of ideas that has happened is the predominance of Economy having made all ideas merely structural-functional to relations of capital: similarly to how under old power-political systems the ideas were always beholden to the few select Ideas of the ruling class, now the empty idea-forms that function only to justify capital from its beginnings to its ends are all beholden to the dominant "Idea" of the capitalist world, namely the form of the empty idea as such, a void of content. And even voids have ontological boundaries, act symbolically and exert real effects.

Power found a way to extract fees from its subjects to a degree never before imagined: under capitalism our bodies and minds and very behavior and activities become managed work, illusory acting that we are required to undertake just to become socially-capable entities, just to participate at all, just as under the old political power games a person needed to act out similar illusions in terms of the prevailing "ideas" of the time. Culture, progress and philosophy have always been an exteriority pressure that builds from the fact that those ideas are never adequate to the human lives and situations that are required to enslave themselves to those ideas. All the ideas are shit, all the ideas are just so many bad lies. Today at least the world is getting on without ideas, which is to say that the lie has become co-extensive with subjective-social structure per se. Alliance politics is an external manifestation of the fact that human being must now lie to itself at the level of structure and psyche, and that it abandoned all the shitty ideas of the past in order to try for a fully idea-less condition. Capital relations and capitalism aren't even primary, they too are just symptoms.

Only when this whole situation is comprehended and the theory developed that entirely explains and lays out rationally this entire setup, will human being finally begin to posit things differently, which will mean for at least one easy example that commodity fetishism will cease and there will be a return to thinking; I have no idea what those thoughts will be, what ideas will surface, but given the completeness of the theory that will realize this new possibility upon the earth it is doubtful that those ideas will simply be verbatim re-enactments of the old psychological illusions and lies.

Or to outline this major distinction between two schemes of politics, power and alliance, we can observe an analysis in Donald Trump's own words:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN7KHWdyrbI

Indeed the reversal of economy-power to power-economy is true.


Though Trump's wealth is different than that of other politicians. The politicians simply lie and do the bidding of donors in exchange for money and influence. Trump has a private fortune that would enable him to hijack the political system and turn it into a goof, he does not need to obey any donors. The amazing thing is, though, he hasn't spent anything so far really. I believe Jeb Bush spent 100 million dollars in his campaign only to get 3 percent of the vote, whereas Trump has only spent a few million and is beating everyone. It seems that his celebrity and personality are his most important assets, simply the fact that he's willing to call the Chinese a bunch of "motherfuckers" and drop a 25 percent tax. I really hope he wins myself- besides being hilarious, if the USA is going to die I'd rather we piss off the world so much that we get wiped out properly in war rather than slowly degenerate as we are doing.

The void of ideas today leads to people idealizing leaders who appear "authentic" which simply means people who don't seem beholden to the old political class, since politics is inherently about ideas. Trump has supporters only based on the fact that those supporters care more about someone swearing and making non-politically correct comments than they care about any actual issues, ideas or expertise. It's just a pissing match in a playground at this point.

The problem with the collective modern will to non-thinking is that existential subjectivity cannot live without ideas, and the more human being tries to suppress having ideas the more this comes out in weird ways, like idealizing an orange-faced uncouth clown who is obviously totally ignorant of anything remotely falling in the range of political matters. That's why they like him. It's like preferring an engineer who has no engineering experience but knows how to tell some jokes and make you feel better about yourself.

The active suppression of thinking mirrors the reversal of moral priorities: morality used to be an affair of 'pure negativity', do this and don't do that, everything is a tectonic platform on which moral valuations are and ought to appear, etc., whereas today prevailing moral ethos is trying to be purely positivistic in character, don't judge, don't criticize, ignore real conditions for the sake of being able to avoid having to make clear moral evaluations, etc. You can compare the reticence of left politics in the USA (a bit of an oxymoron, "left politics in the USA") to make clear moral evaluations with the zealotry of right politics to do so; "progressive" means that moral capacity became a positive pressure rather than a negative disclosure-point of existential contents.

Culminating of course in the farce we see today. The real problem is that while that buried existential content of the human being was able to effectively guarantee more or less stable social-cultural relating in the past, the modern shift to the positivistic pressure of idea-less will has no such corollary in terms of a substance able to act as existentially authenticating... The arrogance of modern spirit got fed up with all the bad ideas and fed up with the effort needed to work through bad ideas to less bad ones, psychological exhaustion as collective blindness. There is no last man, there is no categorical difference here, Nietzsche thought there was but there isn't-- there is simply the increasing difficulty to reify subjective contents within collectivity and given the energy requirements of a daemonically-developing existentia.

" Because philosophy is not equivalent to the value it affirms, because the creative deed of philosophy forms the basic asymmetry between affirmation and the value affirmed, between the passive ground of meaning and the activity of thought, philosophy ends up re-absorbing its own inhibiting, passive feature and determined being at its utmost limit of active engagement with Being: one affirms that the Truth is a Good, in the Socratic scheme, but hereafter the fact that a thing is True becomes one of the basic tests as to rather or not it is Good, and only the true can be good. If philosophy could perfectly mirror the structure of world-becoming which it has taken to be the counterphilosophic signature of illusion and falsehood, then it could engage in the purity of its daemonic energetics of surplus the very question of Being which has so eluded it, for it would finally be able to point to something beyond itself and render its value as philosophy equivalent to the value which it has affirmed through philosophy, by means of its own processes..."


This is necessary to understand this current social setup fully. Or as I said elsewhere:


" The perfect, timeless activity of philosophy is that which supplies the passive ground of
value or meaning, it is in other words the creative act, but philosophy is not constituted by
the value it creates. This is the central problem of Plato's Phaedrus. This asymmetry is
inexplicable at present, standing beyond the scope of Nietzsche's various schema, and
requires a new language, which I inaugurate with the term "reification". The Will-to-Power
is then quite simply the fact of this asymmetry, which must be corrected for by the
creation of a value whose affirmation is the affirmation of philosophy, of valuation in
Nietzschean terms, itself. In what I have written of the Daemonic, the real-ego and ideal-ego,
as time and eternity, or freedom and necessity, transcend themselves within one
another but also transcend themselves as a relation, thereby stabilizing this asymmetry,
for this later transcendence- the transcendence of the relation, which I call reification,
(just as I identify relation with language) also constitutes the form of the logos, that is, the
form of philosophy itself, in its perfected activity, in its self-grounding. "



In other words, the logos or proper form of philosophy as reification, is what I also call the transcendent topos and the final stage of affirmation-affirmation in the four processions. Capitalism appears in the second:


---

1. Negation- affirmation, or the epistemic.

Negation originally lies in the pre-reflective external catastrophe of Being, ie. the disappearance of transitioning forms into the
surplus energetics of Becoming: the self-contradiction of Negation of Being in-itself is the formula of this Becoming. The original
category of affirmation is given in the post-reflective human subjectivity for it affirms as an episteme the forms that this negativity
within nature swallows up and causes to disappear.

2. Negation- negation, or the ontic.

Negation is now transposed into post-reflection and becomes an affirmation of Being within Time (the ontos); this new affirmation of
temporality is transposed into pre-reflectivity and becomes the pre-reflective affirmation of the human ego, specifically the real-ego.
Death anxiety appears. Epistemic-ontic topos arises in the form of Ancient Greek consciousness, the flame of Eros, whose height lies
in the Apollonian denial of death through artistic forms and philosophic abstraction, outgrowths of death-anxiety. Capitalism appears
as the economic analogue to death denial, though in a primitive form. The technological dream of immortality, which is the dream of
capitalism, now seen in the form of genetic engineering and AI, actually comes from this place in the Greeks, they also had theories of
the automaton, robotic lifeforms, etc.

3. Affirmation-Negation, or the immanent.

The pre-reflective affirmation of the human real-ego is combined with a post-reflective negation of this ego's defining limits within
the Godhead, as limits of the flesh, our finite human powers, etc. Immanence appears as the divinity-within-man, the immanent
divine, through which man transcends himself as real-ego into ideal-ego or spirit. Here alienation appears to consciousness finally
within post-reflection. The ontic-immanent topos arises with ancient Jews and the Abrahamic religion with an economic analogue in
utopian communal society, seen in miniature in many monastic communities and turned into an economic hope by Marxists.

