VO Studies: Collectivism vs Individualism

There seems to be a natural tendency for people to desire to collectivize (Styxhexenhammer called it a desire on the part of people to organize, which desire basically renders anarchism impossible) and there are various reasons for this. But whenever this tendency reaches an apex and takes over the general political will and thought of a society, that society starts to lose its ontic coherence.

An entity's existence depends on its maintaining ontic coherence. This is also what we call self-valuing.

Collectivism, so called, only has a proper existence as the natural overflow of values from a strong, coherent self-valuing. A self-valuing will share its values with whatever falls within its broader values-sphere, with whatever it values. But obviously those values must exist, and that self-valuing must be free to share or not share those values. Values cannot be compelled from a self-valuing without distorting those values, cutting out their natural existentiality, and also not without seriously harming the self-valuing from which values are taken. Future valuing possibility is seriously undermined by values-theft, even if that theft produces a momentary increase in values-availability and 'work'-effort.

Individualism is the philosophy that implicitly centers itself upon the fact of self-valuing. Collectivism is a name for various ideologies that are based the perversion of self-valuing in one form or another as theft of values.

Marx codified collectivist tendency within political application and sentiment, and attempted to use scientific-analytic/Hegelian methodology to reinvent economics in terms of the controlled and coordinated, "scientific" theft of values, which of course means the grinding down and eventual termination of self-valuing; remember that a self-valuing is always the source of a value, any value.

The economic model of scientific collectivism coupled with the freeing of the psychological constraints upon the natural impulse to desire to collectivize, led to humanity becoming infinitely malleable and able to be manipulated by applying a two-prong approach: 1) control their economic situation to produce values-theft and redefine this as "progress" and "production", and 2) manipulate the public sentiment around moral issues in order to pervert thinking with shallow virtue politics and 'wedge issues', building upon existing cultural differences to produce distinct classes that can be pitted one against the others. The combination of 1 and 2 produces the modern political landscape. Almost no one can think past it.

Machiavelli, Luther, Kant..... Hegel, Marx, Freud... Nietzsche... the analytics, the deconstructionists and post-modernists... this is all one very long progression, or rather regression. But it is possible that this regression is a necessary one, if human/western societies and people are to generally come to understand some basic facts and truths, to become more philosophical. The philosophical mind must at first entertain the worst ideas, in order to discover how and why they are the worst, but in order to do this he often first must believe (in) these ideas. Penetrate them from the inside, see and understand their essence, devote himself, and then come to discover the shame of doing so. Shame is indeed among the first signs of truth.

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A political philosophy, system and sentiment based on Individualism is very rare, because it centers power away from "the powerful" and upon the average existential valuing, in order to mimic nature and natural selection so that values compete and value-rising or value-falling becomes a natural consequence over time of "what works". If the Individualism is proper this means it creates a closed system where values rise and fall only to the extent they adhere to the existentiality, and even capitalist production is bound to that existentially.. This is also why capitalism is often confused with "social darwinism".

Social darwinism, like cultural relativism, implies a lack of truth, of centering values, and of common valuing. But there are centering values, and there are common valuings. This is precisely what self-valuing means, and the human race has emerged, fractured and different as it is amongst itself, from the same natural-ontological conditions and at the behest of the same universal truth-condition and firmament. Truth cannot be killed or destroyed, it can only be covered over or simulated. The simulation of truth is what much philosophy has tried to do, and what science often does; but simulation of truth is just another form of covering truth over, and if truth is covered over and buried then it eventually starts to live again, as all of the negative side-effects of being covered over like that.

Collectivism used to be an intellectual position, now it is a pure religion. Thus it will not die so easily, or perhaps ever. Christianity, perhaps unknowingly, centered the religious upon the individual, cutting out the self-valuing space from dependency on the status quo of existing social, economic and ideological power-dynamics. Islam reversed this trend and thought that one must submit oneself to Allah only, rather than as Christianity thought we must submit ourselves to each other, and to our personal relationship with the divine. Christianity is Greek, I do not know what Islam is, Arabic perhaps, but I don't really understand Arabic culture enough to know what that means. Greek culture adopted the category of the individual, every God-divine was a manifestation of an individual tendency and will, and individual desiring permeated the mythological structure, thus nature itself was reinterpreted as primarily human, as a self-valuing knowable by the mind and reason. Greeks liked to think; Christianity thought about God, Islam felt about god. Or at least that is my naive reading of history.

Monarchy, theocracy, socialism, communism, and oligarchy are all forms of Collectivism. As far as I can tell the only political equivalent of Individualism is a Constitutional Republic. I simply cannot even imagine another political system aligned with Individualism than a Constitutional Republic. Constitution enshrines individuality as value, as law and right; Republic tempers the tyranny of the majority of pure democracy into a partial system where elected leaders are still trusted to make independent decisions based on their own thinking and values, but who are ultimately accountable to the people whom they represent. And because of that indirect, removed relationship you have a secondary mechanism whereby commonly-held valuing is able to permeate upward into leadership but not, at the same time, defining or over-determining that leadership. A nice middle ground is formed.

For Individualism to be instantiated the people/society must be supremely confident in themselves, full of joy and hope, and possess a very keen strength and underlying existential unity. Otherwise the people/society will prefer collectivist models. Perhaps the early Americans, after winning their independence and coming into possession of vast lands of unlimited resources and beauty, were the only people who could really instantiate a properly Individualist politics.

All values come from individuals. The only rational justification of a society is that it exists to allow its individuals to produce values and to exchange those values freely with others.

There are no exceptions. Even something as simple as water fits this. Water is a value to us, but we must act to acquire that value. And even something as complex as the Internet also fits; nothing is created or used except by individual self-valuings by and for self-valuings.

I agree that individualism doesn't work well in politics.

But it is with individualism where improvements to living standards are found.

And I will agree that societies rely on collectivism in order to function.

After the colonialism period in the 1500s to late 1700s or so, when this started to finally draw back upon itself and the paradigm was shifting, the peoples of the third world in S America, ME, Africa, S Asia all had the chance to seize their destiny and rise up to claim their nation-states and cultures back for themselves, to follow the American example of Independence. And to a degree this did start to happen, even though colonial powers maintained a presence up until WWI.

But what disrupted this process was two things: Marxism came along and co-opted the revolutionary impulse for independence, and then WWI and II further disrupted the local and nation-state economics and societies throughout the non-western world, after which the west was free to redraw the maps and sink its hooks into these other countries, with bribes and threats and military occupation and orchestrated political coups for example.

This is how collectivism won in the non-western world. A subtle and malicious process of values-hacking snuck in, from mid 1800s to post-WWII, and took over these places, altered their future and set up the conditions for what we see in the world today.

Note that the Netherlands relinquished Indonesia only in 1949.
About 100 million people were possession of the Dutch Crown, even while the Netherlands were Hitlers bitch.

And it's getting worse, not better. Globalization is a joke. Just another power play.

Of course, most of the third world countries can't get their stuff together in order to make an effort to evolve.

A great irony is that the only real "social construct" is socialism itself, the whole edifice of social construction theory. This theory made up the idea of social construction because... that is precisely what it is itself.

So Marx tried to value himself in the shadow of Hegel, and ends upon appropriating Hegel's Absolute Spirit into a false idea that society is entirely separate from biology, earth, and 'hard realities'; that society-history is purely a fictional and arbitrary thing, therefore may partake of Hegelian universality, therefore any and all evasions and selective blindness to facts are justified to that end.

I won't say anything negative about socialism at this point but I could say many negative things about how it is applied, especially in the USA.

But I still don't like my money being taken by government and given to people who are too lazy to get a job and earn an honest income for themselves.

Thrasymachus wrote:

A great irony is that the only real "social construct" is socialism itself, the whole edifice of social construction theory. This theory made up the idea of social construction because... that is precisely what it is itself.

So Marx tried to value himself in the shadow of Hegel, and ends upon appropriating Hegel's Absolute Spirit into a false idea that society is entirely separate from biology, earth, and 'hard realities'; that society-history is purely a fictional and arbitrary thing, therefore may partake of Hegelian universality, therefore any and all evasions and selective blindness to facts are justified to that end.

Yes, Socialism replaces the human entity with the entity of "Society", which does not exist save as a kind of Titan who devours his children and ultimately himself.

The idea that all humans would fit in one societal scheme could only be conceived by a mind steeped in slavery, deprivation and the will to extinction.

Specifically on communism: I now know exactly what communism is. I mean precisely what it is.

Communism is literally a force of disorder and destruction that arises within a society and culture, and targets that society/culture for disorganization and destruction. You can think of a society and culture as one substance, one 'thing', even though I realize that the concepts of society and culture are each touching on something different, but it is useful to take those differences and combine them into a single sociological-political-historical-psychological substance. That is what these things are, tectonic substances, physical realities that are from our perspective not physical at all but rather intangible, abstract and ideal.