4. Affirmation, affirmation, or transcendence.

Lies in a pre-reflective affirmation of human alienation, his misplaced immanent divinity, combined with a post-reflective affirmation
of the presence of death in the world, through which materiality destroys itself in the apotheosis of Becoming into Being, creating
heroic-daemonic love. This is not yet a stage that has been fully reached, it is intimated by Christ at the immanent-transcendent topos.
Once it is fully reached it will also have unknown sociological-economic parallels.
---


As in that passage, the capitialistic fetishism of material is an ecomonic analogue to the fetishing of the erotic form as the apotheosis of beauty, which symbolically represents an immortality that the human ego cannot master for itself. Man turns his beloveds into ghosts and eternal ideals because of the death-anxiety. He turns his fellow human beings into reservoirs of capital and buys their wage-labor for the same reason. The problem of human alienation and the death anxiety are the basic problems of psychology and philosophy respectively, though because, as I have been writing about, they are two sides of one thing, to resolve the problem would be to unite psychology and philosophy, and all of their sub and corresponding disciplines, economy and politics being two of them.

I think what you call the timeless act of philosophy I've been calling just "human being", and what you call the passive ground of meaning I would call the existentia. It is passive because it determines itself, or: it is passive because it must continuously draw from its own contents thereby deepening abysses within itself almost instantly, outside of time, such as with infinite regresses of self-perceiving. Meaning in this way is two-fold: meaning's form is that of passive self-inexhaustibility and its content is whatever allows for mutual interconnection vis a vis expanding the order of nature within the principle of consciousness of man by 'stimulating more than the stimulus itself', by that I mean that what we call the experience of meaning is in part the fact that conscious stimuli produce disproportionately greater effects than they otherwise would, and not only greater in quantity but also in quality and as pure differences of a categorical nature (i.e. a smell can stimulate a cascade of memories, an image can vitalize the entire body and thought, one small idea can build a towering edifice in mentality, etc.). The ever-expanding circle of possible effectuality as a result of conscious stimuli is experienced by that life which is that said consciousness itself as what we call meaning; the phenomenological nature of meaning is precisely the fact of the existentiality of human-like conscious life.

I don't think typical phenomenology believes in a pre-reflective split of being, but I think you are right that this is truly how it is. The abyssal structure of the active existential act qua the expressing of contents of consciousness mirrors the abyssal structure of originary Being. Therefore we should analyze in terms of how to achieve more affirmation-affirmations, which I  visualizing as a kind of transcendental feedback-looping whereby the actual (onto)logical ground of existential consciousness finds positive reflection in the continuous synthetic relations of the phenomena. In other words, philosophy isn't just about theory and application, isn't just some abstraction, but is actually symbolizing the ontically-real "material" conditions of existence, particularly of those instances of existence we could call living or alive.

Yes, the pre-reflective division of the human subject from the object, which I call the shadow of the real, I took not from phenomenology but from a combination mainly of Holderlin's philosophical essays and Schelling. It complimented the daemonic as well as fulfilled my desire to situate the original negation in Nature rather than in consciousness for the logic of transcendence, as a counter to Hegelian dialectic.




In Holderlin, Nature- by which he means the universe in general, is constituted by an unending series of oppositions or tensions, and thus aesthetic work, rather it is found in poetry or painting, but more especially as it is in philosophy, and in all that serves Eros- the basic impulse of organic existence or life, simply brings these tensions into harmony: this aesthetic praxis cannot ever attain the Kantian transcendental apperception that holds the experience of the Ego together, can never attain to the pre-reflective union of the human subjectivity, to the union of these tensions within consciousness, as is posited on the ground of phenomenology, but it can represent these harmonies and resolutions metaphorically. Tragic-poetic language is simply a way of indirectly pointing to this apperception that pure logic or philosophy cannot formulate: that is, it points to it by pointing at its exact opposite: the pre-reflective division of the human subject from the object, from Nature.


There is a dim recollection to use Platonic language of the pre-conscious unity, the integral reality of the life processes- a nirvana principle in Freud, but this recollection cannot be directly formulated rationally and can only be indicated metaphorically. It can only be experienced as death, just as in Freud. For Holderlin that happiness, innocence, and unity, from which the human self was divided in pre-reflection, was the world of Nature, and the tragic-poetic art allows for its memory to be accessed by way of a kind of counter-reflection. Holderlin situated the origin of affirmation or meaning in Nature, and negation within the reflectivity in which the pre-reflective subject was absorbed by consciousness. But this is a paradox, the paradox of subjectivity: the human ego, our sense of self, exists by absorbing itself into negative reflective consciousness, it exists only by negating its existence, transitioning at each moment through negation between a lost Edenic paradise of pre conscious unity with nature to a post-conscious reflective division from nature, such that it exists neither within the negation of reflective consciousness, which separates and divides, or within the Edenic memory, or within post-conscious reflection, in which a new self is always studying the actions of an old self that is no longer there, as the one that for me just finished writing this sentence. Holderlin's resolution of this paradox is that the self, the human subject, is simply a rupture of negation into the otherwise perfect unity of Nature, as is divided from the world in pre-reflection and finally divided from its own existence in reflection, and which may possibly be overcome in post-reflection, insofar as it is made to cease and give way to death, to the nirvana-principle.


I do the opposite, by appealing to Schelling and the daemonic. The memory of Eden, the unity of nature before the fall into sin by consciousness, does not exist. Negation is in the tensions of Becoming which continually nullify Being: reflection is the affirmative power, and through reflection daemonic tensions are reified. Reification is a category I use to extend and modify what reflection means. Holderlin speaks of man's longing for Being- for the pre-conscious unity of the self with Nature, but reflection and philosophy can only bring us farther away from Being for Holderlin, and all reflection, whose ground is the primary negation in his mind, succeeds merely in logical division and further separation. For me there is also longing, but it is the longing Schelling knew, through which Becoming longs to grasp its own Being, and which is experienced by the human Will tragically descending into the abyss of time to return a particle of genuine Being to the Heart of the world's Becoming- this particle of genuine being, which is our Self, and from whose sacrifice the God is born into the broken rind of the earth.


That sacrifice I re-think as the timeless act of philosophy which separates the passive ground and active principle of philosophy, that is, the human self from the transcendent, which Schelling called God. This separation is the source of alienation. The eroto-daemonic pathos mirrors the tensions of Becoming's self-nullification of Being within consciousness, and what I call reification is the philosophic operation by which these tensions transcend themselves as a relation, for the human self and the transcendent can only be understood as a relation.


The pre-reflective division of the subject from Nature allows Holderlin to formulate an initial separation which all thought, reflection, and philosophy, succeed only in intensifying. For me, reflection mirrors for the pre-reflective subject the dynamic structure of Becoming's self-Nullification of Being, through whose oppositions and tensions the human subject can bring itself into conscious reflectivity, insofar as it posits itself in relation to its own tension- the transcendent, or God. The four topoi, the four stages I put forward which end in affirmation-affirmation, are these relations of things, things which reifiy themselves within one another and transcend themselves as a relation, as the human self and God do at the highest level of consciousness. Alienation for me is integral to the very structure of human subjectivity, as it designates the relation of the essential distance of the self from the transcendent, similar to Kierkegaard's qualitative disjunction.

* edited last post a bit

Trump may not even be an idiot, just a bit of a troll. Trump has, rather consciously or unconsciously, identified the three basic, immediate problems for the US. That is why he is winning the election. The first problem is the fact that mass immigration of the kind taking place in Europe and in the US from Mexico does not lead to assimilation; when one large chunk of a population is moved to another nation they form an insulated micro-economy and reproduce their original conditions of existence. If those conditions are antithetical to that of the culture they are moving to, then the problem arises. This wasn't that big of a problem in the more ancient world, though it still happened occasionally, but in this age, given the fact that we have airplanes for example, it has taken center stage. Trump was branded as a racist when he referred to Mexicans as "criminals and rapists," even though he wasn't talking about Mexicans, he was talking about illegal immigrants- he was speaking about a subset of the Mexican population that is willing to break the laws of the US in their first interaction with it of all things, that is, by illegally immigrating to it- many studies indicate that there is a very large amount of both criminals and rapists in this specific subset of Mexicans, and it has nothing to do with their race, but with the basic material conditions of the people that are illegally coming here- they were born and programmed by a shithole of a country and have experienced traumatic experiences there, and though it may be an unpleasant truth, traumatized victims do not become good people, they become worse people, they perpetuate the trauma they themselves were subjected to just as the raped child grows up and becomes a rapist themselves. This applies even more to those coming from the Middle East, who are immigrating not just from a geographic location but from a time period- namely the dark ages. When the European nations withdrew after the war they took back with them their colonial subjects for some cheap labor- a lot of Muslims, from places like Pakistan or Turkey, and due to their higher birth rates the Sharia law that was at first discretely applied to small enclaves became much more threatening. People do not seem to properly understand that Islam is a very peculiar religion in that its basic text comes with its own political theories built into it- called Jihad, as well as a system of Law- Sharia, etc. and that these theories are antithetical to those of the US. Only when we recognize that this need to affirm one idea of human nature and one ethos against another, only when we recognize the incompatibility of certain ways of life- rejecting the relativity of values and cultures, will politics rise above merely economic concerns to an Idea. Islam isn't an opinion its an idea- and it must be opposed by an idea.


The second problem: Replacing realpolitik with our current liberal alliances and micro-managed, tenuous relations with other countries on the basis of mutual interest, world peace, social justice, and the like, epitomized in the formation of NATO,- an alliance politics which once benefited us indirectly by increasing wealth for the world in general insofar as it stabilized the dynamic energy of civilization and prevented gross expenditure of global resources in mass conflict- in world wars, is now working to the detriment of the US, for, in the interregnum between the World Wars, the cessation of the old power-scheme, and the present time, the US has degenerated as the British Empire did and become a mere debtor nation that has lost most of its infrastructure, as stands now incapable of manufacturing enough on its own to sustain any real level of participation in the world-economy, and is left simply to operate as a kind of giant bank whose basic foundational pillar is debt and whose purpose is to simply balance the transactions between foreign powers- to put it simply, we owe a lot of money to places like China, this gives them confidence that we will keep buying their shit and feeding their economy- without us to buy that shit their economy would implode very quickly, so they keep making the shit that we have no choice but to buy because we don't have the ability to make any shit for ourselves and mobilize our deteriorated capital. In this position we keep everyone else's economy functioning while losing a little bit more of our own infrastructure every year, effectively depriving ourselves of our own capital and only real source of power. Also, the stabilization of the movements of world-history which the alliance-politics has attained is now confronted with its weakness in that, when it is combined with the first problem I mentioned, that is, the clash of unassimilating cultures, as also the relevant rise of terrorist groups throughout the world, it prevents the kind of decisive acts from being taken which serve the nation-state's most fundamental right to affirm its own cultural mandate at the exclusion of others and protect its ethos or way of life from being transformed by another one. This alliance-scheme stabilizes the dynamic of history; when these unforeseen problems arise, as everything is slow to change, are also slow to be fixed or even to be recognized, so that it paradoxically exaggerates the dynamic of history and the tension between nations. Whenever Trump is talking about re-negotiating trade deals with China and the rest of the countries he targets- those are his code words for all of this. I am convinced that his public speeches are calculated to be as simplistic, confrontational, and as belligerent as possible, and that, though he could go into greater depth about it, it would not benefit his actual campaign. As long as he keeps his real goal- a kind of return to the era of realpolitik, invisible to the majority of people and especially the media, concealing it in a simplistic "Make America great again" slogan, he has found himself able to mobilize both the unknowing masses as well as those people genuinely knowledgeable about the USA's current position and the nature of international trade relations. "Dropping a 25 percent tax on those Chinese motherfuckers" is a code to those knowledgeable, that he wants to return to power based politics.


And the third problem he indicates, is the American political system itself, which he admits is just a matter of buying politicians, as well as the media, which creates the false simulacra that makes the political system seem like its real even though everyone knows it isn't. Also with this there is social justice and political correctness- the regressive. The Left seems to have been completely absorbed by an obsessive dialogue about social issues and social science, ie. feminism, racism, class structures, etc. seemingly oblivious to the reality that every social issue is just a symptom of a deeper reality, an effect and nothing more: they have lost the ability to identify the actual causes of things and, with that, they have lost the ability to identify any actual solutions to things, succeeding only in further solidifying the relativity of values and culture I mentioned in the first problem. The fact that Trump's seemingly unconnected points- immigration, trade, political correctness-social justice, etc. all perfectly connect in this way and feed back on themselves in a circle points to the fact that he knows what he's doing.

To the third problem, the political system is fucked up in part because politics is simply the void of philosophy, the lack of good thinking that gets filled in by shittier, smaller thoughts coupled with ambition will to power appropriate to such a meager stature of thinking and ideas. But a larger reason is the rise of capitalism and globalization pushing Econony further in front of the political, again to the effect of making politics a mere game of justifying capital and ensuring continued capital expansions. From this perspective Trump is no better than any other politician, and perhaps far worse; one example being that he holds interests in a large number of the biggest US corporations that hold much of their capital abroad and avoid bringing it back into the US due to the large tax burden they would suffer to do so. It is highly probably that Trump would use the presidency to simply increase his personal wealth and economic power, namely doubling down on the continued push of Economy (global capitalism) further and further out in front of the political idea-space. And remember that the political is inherently based on ideas, the low quality of actual political ideas is not a indication that politics is necessarily either non-idea-based or low-idea-based, but again results from the fact of the low quality of philosophy and the absence of philosophic thought and work from the political spheres.

To the point of immigration, it is valid to point out that cultural assimilation doesn't succeed perfectly and immigrating groups tend to form micro-societies attempting to preserve their own ways of life and thus their own social programming that they got from their home country/culture; but it is also relevant to point out that more complete assimilation and integration is a multi-generational process and could take a century or more, and in any case is neither guaranteed to succeed or fail for any given group (unless perhaps there is an example and rational arguments made for a specific group being necessarily unable to integrate-assimilate, I'm unaware of any such arguments and evidences though). For me, and not to deny the importance of maintaining the existing culture and level of social ideas and norms and programming, but the most important factor is philosophical and thus universal in scope: that all human beings are more or less equivalent to each other at the genetic level and are basically bred into differences by way of where they are born. Thus what appear to be fundamental differences are largely differences of cultural and religious upbringings based simply in where on the planet a baby happens to be born. That is basically random from the genetic perspective and when we consider fundamentals, because human beings don't depend on natural reproductive selection anymore and are largely homogenizing into one generic mass where genetic differences are going to continue to be flattened out not only because of globalization but also because, again, there exists almost no natural selective principle at work in the human species. Nearly every baby can grow up and have the potential to reproduce regardless of its specific genome. We may compete for mates but that competition does not lead to die offs in the loser's genetic line, in fact we see that education and intelligence and the height to which a culture or civilization climbs can be a deterring factor in the number of offspring its people have.

From a philosophical standpoint I want to keep seeing humanity homogenize and keep seeing the ideas universalizing, which includes that integration of racial and cultural differences must continue. The relative loss to more uplifted cultures by assimilating members of lower cultures is easily offset by the total net gain for humanity, and again integration is multi-generational and slow. But it is also necessary in order to eventually purge the lower ideas and cultural forms, for example the medievalism of Islamic nations is going to be wiped out the more that Muslims are brought into the west and, perhaps not now but in 2-3 generations, those Muslims (the kids and grandkids of those coming here today) are going to be virtually identical to you and me today, namely part of a secular pluralistic society and not holding strong-severe religious convictions or practicing medieval archaic thinking and behaviors. The fact that a few of these immigrating people are going to blow some shit up isn't even a factor to consider when you look at the larger picture. It's only their reacting to the natural and logical death of their paradigm within the larger context of globalization and western values.

But of course the point is also valid that cultures that are forcibly isolated and prevented from integration are somewhat forced to come up with their own solutions and ideas, but that process is tiny and not at all compares to the massive change and progress that occurs in the long run by mass human assimilation into pluralistic society based on rational values and western philosophical and scientific traditions. Truth always wins out in the end, even if only negatively, and these medievalisms are already logically doomed to failure. They know it and we know it. And I'm far more concerned with globalism itself and transformations of capitalism that could ensure survivability and continual progress in social, scientific, philosophical and subjective evolution of humanity. So called "leftist" values as indicating classically liberal thought are, in my estimation, the best way to achieve that and in fact flow from the logical unfolding of greater truths into the world. I consider anarchistic, right-leaning conservative thought to be fundamentally atavistic and anti-progressive when it comes to the evolutions of human forms under the auspices of truth. We should go deeper into this because there is a lot to explore here. But on the Trump point, one easy example here of the low quality of thinking is labeling people illegal and criminals for their simply wanting to come here from their own backward shitty countries, we would probably do the same thing if we had been born in Mexico or the Middle East and had the means to get to Europe or the USA, it's only natural. And it doesn't mean we can make presumptions about the type of person that would be willing to "break the law" to get here, that is a flawed argument and talking point only. I break the law all the time, most people do, there is only relative value to the law and simply violating it in specific instances doesn't say anything about the kind of person one is; we would need to look specifically at particular instances, reasons and motives to make such judgments accurately. And in the case of immigrants coming here illegally, he situation and reason and motives are easy enough to grasp.