Such a substance as is the society, culture, history, people, traditions, etc. of a region is diverse and subtle, very complex overlapping and interacting values-fields that create multi-dimensional structures. This substance slowly grows over time, per the nature of any living thing, as it expands and interacts with the outside and inner-interacts within and amongst its own elements, creating newer more derivative layers all the time. Eventually a bulk of capital is created that acts as the skeletal structure of this substance, and a hard shell covering it over and protecting it, allowing it to push out against the world in more powerful and decisive ways. This layer of capital growth atop the substance is at first soft, thin, relatively weak, but over time becomes hardened, thicker, stronger, and shields and protects the society/culture substance from which that capital has been generated and to which it belongs.

Now the substance is armored, it is armored by its 'hardened capital'. The danger of hardened capital is that it becomes too rigid and heavy, to the point where the social/cultural substance begins to be strangulated and burdened under that weight; this capital acts like a new substance entirely, and there is a natural push to re-write the existing social/cultural substance in terms of that bulk of capital which happens to exist at the given moment, in accordance with the particular desires, perspectives and pathologies of those people who happen to be the controllers or owners of that capital at that time.

In other words, growing capital is not naturally distributed amongst society/culture in such a way as would reflect how that capital came into being. The bulk of capital came into being by the combined derivative efforts of all aspects of that society/culture, interacting in very complex ways by very complex logics that simply cannot be traced beyond the most salient; the actual onto-epistemo-logical structure of a society/culture is impossible to model but can be understood generally in theory as being a thing of complexity, richness, variety and chaotic-emergent causality on par with the body of any advanced living organism. And these substances are non-teleological, they do not naturally have an end-goal state toward which they are working except to say that each such substance is indeed a self-valuing, and therefore its end-goal state would be to maximize the situation of its own valuing-selfing.

So now we have these substances engaging in conflict and war outside of and within themselves, attempting to create the situation where the bulk of hardened capital becomes organized newly and according to a new principle whereby the "weight" of that capital is no longer strangulating a large portion of the social/cultural substance itself. This natural tendency toward obtaining certain kinds of situations whereby the bulk of existing hardened capital is made to be reorganized in new ways in order to alleviate the pressures and imbalances within the substance itself is the true cause of the 'revolutionary impulse'. In other words, satisfied people do not revolt, which is something that modern capitalism has figured out.

This pressure and the natural tendency to alleviate it create complex dynamics that lead to the obtaining of certain kinds of situations that would prove to be capable of tending to cause reorganizations of existing capital structures, namely the social/cultural substance is always experimenting with its own possible structures to find a better structure, similarly to how genetic reproduction naturally contains gene replication errors in order to allow for the possibility of change and new states obtaining. It is important to note that these new states cannot be envisioned before the fact, this sort of change is entirely ex post facto, "accidental". This is because, again, the social/cultural substance is far too complex, logically intricate and subtle to ever be able to model and trace it in any practical manner. (Attempts to predict and force this substance into new changes will only succeed to the extent that such proposed or desired changes are simple enough to be so crudely enacted, imperfect enough to allow for flexibility of the inevitably imperfect result, and if one does not care about the fact that crudely manipulating the substance in this manner is quite literally closing off whole universes of potential future states and situations that could have and would have naturally obtained by the infinitely greater subtlety and logical intricate complexity of the substance itself when compared to the machinations of those who would wish to steer society in this or that direction.)

Now we have a basic understanding of the situation and the substance, so where does communism fit in?

Communism is a force attempting to release nuclear energy from the substance. Communism pulls apart existing relations within the substance in order to release energy from this destruction. For example, the "structural" relationships at the political or economic level, the "molecular" relationships at the community and family level, and even and eventually also the "atomic" relationships at the level of the individual person/psyche itself. Communism aims to provoke these kinds of pulling-apart nuclear reactions in order to release stored energy; this stored energy had formerly been used for maintaining the onto-epistemo-logical structures and for allowing self-valuing to occur at higher thresholds than it otherwise would be occurring, thanks to the existence and maintenance of those onto-epistemo-logical structures at both the individual, family, local community, and state levels. All of those levels each possess their own being, but are also each only one part in a larger being, namely in the environment in which self-valuing finds itself and by which self-valuing is able to self-value to its highest capacities, translating and interacting with as much truth and as many truths as possible.

The building-up of the social/cultural substance in order to effect that substance as this kind of environment suitable for the highest kinds of self-valuing is a very long historical process, and again is a natural process very much 'geological' in nature, whereby derivative layers grow tectonically and create meta-frameworks allowing for new kinds of relations and objects, and just as the root breaks through the rock so too do these kinds of substances break through the harder realities of the natural world and into the light of the moral universe, into the possibility for responding to and knowing facts, values, reason in a more and more direct manner. This whole building-up process is very slow over time, a gradual accumulation.

What happens with communism is that the imbalances within this substance with respect to the distributions of its bulk of hardened capital atop the social/cultural milieu of the substance itself are taken advantage of to cause seeds of internal disorder and destruction to take root, like cancers, within the substance. The first communists (Marx for example) figured out that if you pull apart existing substance-relations there is a sort of energy that is released from this; this energy is chaotic in nature and tends to have a destructive effect, because it is not integrated into the larger substance and environment but rather represents precisely the destruction of a small part of that substance and environment. The substance is now beginning to attack itself in a very profound way, it is becoming cancerous as the communist idea infects self-valuing with lust for forcing new capital-arrangements into being that would ostensibly be more advantageous to that communist self-valuing itself. But all that is secondary causality, more like catalysts and setting up the situations in the practical sense; the real reality of communism is simply its being this destructive disordering force ripping apart existing relations within the substance. Any number of excuses and justifications can be used to trigger and grow this force within the substance.

Communists will prey on people's disaffections, their desires, their frustrations, their embarrassments, their inabilities, in order to trigger nuclear reactions. The communist hopes that these reactions will cascade in chain reactions causing the communist idea to self-perpetuate and take over the entire society, such as occurred in Russia and China. It is important to see that the communist agitator is really a very careful practitioner of this philosophical/'spiritual' method of attempting to work directly with the substance to provoke a specific outcome; I am not at all convinced that Marx et. al. had no idea what they were doing, I think all of these early communists must have been at least somewhat deliberate in their intentions and methods. But the communist idea is naturally intoxicating for people whose self-valuing has been damaged or limited in some crucial way, because it offers them a religious escape and excuse for these traumas and failures. Communism is indeed a religion, which is why it does not tolerate other religions (it is 'atheist').

Communism is a religion of self-worship of the idealized capacity for working; I say idealized because real work can never be rationalized in that way, real work is work of the earth, work as and within and for the substance of the social/cultural and for setting self-valuing properly in its relations to truth. Communism disregards these relations and removes self-valuing from its contexts, forsakes the earth, and attempts to realize a religious neo-substance directly in reality and without any pretext, precursor or vision. Communist must burn up the existing social/cultural substance, first in nuclear reactions to spread communism to a threshold point of self-sustainability and second in using the existing capital and substance relations and objects as fuels, burning these to produce the life-substances that will satisfy the people from moment to moment. The whole central planning, top-down authority aspect of communist economics is no accident, it is an integral part of what communism does to the existing substances and capital: in communism's 'spiritual' (philosophical) attempt to form a religious kingdom on earth, it must simultaneously reject the earth as such and make direct use and consumption of the earth in strict linear manner in order to satisfy the basic needs of the people who are now communist. Because the earth has been abandoned it can no longer provide for the communists and the communists can no longer truly work with the earth, therefore their only recourse to survival is to seize everything around them and appropriate it into new destructive-consumptive processes, digesting the whole history and capital development of the past and present which becomes their 'new earth' upon which they attempt to found their religious kingdom.

The problem with this, obviously, is that each communist regime starts with only a finite amount of substance for it to destroy and digest in this manner. Eventually that substance is all but gone, and new substances must be found. Because communism deliberately severs man's links to the earth, and to truth, warping his self-valuing in this religious process, any "work" that occurs under communism is going to be bare minimum slavery producing simply the goods needed for the moment, without any natural capitalistic subtlety and certainly without the subtler dynamics and derivative logical complexity of the substance of the society/culture itself, for indeed communism has severed that link to the past and has done everything it can to consume the past entirely. Communist regimes therefore have a very short lifespan of growth as they consume the culture and capital around them, after which a period of increasingly slower growth and eventually stagnation sets in. The USSR only lasted 70 years; communist China has only lasted 68 years so far. And the tyrannical authoritarian methodology of communist regimes is no accident either, this sort of superstructure of state central power and absolute control is needed since, after all, the communist system has forsaken the earth itself as well as the earth of self-valuing as such. It can no longer trust anything to be that which it is; everything must be remade in the religious image of the communist death-idea.


So communism is literally this destructive and 'nuclear' force, and it is also the logical consequences that must follow from such an act occurring en mass within the social/cultural substance. The communist impulse is the impulse of a horde of rats, rats that are starving and who decide rather than improve their situations they would rather tear down their situations and hope that there is enough existing capital for them to steal in order that their lives will be better off in this 'new (religious) world'. But the high is very short-lived, if indeed there is any high at all.