To the point about US becoming a debtor nation that doesn't produce much anymore, this is certainly valid and I agree. Trillion dollar deficits are now the norm, which is really insane application of Keynesian economics especially if you consider the psychological aspects of that economics where it is much harder to cut spending and raise taxes after the low tax and high spending/debt phase has proceeded its course. Trump would maybe care about that issue at least, which is a valid issue. Debt is largely stupid and should be avoided as a general principle and used only in specific circumstances where there are clear gains, the orgy of fiat debt creation is a huge problem that capitalism hadn't yet come up with a solution for. And yes it is funny and somewhat pathetic that politicians, especially on the left, seem totally indifferent to problems like this. These kind of deeper problems seem to cause too much cognitive dissonance for them to be able to acknowledge the problem at all, so they revert to ideology and denials.

There are examples of German immigration to Russia that more than 100 years later led to zero assimilation- when they returned to Germany they still even had their old accents.

There is certainly no difference in the genetics of human beings, save for phenotype and certain disease resistances. The reason that assimilation, in some cases of extreme difference, might not be viable is this: traumatic repetition. Syrian immigrants have lived a traumatic middle ages life and reproduce this trauma in their children, even if they have them over here, in the same way that all violence perpetuates itself in a cycle of victim and abuser. The native insular disposition of Islamic religion compounds this trauma repetition. I do not believe that Muslims will ever integrate with the West on any real scale. Their culture is too different- every intervention in their territory has led to battles of attrition because they are so fiercely defensive of their world. It is even written into their concept of Jihad, and many leaders in the Islamic world urge Muslims to immigrate to Europe and reproduce at a faster rate than the surrounding population, instilling their old values in their children, to effectively eat the culture they have moved to from the inside out.



--------------
"But on the Trump point, one easy example here of the low quality of thinking is labeling people illegal and criminals for their simply wanting to come here from their own backward shitty countries, we would probably do the same thing if we had been born in Mexico or the Middle East and had the means to get to Europe or the USA, it's only natural."


It's not so much that, as the fact that a lot of illegal immigrants are actually criminals and rapists:


[[[[ In the wake of horrifying tales of sexual assault perpetrated by potentially up to 1,000 men on New Year’s Eve, German officials have made two stunning decisions.

The first, from Cologne, Germany — where the attacks took place — was Mayor Henriette Reker telling women to adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent further sexual assaults, which crossed the line into “victim blaming.”

The second, from the broader German government, was to crack down hard — not on those responsible for the assaults, but for those criticizing the Muslim immigrants who may have perpetrated them.]]]]


And in Sweden, with their rising admission of Muslim immigrants, so has the rate at which Swedish women get raped risen:

[[[ Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes in the world, after South Africa, which at 53.2 per 100,000 is six times higher than the United States. Statistics now suggest that 1 out of every 4 Swedish women will be raped. ]]]


[[[ wikipedia:
According to 2014 official statistics, 24% of rapes have been committed by foreigners in Finland, while they comprised 2.2% of the population.[47]


In 2010, 132,524 persons were arrested for "illegal entry or stay" in Greece, a sharp increase from 95,239 in 2006. Nearly half of those arrested (52,469) were immediately deported, the majority of them being Albanians.[54] Official statistics show that immigrants are responsible for about half of the criminal activity in Greece.[55] ]]]]



This criminality has nothing to do with their genetics or race. The sad fact is, that people raised and born in shitholes and poor economic situations get psychologically damaged and become predisposed to repeating the traumas they endured, proliferating violence. The fact that they are fleeing their own country to come here is evidence of their damage. In the case of the Muslim immigrants, the rape is part of their culture- in the same way mutilating clitorises is part of some cultures.


In general the integration of different societies you mention is good, the universalizing of human culture- but there are some instances in which cultures are too incompatible to ever integrate. To integrate does not mean, to me, that two cultures combine: it means a value judgement is made as to which culture is morally, philosophically, and politically superior to the other one, and then the inferior one stops existing and everyone that was a part of it accepts the new ethos, with anything good about the inferior, as perhaps its literary tradition, re-appropriated by the better- by the choice type. The question is how this judgement is exercised and determined- that is "grand politics," a philosophic politics.


As in this comment of Nietzsche's idea of great-politics: "the objective or end of this structural economy [of 'great politics'] is ultimately to uphold and privilege the philosopher's experience of unrestricted expenditure, the general economy of Dionysian nature. This is why Nietzsche will claim in Beyond Good and Evil that 'society does not exist for society's sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type is able to raise itself to its higher task and to its higher state of being.' (48)





----------




"... he holds interests in a large number of the biggest US corporations that hold much of their capital abroad and avoid bringing it back into the US due to the large tax burden they would suffer to do so. "


Yes, he has criticized that. He also has used his money to influence politics, the very thing that is one of his main objections to the current system. His excuse is that, in these cases, he was running a business and taking advantage of his personal capacity, that it doesn't reflect his political goals. He has proposed certain policies that would cost his own businesses a certain amount of profit.




Indeed the main problem is politics being devoid of any philosophy, but the transition from the present to an enriched politics will never take place save through many gradations. Trump or someone like Trump- and this election will probably be the only chance to inaugurate someone like this in our life time- someone truly outside the normal political spectrum, will have to be one of those gradations, in the least to wipe the slate clean.



" And I'm far more concerned with globalism itself and transformations of capitalism that could ensure survivability and continual progress in social, scientific, philosophical and subjective evolution of humanity. So called "leftist" values as indicating classically liberal thought are, in my estimation, the best way to achieve that and in fact flow from the logical unfolding of greater truths into the world. I consider anarchistic, right-leaning conservative thought to be fundamentally atavistic and anti-progressive when it comes to the evolutions of human forms under the auspices of truth. "


The technological salvation of the human race will never be accomplished, though I myself muse on AI sometimes, as is the dream of Capitalism and globalism. The State will never be abolished and the right-leaning thought is doomed as well. But if anything good is going to happen, the US requires a reset- and more importantly time, and nobody running save for Trump is going to do anything but perpetuate the same problems we have now. The most important point is the economic one, and only Trump is willing to recognize that fiat debt is a problem that must be dealt with, whereas everyone else considers it not merely not a problem, but the very engine of our system.




I don't vote- but if someone put a gun to my head and made me, I would have to go with Trump. Oh shit: https://i.imgur.com/Y0gweWy.jpg

Yes I find myself in general agreement with everything you say. I'll have time to write more details soon.

Really good to be working on these issues here.

On this part: This criminality has nothing to do with their genetics or race. The sad fact is, that people raised and born in shitholes and poor economic situations get psychologically damaged and become predisposed to repeating the traumas they endured, proliferating violence. The fact that they are fleeing their own country to come here is evidence of their damage. In the case of the Muslim immigrants, the rape is part of their culture- in the same way mutilating clitorises is part of some cultures.


In general the integration of different societies you mention is good, the universalizing of human culture- but there are some instances in which cultures are too incompatible to ever integrate. To integrate does not mean, to me, that two cultures combine: it means a value judgement is made as to which culture is morally, philosophically, and politically superior to the other one, and then the inferior one stops existing and everyone that was a part of it accepts the new ethos, with anything good about the inferior, as perhaps its literary tradition, re-appropriated by the better- by the choice type. The question is how this judgement is exercised and determined- that is "grand politics," a philosophic politics.


As in this comment of Nietzsche's idea of great-politics: "the objective or end of this structural economy [of 'great politics'] is ultimately to uphold and privilege the philosopher's experience of unrestricted expenditure, the general economy of Dionysian nature. This is why Nietzsche will claim in Beyond Good and Evil that 'society does not exist for society's sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type is able to raise itself to its higher task and to its higher state of being.' (48)

---





I am in disagreement with Nietzsche on a lot, but one thing I agree with him on is the idea of grand politics. The philosopher must place himself above whole civilizations and millennium and judge millions of lives against each other. Because I reject a lot of his philosophy, I reject the mechanism by which he philosophically judges one culture against the other, his criterion of value as a function of the will to power and dionysian surplus, but that such a judgement must be made, is given. I have my own mechanism for it.