It is also important to note that communist Russia began right after WWI, and communist China began right after WWII. What does this mean? It indicates that in the destructions and ravages of war, and in all the poverty and misery that war produces, is found a very fertile ground for laying the seeds of the communist idea within the social/cultural substance of a people. We may yet see this same thing occur in the United States and also in Europe, if there is another large-scale war; indeed, we saw it occur partially in the US and Europe already, after WWII when the ideals of socialism spread far and deep within the US and European people and institutions. But the substances of the US and Europe are far stronger, older, and deeper in truth and self-value than were the substances of the Russians or the Chinese, therefore the communist takeover after WWII was only of limited success in the US and Europe.

If there is a WWIII, we can be sure there will be a further attempt to cause the US and European nations (their social/cultural substances, their histories, their peoples, their traditions, their capital, their ideas, their subjectivities, etc.) to fall to communism just as the Russians and Chinese did.

Communism is a potent religious-mystical system that can be very easily used by a small number of people to take over an entire country. In all likelihood communism was designed precisely with this in mind.

This is why it is so important to resist communism, and to resist the temptation of easy power that it offers. Socialism is sort of a "communism lite" that succeeds because it threads the needle of remaining a little bit authentic while also employing a little bit of communist magic for personal gain. This is why we must always uphold principles and reason, philosophy, self-value, over all temptations to easy personal power.

I realized something tonight... communism is nothing more than entropy. Literally it is entropy.

All of the social, cultural, economic, linguistic-psychological (mental and emotional) constructs and values that are built up during the history of a civilization, a nation, a family, etc. are literally structures, and as structures must be maintained. They are subject to entropic decay if not maintained properly.

Communism is this decay. The burning-up of these structures in order to generate 'heat' energy; that heat is what we see as the revolutionary-chaotic impulse to destruction, the mob. The mob is destructive precisely because the mob qua mob is this burning-up of existing substances, producing heat-fire, and that heat-fire is simply the actions of the mob.

Communism is the psychological attractiveness to entropy. So literally a form of death. Standing upon the edifice of capitalism, of constructed values, we can look down below us and see communism far down there.

Thrasymachus wrote:

I realized something tonight... communism is nothing more than entropy. Literally it is entropy.

All of the social, cultural, economic, linguistic-psychological (mental and emotional) constructs and values that are built up during the history of a civilization, a nation, a family, etc. are literally structures, and as structures must be maintained. They are subject to entropic decay if not maintained properly.

Communism is this decay. The burning-up of these structures in order to generate 'heat' energy; that heat is what we see as the revolutionary-chaotic impulse to destruction, the mob. The mob is destructive precisely because the mob qua mob is this burning-up of existing substances, producing heat-fire, and that heat-fire is simply the actions of the mob.

Communism is the psychological attractiveness to entropy. So literally a form of death. Standing upon the edifice of capitalism, of constructed values, we can look down below us and see communism far down there.

Actually it isn't even burning up, at first. Once the structures stop being maintained properly there is a kind of release, a short-term respite that makes me think of how Fixed once described the Islamic experience of prayer (submission) to Allah: the projection of one's consciousness into the void, which causes a momentary feeling of uplift at the loss of feeling the burden of oneself, the burden of reality (since the burden of oneself is simply the same thing as the burden of reality (we are precisely as much reality as we are able to know/carry at present)). Similarly, when social/cultural/psychological structures are not being maintained there is an increase of entropy, followed by a slight slipping of these structures into more slackened states; they are still constructed together, they haven't yet fallen apart, but they are lagging, slackening a bit, and because of this there is a feeling of relief, a respite from having to feel the burden of self/reality.

This feeling of relief or respite probably mimics the infant's and child's feeling of infinite comfort when being coddled by the mother; a state of pure pleasure and no pain, but as Parodites has said there is no desire without suffering, no pleasure without a deeper structured pain against which something can be moved to generate the opposite of that pain, namely pleasure. So too for the feeling of slackening of the duties of existence at the hands of failing to properly maintain the social-cultural-psychological strictures, and this happens both individually and collectively: the (temporary) feeling of respite-pleasure is only possible to the degree that there also exists already a corresponding and 'deeper' (more fundament-anchored) plane of suffering and pain, of hard-existing, of responsibility to self and world.

As the structures continue to relax and slacken, and begin to experience small breakdowns here and there, this deeper plane of suffering and pain of the hard-existing of our responsibility to self and world begins to become fractured, and also starts to slacken. This "plane" is purely tectonic, and a kind of metaphysical corollary to the actual structure of the society, culture, psyche, etc. Namely what is now occurring is that our capacity to suffer is itself being broken down, our ability to feel and experience pain is decreasing. This produces a secondary feeling of respite and relief that stacks atop the first one of the original slackening of the overt structures.