Sanders thinks we can apply an economic system that worked in Sweden or Denmark, with a population of 5 to 10 million people and very limited social stratification, to a country with 350 million people and massive stratification- that is, cultural division, as well as wealth inequality. He doesn't seem to understand the nature of debt in our economic scheme. Clinton, besides being an incompetent shill and a liar that can be indicted provided the FBI finalizes its investigation, doesn't either, and takes the fundamental problem in the US to be the unequal distribution of wealth- oblivious, as I mentioned with the general criticism of the Left, to the fact that it cannot be the problem because it is itself just an effect, not a cause. Cruz has a face that causes a spontaneous curling of the fist- even his eyes are slanted, he does nothing but lie- that's the only reason he won Iowa: in addition to winning New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, Trump would have won Iowa too if Cruz had not sent out a message informing everyone that Carson had dropped out of the race and that all his supporters should therefor go vote Cruz. Carson and Rubio are nobody. Jeb Bush, who dropped out already, sold Guacamole bowls for 75 dollars to fund his campaign and gave out toy turtles to kids to symbolize his slow progress was actually a virtue, gets kicked off stage at his own speeches- the guy's a living meme. Trump is leading by a large margin in 8 of the 10 states that will be decided on Tuesday, he's won 3 of the 4 states so far, and has good polls nationally. Polls indicate he beats Hillary in a general election- and Sanders will never be the democratic nominee. These politicians study just that- policy, and nothing more- just the mechanisms of operation for a failed system that Trump has no interest in utilizing; they do not know anything about the complexities of international trade, the meaning of debt and how it works, history, etc. Nietzsche proposed three transformations- first into the ass, then into the lion, then into the child. Trump is the ass, with regard to transforming the country. Nietzsche actually proposed the camel, lion, and child, but the ass/donkey seems more of an appropriate load-bearing undulate here.

The criterion for the grand politics must be to select whatever gives the greatest and most sincere (philosophically developed; truthful) uplift to the development-evolution of the human being, within all the conditions and contexts relevant and necessary and possible to that being; the meta-concern comes in when different conditions/necessities/possibilities must be compared and contrasted to each other within the scope of the grand political vision: that vision isn't simply the task of revaluation of existing values and ideas but is also the task of taking up the different alternate possible and incidental concerns, situating these with respect to necessities, as well as selecting and judging among necessities themselves, i.e. ranking these from lower to higher within the overall scope of our project and criterion. Thus the criterion becomes self-eenforcing and self-reflexive, and the grand politics becomes a properly active and philosophical, continuing project rather than a simple or given individual proposition or end toward which we can aim.

I like Parodites' standard of evaluation, namely to look at subjectivity and the overall progression of subjectivity and it modes, powers and total development, its evolution. Subjectivity I understand to mean 'the self' as such, the total psychic being of the conscious organism including its larger environment, history and abstract ideas, texts, accumulated knowledge, habits, etc. Subjectivity itself is simply within this context the specific powers-scope of reality to which any such instances of living consciousness are able to cohere within and as themselves. Every idea, act and thought contains a quantum of its own self-consciousness as the Sign of that subjectivity-form out of which it arose, even if these acts also double back upon that form in reciprocal causality. Subjectivity is simply whatever is capable of containing the most identity, the most reality; knowing and responding to the greatest degree possible, to the most comprehensive powers, assimilating and make in use of more, and of being a vessel for the translations of ontic-phenomenal truths into material-epistemic existence. But this idea of subjectivity is, for me anyway, just the premise and standard of measure, it acts as the rod by which we can know the degree to which our species, or any other, has ascended up the universal ladder of Being.

The grand politics requires the maximal and absolute thinking of everything relevant to the human world, politics and society, the future, valuation; hence why politics is already philosophical, and the culmination of philosophical method becomes the actual work of a grand politics as such -- they merge/converge at the upper echelons. I agree that were Trump elected he would act as a shaking-up mechanism and stir the pot enough to really cause some interesting effects. As far as this point in history and ideas I cannot conceive a better social order than the "politics of alliance" as you call it, as opposed to nationalistic politics of direct power, but the limitations of alliance are quite clear and severe, not even speaking of capitalism; and the self-criticism needed of alliance politics would certainly be furthered by someone like Trump, who wants to revert to a previous arrangement, wants to de-volve somewhat back to "the good old days" (myth of the Fall). That psychological motivation can give a lot of energy into criticism and self-criticism, or at least spread that energy around various social strata and re-invigorate the debates. I agree that the present situation has become highly static and stagnant, Trump and Sanders are the only ones who really wants to mix it up (and yes, Sanders' position is one of deep ignorance as well, but again even he would act as a catalyst of sorts).

Indeed. The problem with Sanders and socialists in general, democratic or otherwise, is basically this. I heard a story of some multi-millionaire who gave a bunch of kids in Florida free college scholarships and such, and then people are amazed that the crime rate goes way down and high school attendance goes way up. This is a short term improvement and means nothing. What happens when these kids go through HS and get their free college, then get out into the real world and find out that all they have is a piece of paper- a degree, that they didn't have to achieve anything on their own merits to acquire, and that they lack any real skills, vision, and probably have less than exceptional IQs and are thoroughly incapable of functioning in the high stakes, entrepreneurial or technical professions that the false confidence of these free degrees has inspired them to pursue, and thus end up failing in their ventures, going into greater debt then they would have had taking on student loans, and end up failing even more significantly the gaggle of kids they've had along the way through this whole process, who are left worse off then they were? This is the point of capitalism, which at the moment is the superior mode. Excess wealth is accumulated and, in the hands of a very few people who are informed enough to make decisions relating to the future of technology and things like that, and who have shown themselves to possess some degree of insight with regard to the changing needs and trends in society, is re-invested in the next cycle of technological innovations- creating new drugs, faster internet, etc. Socialists want to take that excess wealth and instead re-invest it in what? In the ignorant, retarded masses, who will never be able to figure out anything to do with it. To put that in terms of Marx: Marx believed that the means of production- the actual technological infrastructure behind automobile factories or iphones, would be given up to the workers- why? A guy who puts the tire on the car doesn't know how the engine in it works let alone how the factories that the engines are made in works- let alone will the worker be able to predict the spirit of the times and what people are going to want out of an automobile or an iphone 10 years from now, so the worker will be unprepared to respond to the fluctuations of economic demand. It is for these reasons that, while democratic-socialist countries like Sweden or Denmark have a generally higher standard of living, they are quite simply never going to put anyone on Mars, they don't invent new drugs and medical procedures, they don't lead the world in technological innovation; they don't do anything and nobody cares about Sweden or what Sweden is doing besides Swedes because Sweden has no role on the world-historical stage- because Sweden has surrendered its future and destiny to the will of the clueless Masses, who are quite retarded as all masses are; it has given its capital and therefor power to the people, who have no idea what to do with it. In order to be able to send people to the moon and lead the world in technological innovation, there must on the other side be some homeless people in the street and a middle class in the middle of the two; the massive incongruity in the wealth distribution is simply the effect of the fact that the only way to secure the next cycle of innovation is to leave all excess wealth in the hands of a very few people who know what they're doing and know in what avenues of technology and research that excess wealth should be reinvested, because these decisions, when left to a democratic process, to a vote, to the will of the clueless workers and people, can never lead anywhere pleasant. If the average IQ was higher than it is, if intelligence wasn't a rarity, and if technological and economy trends didn't change so quickly and so drastically, then perhaps it would be different and a viable alternative to capitalism would appear. If the means of production were given to the people then 10, 15, 20 years ago the masses-workers, who would thereby possess control of the economy, would have chosen to re-invest all the surplus wealth in exactly what they thought they wanted: fucking crystal pepsi, better compact cd players, walkmen, pagers, and sneakers with brighter lights in them. They would never have thought to pursue incorporating cameras and the internet into cellphones, why would anyone want to walk around with a portable camera in hand all day?, they would have imagined. Social media? Why would anyone want to publish basically their diaries to the world let alone read those of others? Surely that will never be a thing. And that's just the social bullshit, they would have far less of a clue when it comes to predicting the future trends in medical technology or what should be looked into for scientific research.

Yes capitalism is this mechanism of forcing capital reinvestment to tend toward increase in 'value'. That value increase is not necessarily going to be good or rational, since the only principle involved is "will this reinvestment produce future growth of more capital?" In other words, most often, making more money. So non-capital based needs sit atop a structure of principle of need for ever-increasing money/capital resources. Somewhat like how the mind sits atop the body's need for input of calories and nutrients. Although the body can operate best without needing to increase the rate of intakes, whereas machines/systems within capitalism seem to not get by so well with static inputs even when those inputs produce greater output of values than those put in by intake. Capitalism needs to expand, whereas living bodies need to maintain equilibrium and actually become unhealthy if they keep expanding the rate of input vs. output, which is what capitalism is all about. Marx also didn't realize that taxation could be used to redistribute capital throughout society, if he had realized this he wouldn't have needed to posit in such an extremity the idea that workers must take direct ownership of the means of production; through taxation society itself takes partial ownership in the abstract sense of all capital in the society. And yes capital owners are more invested in productive use of capital than would be a non-owner, generally speaking, however that incentive doesn't necessarily translate into expertise and certainly doesn't necessarily translate into philosophical capacity and vision, which is to say into the sphere of highest possible use-values to which capital could theoretically be put.