I am guessing that in times of crisis of pleasure due to lack of proper suffering, it would be possible to play one of those feelings off of the other, trying to squeeze out a little more pleasure-capacity here or there by bounding one small suffering against another, shifting contexts to create relative illusions of size difference. In any case, this ongoing collapse cannot be maintained forever, and eventually the structures just sag and fall mostly apart, are like a person on their deathbed, and one can no longer feel either suffering or pleasure.

It is between this end point and the initial slackening that communism inserts itself. Communism is a path that attempts to stabilize the subjective death-collapse that is occurring in tandem with the slackening structures, and it does this by mobilizing a certain segment of the meaningful social-cultural-psychic substances in order to light a flame so that all other possible meanings can be pushed into that flame, feeding it. The flame becomes the "void" to which the communist prays and makes his sacrifices, just as for the Muslim the inner image of Allah becomes that same void to which the Muslim prays and offers his own sacrifices. In other words, the communist is trying to forestall the inevitable moment of total structural collapse and subsequent loss of both suffering and pleasure, by positing a small category of meaning (desire) amidst the collapse. What is chosen for this category? Whatever is most entropically conformed to the moment; whatever is easiest and can most easily be translated into something maximally universal. "Kindness", "tolerance", "peace", "save the planet", "cartoons", whatever.

And while it is interesting that communism is sort of an attempt to forestall the inevitable death-collapse, communism is in no way part of a health process but is really a pure disease process. We might, however, say that in otherwise healthy (but naive) people communism is a disease process that takes advantage of the natural healthfulness of naive people by appearing to be part of a health process; this is why so many college students get teary-eyed about social justice causes for example, whereas they don't particularly feel moved by the collapse of the very structures by which their selves and world are actually sustained. This isnt merely because they lack philosophy, and these structures are philosophical -- no, even non-philosophers can experience and feel these philosophical structures, namely as our emotions and our reason, also a certain range of our intuitions. The healthiest communist therefore would be the most naive, the most ignorant of philosophy, but would therefore retain most of his personal healthfulness while also staying true to his communist god, while the slightly more philosophical would quickly lose their healthfulness in the growing need to deny health as such for the sake of the communist god, which continuously demands their blood even as it pretends to smile healthfully while setting them upon the alter.

But no amount of slow or fast feeding of the flame will prevent the total entropic decay that is coming; it is coming because the structures are not being maintained properly, and instead of learning how to maintain the structures and taking care and responsibility for self and world, the communist is literally burning up self and world for the sake of his own little religious idol, the flame of the small category of meaning that acts as a surrogate subjectivity for the short time it will take for him to cease existing.

I want to distinguish between some aspects of the Marxist model of economics and my own.

For Marx, commodities come with a socially necessary value, which is tied to the labor hours needed to make that product. This is "socially necessary" in so far as the labor hours needed to make the commodity match the eventual price of the commodity such that the price reflects, in revenues back to the producer, the total cost of that labor which made the product. If the eventual price is too low then the amount of labor expended to make the product is too high, and vice versa if the eventual price is too high. Marx defines the value of commodities as either use value or exchange value, namely we use commodities or we exchange them for other commodities which we can use; each commodity has its corresponding "socially necessary labor time" to be created, and what matters for Marx is that this labor time matches the eventual price of the commodity which it produces, so that there is a 1:1 match between production and consumption.

This is a very strange view. For one thing it assumes that there is an average worker working with average tools and skill making an average commodity, and it uses this supposed average worker and product to construct the idea of the socially necessary labor time, or the measure of productivity for making a commodity into units of "labor hours". This is obviously a myth that any such universal labor hour exists in any economy, especially in an economy as diverse and complex as our capitalist one. But the temptation of this idea is obviously that it sneaks an "egalitarianism" and "equity" principle into economics: that production of goods and services is only "correct" when the cost of labor doing that productivity matches the eventual price of the sold product. Marx therefore defines profit as that the producer (the owner who owns the means of production, the factories that the laborers work in, etc.) is constantly trying to get more price from his products than the labor cost to his workers for making that product, therefore "stealing" value from the society or economy broadly. It really means that producers are trying to make their products with less socially necessary labor time, namely undercutting their workers and forcing them to work harder in less time. This is "surplus value" as I understand it, and this is what Marx thinks profit is.

Now that you can see how Marx conceived it, let's look at what I think.

In my view, each individual in the economy finds a way to produce values, and the more values he produces the more he will be paid. Human beings need to create value and participate in process of creating value, this is central to who and what we are. We do this in economics but also in every other area of our lives. In other areas of our lives we are "paid" for creating value by positive social affection or regard, friendship, love, mastery and knowledge gained in a given subject, etc., whereas in a job we are paid actual money for creating value. The line between creating value in a job versus creating value outside of a job is a somewhat undefined one, but generally consists of the difference between activities that are intended to produce clear products or services with the intent of selling those products/services in the marketplace for money, versus activities that we do by our free choice without any expectation they would produce sellable products and money. I create value by cleaning my house, but I don't do that because I am going to be paid for it, I do it because I personally gain from the value I create; when the value we create is exported away from ourselves, that is when we get paid money for our value-creating.