Another important point is that, if people are stupid, then this is the fault of society; or said differently, societies and cultures also rank somewhere on a universal continuum just as do individual subjectivities rank upon one. The higher society and culture would produce the greatest number of high quality individuals (individuals ranking higher upon the continuum of subjectivity). Societies may be judged as noted by how well the reinvest capital into productive activity such as leading to development of new technologies and knowledge, namely how "capitalistic" a society is, but they may also be judged in terms of what I just said with respect to the quality of the individuals a society produces.

We are human beings, living organisms and minds and cannot fully subsume ourselves within capitalist architectures, we cannot become synonymous in our living content with capitalist principle reinvestment into increasing rates of productive growth, just as we cannot literally identify ourselves with the technologies or the knowledges we use, create or acquire. Capitalism needs to be mediated with human being, I believe this is always happening and just as a pure "socialism" is impossible so too is a pure capitalism impossible-- a pure capitalism so called would simply presuppose the lack of existence of human beings qua human being. Furthermore there is no absolute or truly categorical distinction between different people; I realize I may be alone in this view here, but the fact that every individual ranks somewhere along the continuum means that every person in potentia contains the conditions for rising higher than they are in that continuum, for the simple reason that those conditions are already embedded to every stage such that a stage contains the implicit "instructions" for what it would mean to use that stage as a stepping stone or ground to rise to a subsequent higher stage.

Because all or nearly all human beings contain the genetic profile adequate to rank upon the continuum (call it perhaps the continuum of "self consciousness") all differences in rank order achieved boil down to incidental or arbitrary factors; to time and space requirements necessary for movement up the ladder of being; to the various internal contradictions and irrationalities present to any given system or arrangement; and to the level of philosophy by which the highest order of thinking and concept-making comes into being as the determinants of the society's values, ethos and powers. I don't believe that the failure of individuals to reinvest capital in ways productive of maximum growth of more capital is necessarily a sign of the irrationality of a society or of a person, given the self-valuing requirement -- but the coordinated activities of individuals will produce exponentially greater productivity in so far as allowing division of labor and increase in the complexity of capital machines. In other words, the internal tensions of society form internal tensions within individuals and also limit the range of possible values, powers and realities available to society and the individual in the future. This problem cannot be solved by capitulating either to capital (capitalism) or to "non-capitalist human being" ("socialism"). Each of those extremes is only an approximate polarity, a maximum failure to correct the real problem of political economy.

I agree that individual people need to be more intelligent and sentient in order for this lock to be broken. What is a problem now will simply be a given ground of prior reconciliations unproblematically for future people and societies that have found a way to solve these problems, and uplift in quality of people/consciousness/subjectivity is probably the only way that is ever going to happen. And the only way that uplift will happen is by continuing to mediate capital and human being in such a way where neither of those terms is made to collapse into the other, and society itself takes on the massive and philosophical responsibility for the production of quality individuals, alongside and even against certain possible gains in total capital expansions. Capital expansion for its own sake has no meaning except as a ground-implicit for human beings (or for whatever else life forms might come around at a future date).

It's not so much that the masses are simply dumb, I was being a little facetious. The problem is that the surplus wealth must be centralized in the hands of a few, otherwise it will become too evenly distributed for any re-investment to be made in a kind of two stage process I will describe, whereby capital is being moved around, from a first stage in which free labor is converted into capital, and a second at which capital is re-converted into labor- specifically working, or utilized labor. This equation is very important, because if we as a species fail to work out the balancing act implicit in it between free and working labor, between expansive and contractive/centralized or monopolized capital, then a lot of us die; this is the structure that keeps society from falling apart. And we've gotten it incorrect on our first two attempts at it, the world wars.


You can see this movement of the surplus wealth in two recurrent stages. Capitalism in the early phase is marked by the emergence of free trade and the rising of innumerable small businesses and entrepreneurs- this is where the world was before WW1. At this stage the surplus wealth created by all these little businesses is fairly well distributed. Marx theorized a point of no further expansion possible, "State Capitalism," in which these small businesses- the little Bourgeoisie, will be absorbed over time by the proper bourgeoisie out of which the elite class precipitates as the bearers of centralized wealth; this centralization takes the form of Mcdonalds, Apple, Microsoft. Monopolies absorb the small businesses, that is, the little-middle-class of successful smaller scale entrepeneurs who have done well for themselves, and re-concentrate the much more distributed surplus wealth created in the early explosive stage of capitalism. Now, in this later stage, in state capitalism, a very small number- the proper elites, have gained enough control over surplus wealth to simply charge people for rent and make money without expending much if any labor. This is the necessary step that leads to all the surplus wealth and therefor power being stripped from the common masses and handed to the select few, that it may be re-invested in the next cycle of innovations. This next cycle creates within itself a kind of pseudo-controlled mini first phase capitalism again, that acts explosively as many smaller businesses crop up over night to take advantage of the various new avenues that have opened up with the new tech produced in that cycle, ie. everyone going after domain names in the dot com thing in the 90's, or the profusion of more different kinds of cellphone than you could count in all shapes and sizes before the Iphone appeared. This bubbles out for awhile and then pops, the surplus wealth is reabsorbed, and so on, ad infinitum, each time strengthening and further concentrating the surplus wealth in the last cycle into fewer and fewer hands, a smaller and smaller "elite" class, the designated 1 percent. Now, because this didn't happen when free trade was first established, before WW1, the surplus wealth was too evenly distributed and dried up; the products of this failed first phase however were not iphones and web domains and sneakers with lights- they were bullets, bombs, and machine guns, and all of the surplus wealth, now in the hands of the people- an unemployed and impoverished people after the failure to reincorporate the surplus, used it to create the first war of the people rather than of small trained armies: they used the wealth surplus and the means of production to manufacture the necessary agents to kill themselves instead of recentralizing and investing it in a new cycle of innovations.


This is why, as you say, pure capitalism is impossible- pure capitalism meaning an infinitely distributive and unencumbered period of first phase free trading and small businesses. Socialism simply aborts the second phase and replaces it with government intervention on the economy, and that has the effect only of drying up the surplus wealth created in the first phase, as the democratic and governmental modification on the economy, the workers controlling the means of production- for all taxation and government intervention has that effect of shifting control over productive capacity to the people if only indirectly, cannot properly mobilize the surplus wealth toward the development of the next cycle of technology. So socialism is not viable for that reason as well.


If you collect taxes and use it to build a road, through governmental intervention on the economy, then you also have a bunch of businesses and innovation that was not created and could have been created with the same money- but only if society is in a state of economic equilibrium, because if there are a bunch of unemployed people at the time, then now their unused labor capacity is being utilized to construct the road, and labor is not being diverted from anything that would have been getting done otherwise. That is one justification for socialist policies. Yet it actually is being diverted from expansion, for the following reason. Through this tax, money is collected from workers operating in an expansive state of the movement of capital, in that mini unencumbered free trading bubble reproduced within the second phase, and then redistributed to those currently unemployed and converts their unused labor capacity into public goods like a road, so that as I said, what is happening is power and productive capacity is being re-bestowed to the people, aborting the second phase or state-capitalism from completing itself in the movement of capital that would redistribute the wealth surplus to an elite class who would be able to reinvest it properly and create tech and sector bubbles which mobilize a fury of human labor toward new innovations and maintain equilibrium. As the first phase converts free labor into capital, the second phase must convert capital into working labor: this socialist intervention converts free  labor into "nothing", ie. as opposed to working labor, my concept of working-labor meaning more or less capitalistic expansion: it converts a previously unemployed guy in a state of unused free labor now building a road into an invisible piece of fiat currency- for unless the wealth surplus is centralized at the end of the second phase in the cycle then it dissipates, and each piece of free-labor that is being taxed by a construction job for a road is just that- a dissipation of the wealth surplus. Obviously we need roads, but this is the effect of acquiring it and anything else through taxation. Taxation is simply a dissipation of wealth surplus, a prevention of its being centralized in preparation for its reinvestment by the elite class. Taxation and socialist policy prevents the formation of the little-middle class, so that the middle class proper spreads its cumulative wealth so much that the elites have no way to siphon off surplus wealth into their monopoly, and thus no capital concentrates anywhere, and cannot be reinvested. In short: working-labor must be kept equal to free-labor with reference to the third term of capital; working-labor (or expansive trade) minus free-labor (potential trading, ie. my work for your money) must equal capital, (the material that can be expansively traded, which includes human beings in a state of free-labor) and this equation is accomplished by centralizing surplus wealth and reinvesting it in new technologies at the end of each of these two-phase cycles. Socialism is basically adding free-labor to capital and saying it equals working-labor, but it does not, because free-labor is already contained implicitly in the value of capital.