There is no "average labor time", no average unit of labor making an average commodity; that is pure nonsense. It wouldn't even be possible to define the actual cost of producing a single product, if you want to think about cost as the cost to the workers who made it. So instead we just focus on the financial cost of making the product, which includes the wages of the worker. Then the product is marketed and sold, and the revenue aggregated to other sold products to produce total revenue. You want total revenue to exceed total financial costs of production, obviously. If it does, then we have what is called profit. Profit is not "stealing" "surplus value" from the "average socially necessary labor cost". Rather, profit is simply the fact that selling a product brings in more dollars than the amount of dollars you used to produce that product, and this can happen for a variety of reasons. Most commonly is that the producer has a surplus of products and of the parts to make those products, whereas the consumer has a deficiency of these things. The producer uses his surplus us parts to make a lot of products, and then he sells these products to storeowners; now the storeowner has his own little surplus, his inventory of items, and he then sells these to consumers in his store; now the consumer has one or two of these items as well. The consumer has less than the store owner, and the store owner has less than the producer; therefore you can see that the surplus moves up the chain of production from consumer to producer.

When we have a surplus, this reduces the relative value of that product for which there is a surplus. Namely its value is skewed because to the person with surplus the value of one of those products is much less than is its value for someone who doesn't have a surplus of that same product. If I go into the store and buy a candy bar, that one candy bar has a lot more value to me than to the store owner, because the store owner has hundreds of those candy bars in the back. I have no candy bars, so assuming that I find a candy bar valuable to me, the addition of one candy bar where I had none is going to represent a gain of value for me over and above the gain of value which the store owner experiences by holding onto that candy bar, even if the store owner personally really values candy bars. Therefore, the store owner can get rid of that candy bar and experience relatively less value-loss than I would experience were I to give it away. To be specific on this mechanism, then: store owners hoard a surplus of items, relatively de-valuing each item in the process, and use this de-valuation to sell these products because the consumer finds more value in the product than does the storeowner with his now-de-valueued products; this value differential is part of what produces profit.

This produced profit is not simply appropriated by the producer or storeowner, rather it is split between producer/storeowner and consumer in the following way: the consumer was required to pay a sum of cash to buy the product, meaning that the value of that cash to the consumer was less than the value of the product he gained by using that cash to obtain the product, therefore the consumer has just experienced a value-increase; the producer or storeowner valued the product they sold less because they happen to have a surplus of that product, therefore they are happy to exchange away the product for some cash, and due to the relative de-valuing of the products of his own surplus of inventory the gain of cash represents a value-increase for the producer or storeowner. Therefore the profit is distributed in part to the consumer and in part to the producer/storeowner. The very fact that the consumer voluntarily exchanges his cash for the product, and the producer/storeowner voluntary exchanges his product for the cash, demonstrates that value-increase is taking place on both sides of the transaction.

How exactly does this occur? The mechanism here is the price of the product. If the storeowner or producer sets the price too high, they are trying to take as much of the profit from the sale to themselves, because the consumer will be expending greater value to purchase the product, but by doing that the producer/storeowner also makes it less likely that the consumer will voluntarily choose to exchange his cash for that product. Therefore the producer/storeowner wants to find a sweet spot in the middle, where the price of the product is high enough to maximize the amount of profit that goes back to the producer/storeowner himself while also maximizing the likelihood that the consumer will voluntarily choose to exchange his cash for the product. This latter half of the equation is the fact that the producer/storeowner is choosing to share the profits with the consumer. He chooses to do so by setting his prices reasonably rather than too high, and of course he 'chooses' to do this because if he did not, then he himself would lose overall value.

For me, there is no "socially necessary" aspect to a commodity, and there is no "unit of average labor hours" involved in creating commodities. Also there is no 1:1 match between the "social cost" and the "social gain" of making and selling a product, in part because it doesn't balance out like that in some kind of universal way, but also because the idea of social cost and social gain is meaningless; there is only direct individual cost and gain, the cost and gain of both the producer and the consumer. Every value-transaction involves a cost and a gain, and the whole point of value is that in this transaction there is more gain than cost. This is how economics works in so far as economic transactions are voluntary. But as soon as economic transactions become obligatory and coerced, it no longer becomes possible to say that each transaction is producing net value increase.