This two phase recurrence is the problem for both a pure capitalism- the first phase without the second, as well as socialism, and I'm not aware of any solution. If the first phase is pushed too far, then countless small businesses distribute all surplus wealth to the extent that it can no longer be collected in one place and reinvested in new technologies, and capitalism hits a dead end and regresses- that is what happened to bring on the first world war, as, in the fascination of the human species with the new free trade idea, we were finally woke up from its dream into its nightmare; if the second phase is replaced by a governmental intervention, if taxes are utilized to give control over productive capacity to the people, then the surplus wealth from the first phase gets starved and dried up- the attempts to shift this productive control to the people on a large scale amounted to the failed communistic regimes, and ended in the second world war. Now in the US at the present time and in other places in the world we are attempting to apply a very small amount of intervention or socialist policy, not completely aborting the second phase, and modern socialists like Sanders want to accomplish that by laying taxes on the elite class, the 1 percent in particular, and this has and will have only the consequence of making the starvation of surplus wealth much more slow than it would be in an overtly socialistic or communist state, and through attrition will take us into another war, as we will find this method works as badly as the other two.

That's really interesting. Marx noted that the worker is paid to replace himself and maintain himself, that wages are the cost of continuing self-maintenance of labor and any work produced by labor beyond that cost is "surplus labor", labor that the worker gives to the capitalist (owner of the company or business) but for which the worker is not actually being paid. This surplus labor produces surplus value, which is the true quantitative gain for the capitalist enterprise (quantitative because it is converted into pure quantity i.e. money) and the true reason for profit. Workers who produce more surplus labor (who volunteer themselves more to work more and work better compared to other workers at their same pay scale) will be more desirable to capital owners and thus get promoted and receive further wages, with a likelihood of diminishing returns progressively enacted upon the workers who most offer their the surplus labor and therefore most produce the surplus value (profit potential for the capital owners), due to the fact that as workers move up and become more skilled and specialized the quality of the competition (other workers, co-workers) is also increasing, so the worker himself must compete even more and offer even more of his surplus labor to the capitalist if the worker wants to stand out and continue to be promoted/move up in the organization.

Small and medium size businesses offer less organizational structure and scope of productively possible activity compared to large businesses, and therefore small and medium size businesses are not able to offer as many or as great pathways for workers to offer their surplus labor, therefore the large businesses is most effectively placed to extract maximum surplus labor from workers and therefore obviously to produce the greatest amount of surplus value. Even if a small businessman works his employees 14 hours a day he is going to be producing less surplus value, as compared to the relative size of the workforce and resources/capital invested, than a large businessman would be producing from working his employees just 8 hours a day. It is partly a factor of the number of workers but more so is a factor of the hierarchical organizational structure in which workers are organized. So a lot of small businesses would mirror the structure of a lot of workers within one business but which workers are basically all at the same tier of pay and responsibility; as you say in this case there is less potential for the concentration of capital upward into narrow channels of productive growth potential via reinvestments, not only because the large businesses possess more scope of activity and command more total capital but also because a few very large businesses employing a total of 30,000 workers are able to organize those workers to extract more surplus value in total than would be able to be extracted by that same 30,000 workers had they been employed across several hundred small to medium size businesses. Furthermore the regimentation and specialization of roles within large organizations tends to be greater than within small or medium size organizations; I suspect one effect of this regimentation/specializing of work is to create the chance for more surplus labor to be released within any given role, simply because the worker in that role has less to worry about or distract himself with and can basically focus his energies on the narrow tasks at hand of his position, concentrating his own "labor capital" in similar manner to how you mention capital wealth is concentrated upward into the larger companies and individuals, exponentially increasing its possible reinvestment power.

I hadn't thought about this in terms of the world wars, it makes sense if world war 1 in Europe was basically set off by nationalist political positioning and pressure differentials probably largely relates to matters of trade. Expansive first stage capitalism in Europe prior to 1914 could have developed too many competing business interests and those interests were probably tied too heavily to the nation-state political structures, subsuming economic tensions and displacements up into political ones. I'll have to look into this more; if this is true then it also explains multinational business and international economics of the modern world by showing how these extra-national or quasi-independent (politically independent) business entities are able to introduce breaks between economic and political tensions, creating more space in the middle. Business rivalry and economic warfare need not spill over into direct political nationalistic conflicts. The situation with world war 2 then would represent the abortion of the attempt to concentrate capital wealth in Europe up into the "proper elite" (small number of wealthiest capital owners), aborted basically because of the actions of Hitler's Germany. I'm guessing there wasn't enough time between WWI and WWII for enough capital to be recreated and redistributed socially to the people, due to all the destruction of the First World War, which actually makes sense that this situation post-WWI would have led to a quicker progression from first to second stage capitalism as you described: concentrating wealth upward would have been easier after WWI due to the fact that all the capital and wealth in Europe was already largely fractured and shifted out of the hands of the masses to a large degree.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, McDonalds, Google all started out small and became large, these companies were basically small businesses that created massively effective models for extracting surplus labor from workers, at least under Marx's view; but that view ignores the specifics of the businesses in question, namely the research and technical knowledge as well as the vision and philosophical clarity around what new ontological arrangements were possible to society. Facebook capitalized on that kind of clarity and invented a whole new social arrangement. So the surplus value even if it can be reduced to surplus labor, an understanding of that surplus labor must take into account qualitative-creative and knowledge-based work as opposed to simply considering things from the perspective of quantity of work and effort given. Essentially the machinery of production must be built first in order for capital to attract and "fill in" that machinery thus drawing to itself the work and surplus labor potential needed to actualized production of actual surplus values, either quantitative or qualitative. McDonalds represented a mostly quantitative increase in surplus value while Apple represented a mostly qualitative one. But in any case the machinery was first built by small businesses of a handful of people with technical know-how and creative vision.

So I would think that for a 'moment' of new productive machinery to be created this impetus must come from individuals or small groups of like-minded workers, basically from entrepreneurs. Shows like Shark Tank are so popular because they reveal the actual engine of true growth of value, at its genesis point: the human mind. And the regimentation and specialization mentioned previously with regard to large businesses can be a severe detriment to that kind of mind which could otherwise build new productive machinery; so that creative potential is usurped into research arms within large businesses, trying to mimic the conditions of creative originary genius that technically represents a qualitatively and quantitatively different kind of labor power and "surplus labor" in its own right, with venture capital and large scale investments focused heavily on these tiny sectors. They're basically trying to plant seeds within the ground of the economy, hoping to own the seed that eventually sprouts and grows up from that ground.

I suppose you're right that no solution is readily apparent to the setup of first and second stage capitalism process; redistribution and high taxation increases Human Being at the cost of Economy, and free labor is also a game of limited or diminishing returns, while absolute capitalism would increase Economy at the cost of Human Being, seeking to convert that human being and human life as much as possible into reliable labor power. Even if the workers owned the means of production and even if they employed expert managers there would still be the problem you identify of capital stagnating due to being spread out too far to become concentrated within monopoly enterprises; obviously some balance is needed. Small business and co-ops function like living organisms, they seek their homeostasis of balancing inputs and outputs and growth is valued onto to maintain and very slightly expand that equilibrium, while large businesses cannot avoid becoming cancerous machines of pure capital growth that must keep expanding or perish. Large businesses differ in this way from small ones because of the larger society-wide pressures upon large concentrations of capital resources and wealth to be used as effectively as possible, whereas for small businesses and non-wealthy individuals there isn't so much of that kind of pressure simply because that pressure is relative to the size of the capital and wealth in question. A small business can get by on balancing costs with revenues whereas a large business that tries to do that will simply get bought out or out-competed by a more ambitious large business producing more total surplus value. The only real solution I can see to the problem is that a large enough field of capital and economic agents exists such that both processes, stages 1 and 2 can co-occur alongside each other at all times; therefore limited bubbles coming into existence and collapsing without disturbing the entire society and economy as a whole, but also being effective at spurring expansions and bubble-based inflations to such a degree that productive increases produce society-wide significance. The disruption of the direct link between business and national politics is a good step in the direction of producing an economic system large and diverse enough to sustain stages 1 and 2 simultaneously. So is the transition to global capitalism, creating enough space and time to allow a "meta-economy" to subsist.

" A small business can get by on balancing costs with revenues whereas a large business that tries to do that will simply get bought out or out-competed by a more ambitious large business producing more total surplus value. The only real solution I can see to the problem is that a large enough field of capital and economic agents exists such that both processes, stages 1 and 2 can co-occur alongside each other at all times; therefore limited bubbles coming into existence and collapsing without disturbing the entire society and economy as a whole, but also being effective at spurring expansions and bubble-based inflations to such a degree that productive increases produce society-wide significance. "


Indeed this has led to a third stage which I haven't mentioned yet. The rise of the banking system.


I found out yesterday that Lenin had a similar analysis of the cause of WW1 as mine. The surplus value created in what I call the first stage of expansive free-trade he called a product of colonial imperialism and said that this surplus could not successfully be exported from one nation to another, and this led to war.


So the first stage, that of expansive free trade, creates a large surplus capital value but it is so widely distributed among competing small businesses that it cannot be centralized and that is the reason why, as Lenin said, it cannot be exported; because it cannot be exported, it is instead concentrated in monopoly companies and re-invested in new technological enterprises, while these monopolies recreate expansive bubbles of free trade and smaller businesses within themselves in order to re-absorb and further concentrate any wealth still external to them, creating the "1 percent" class; the third stage appears as international banking systems, which coordinate transfers of this concentrated wealth on a larger scale and deal with the exportation problem between nations. This banking system is supported by alliances in general like nato, and unites the various capitalist countries through tenuous relations of debt- ie we owe a lot of money to China, therefor China can continue manufacturing because it knows we will buy its products, and the global economy can keep functioning with the US as the center of the debt and the international bank system. This third stage leads to the US, as the center of this debt, losing its own manufacturing capabilities, as the companies move their means of production to other nations. Once the US collapses from this side effect, a fourth stage will begin.

The US has shown remarkable resiliency in handling huge debts and economic crises, since the rest of the first world depends on the continued growth of the US economy and also on its military power, or rather the 'global order' of nations and the stability of that depends on it. Markets are so heavily intertwined that shocks reverberate around the planet. The international banking interests exist to capitalize off of national economies, and seem willing to do anything to keep the EU going including massive bailout loans. We saw with Greece that they would rather close up the banks and let cash dry up, basically starve the Greek people rather than admit to debt restructuring on those bailout loans. States don't have the power to print and regulate their own money anymore because money needs to be internationally centered and coordinated. Even the Greeks, who voted 60% against austerity and more debt based on it, capitulated when their leaders basically said fuck you to the Greek people and did debt and austerity anyway.

Managed debt is the new currency. This forces economy to need to constantly expand more so than would be required just to sustain that economy over time, since now the debt must also be serviced. The US can take on an arbitrarily high quantity of debt provided its economy is growing from one year to the next, but once growth stops debt becomes unmanageable. US GDP now matches its national debt almost 1:1, with half a trillion dollar deficits or so every year. 500 billion out of total economic production of 20 trillion puts that around 2.5%. Not too bad except those amounts accumulate over time and eventually push total debt to the level of total economic production.

I don't know if the US economy is going to collapse from that strain, the US+EU is basically the world economic powerhouse in financial terms, with China just a huge production warehouse for raw materials and consumer goods. The third world can't catch up to the first world by simply becoming a cheap labor land to make the west's stuff, because as soon as labor costs (standards of living) in the third or second world start to rise those western interests will just pull out and move elsewhere. It guarantees that influx of cash into third world economies will remain with the political and economic elite there (usually some military dictator or corrupt politicians) rather than get spread around, thus preventing that first stage of free trade and small business economy that you mentioned occurred for the US prior to WWI. I think China has this same problem, and it's communism is a perfect social setup to keep labor cheap even as their overall economy is growing tremendously. China is its own huge contradiction in this way, that to remain appealing to western money it needs to keep itself from becoming a truly first world economy on the order of the US and EU. For example China must deliberately devalue its currency through converting a lot of it into dollars in order to buy US treasury bonds; thus China holds a lot of US treasury bonds some of which come due continuously and pay out in dollars. If the yuan were valued more highly then cashing in those bonds would result in less yuan for China when it converts the dollars back into its own currency. And like you said China must keep buying US debt, not because it necessarily wants to (since spending so much yuan on US treasury bonds prevents that yuan from being spent in China's own economy) but because it needs dollars with which to exchange for US companies transacting for China's cheap labor and production via westerners companies outsourcing their own costs onto China (pollution, waste etc.) and also just so China can stay relevant to the US markets on which China depends.

So really everything is existing in a tight closed loop. This is modern capitalism at the global scale, and becomes self-referring and systemically complex enough to allow for all sort of problems and still be self-sustaining over time. The lower poles of global economy (third world) provide the cheap labor and thus must remain poor and out of the game of true global economy, while China sits in the middle as "second world" economy by supplying not only cheap labor but also continuous supply of currency (dollars) into the world economy. Oil must also be exported internationally in dollars (petrodollars) resulting in a similar situation. So looking objectively at the situation and in terms of concentration of wealth and wealth reinvestment into large-scale productive activity, wealth is always concentrating upward through international business as labor transfers value from itself to international systems of production and exchange, and some of these systems are put to use of R&D (like Apple) as all that labor power such as from China in Apple's case contributes billions of dollars of research and new innovations, thus qualitatively increasing the wealth in the first world and changing the economic landscapes as a whole as new products and subjective and objective spaces of economically possible activity are produced (e.g. smartphone apps). In line with this new model, most of the wealth produced by these new spaces is not distributed back into the "real economy" of free trade small business, because that wealth was produced by the top tier of economic and financial activity which only employs a relatively very small number of workers. The redistribution now is in the form of qualitative value, such as the value gained by us for being able to use things like computers, the Internet or smartphone apps. So "humanity in general" is gaining mostly qualitative increase in value and can only transform a little bit of that into its own increase in quantitative value (money), while the real quantitative value increase is seen in the form of massive wealth concentrations at the top of the system. Even tech startups that make it big get bought out and converted into the "top 1%" thus simply add to the existing system without really changing it. It's the same situation as China is faced with, only in the reverse: no matter what China does its economy as a whole cannot transition into first world status because that status itself requires the existence of the very second and third world cheap labor supply that China already is, whereas in the US + EU no matter what new increases in value appear within the "real economy" these are inevitably capitalized upon and transferred up and away from the real economy and into the top tier "1%".

Views espoused by people like Bernie Sanders are right that relatively small increases in taxes and social government spending can work, and this would be beneficial to the top tier in so far as reducing the cost of labor to big business directly while also increasing knowledge and productivity of the generalized "real economy" thereby leading average people to entrepreneur and innovate more stuff like computers and cell phones, which innovations will be eventually capitalized and transferred up to the top tier anyway. So it is in the interests of the top wealth concentrations to redistribute enough wealth into the general economy either by increased wages or by direct tax payments, in order to keep a healthy real economy going and ensure both the reliable self-replacement of quality (educated and law-abiding) labor as well as continued entrepreneurial innovations on which the top wealth concentrations can feed capitalistically. These increased costs of labor in the first world can be partially offset by further outsourcing of manufacturinf and raw materials production to the second and third world, which is already exactly what has happened and is continuing to happen. But new laws could alter this situation in the following way: by incentivizing repatriation of overseas wealth and incentivizing keeping production and manufacturing in the US+EU some large businesses will choose to reduce outsourcing in order to gain those incentivized benefits (which could be as simple as tax breaks or grants, or more complex such as choice bids for state contracts or increased positive public perception) while other large businesses will keep outsourcing labor cost; this will create new competition between large businesses only now they will be competing for market share of public and private positive perception, as well as for a limited number of choice tax breaks. Those businesses that are efficient enough to keep producing surplus value without those new benefits will keep doing so, while less efficient businesses may opt to avoid transferring costs to the third world and keep labor in the US+EU, thereby increasing the distribution of wealth in the real economy. So the feedback loop can tighten even further-- basically there can be more space and time inserted into the top 1% itself in order to allow wealth concentrations more possibilities to differentiate amongst themselves, allowing the natural pressure differentials that would ensure both a continued stable wealth concentration while also allowing for more equitable conditions in the first world real economy, which again also benefits the top tier economy indirectly through a more educated workforce and through government providing more services that individual businesses won't need to worry about anymore (such as retirement costs of pensions, which are all but gone now as a consequence of this same shifting of cost from business economy to state economy, or healthcare which will probably continue to transition to state economy just as retirement costs have already done) (and by shifting costs onto workers themselves, as we've seen with the rise of student loans and the increased costs to consumers of their health insurance; unfortunately those increases have a detrimental effect on those activities themselves (higher education, health care, and overall spending capacity of labor in the general economy) which goes against the interests of those services and economic arrangements thesmelves. Thus people like Sanders want to offload some of those costs from consumers and back onto government and large businesses, as had formerly been the case prior to the last couple of decades).