The idea of balancing total social cost of production with total social gain is just insane. Individuals balance this for themselves in their own value estimations, there is no "society itself" which is balancing anything, rather society is simply the emergent effect of the sum-total of all those individual valuing estimations and value-transactions. it doesn't need to be "balanced" at all, as if profit were somehow evil, as Marx thought; Marx also thought that ownership of capital was evil, in so far as the owner was not the one laboring with that capital to make products. This is also idiotic, because ownership is an individual responsibility and requires the capacity to make coherent values estimations on behalf of maintaining and using that property which is owned, and if you split ownership too much among too many people you lose this coherence and cohesion of maintaining-using the property, as the individual perspectives and decisions of too many people cloud the decision-making process; also, when you divide out profit from capital use among too many people the relative value-gain for each person becomes too small to actually matter that much, which means you actually dilute the value-gain by having a communist model of ownership of capital ("workers communes", "co-ops", etc.). So naturally in such communist arrangements what matters becomes maintaining the "balance" rather than focusing on the value-gain.

Ownership is just an ontological extension of the self, of the category of the individual. What we own is what we bless with the virtue of our own valuing, and force into the sphere of our valuations. This also represents a natural value-increase, since the individual self-valuing will make use of his property according to his own values and will naturally try to maximize value by doing this. The more property someone has, the more they are able to transact economically for products, and also the more they are able to produce new products. This translates into a direct increase of value on both the consumer and producer side. And so long as transactions are still voluntary, this also necessarily translates into total value-gain on both sides of any economic transaction, again because as I explained above the profit from any such transaction has to be shared between producer and consumer.

I also want to experiment with another thought here; I wonder if in a society where for most people the value they create is exported away from them, there develops a psychological tendency to under-value activities and effort that would produce only immediate value for oneself... in other words, do people become lazy and stop caring for themselves and that which they own/have responsibility for simply because they have been psychological reformulated to only care about values that are cash-exchangeable?

The psychological motive-force behind going to work is different than is the psychological motive-force behind doing activities freely on our own. It is true that in either case we are motivated by values and by increasing values, but the way in which this occurs in either case seems different to me. People often "drudge" through a job in order to get the paycheck, and they often do the minimum necessary to get the job done or be considered a good worker by their boss; some people have intrinsic motivation to do a great job regardless of the pay, and these people end up producing more value for the company and therefore over time are more likely to get promoted into a position where they can be more effective at gaining value for the company (assuming that the means by which this worker is over-performing are transferrable into a new position somewhere higher up the corporate ladder; sometimes this isn't the case, and you just have a really good and motivated worker in a warehouse or production floor doing a lot more work than everyone else, but not really getting the benefit from that personally since his motivation/skill isn't seen as transferrable into a new position, such as supervisor for example).

Anyway, I notice that a lot of people are not very good at caring for what they own/have responsibility for. Their homes, their families, their cars, their relationships, their computers, their bank accounts... whatever it might be, there is often a lack of motivation for maintaining these things in good condition. I wonder if this is partly because the "drudgery" aspect of going to a job has been transferred to the other valuing activities in our lives which are not our job: when we psychologically adapt to working a hellish job that we only tolerate because we want the paycheck, does this also psychologically impinge upon our motivation to value and upkeep things in other areas of our lives? Does the resignation and drudgery spread? Probably it does.

The opposite would be that if a person has a job they really like and get a lot of value out of, and does not feel like resignation and drudgery at all, then the effect of de-motivating in one's personal life would not be the case.

It should also be noted that this same principle of splitting profit between producer and consumer is also at work between producer and laborer when the products are being made. The worker or laborer is engaged in a process of creating values, of making something, of applying his personal work-effort and skill in the construction of something, and he is using the tools and capital of the producer to achieve this; the producer in turn must supply those tools and capital as well as an environment for using them, and of course must also supply the wages to the worker. There is the same logic at work here as with selling the product, namely that the profit is split between producer and worker, again because of the voluntary nature of the transactions: the worker chooses to give some of his time and energy to make the products, and the producer chooses how much to pay the worker; if the producer does not pay the worker enough, the worker will leave, but if the producer pays the worker too much then the viability of the company will falter, screwing both worker and producer in the process. So the total value-gain from the worker using the producer's capital to make new products is naturally split as profit for both the worker and the producer, in the form of the wages paid to the worker by the producer.

This mechanism around how prices of products or wages are set is really where the 'magic' of profit comes from. There is no "theft" going on here, unless someone is conscripted into working against their will. Of course people need money to live, so there is a natural pressure of necessity to have some kind of job. Marx thought this meant that workers were de facto enslaved, whereas capital owners could sit back without working and just charge rent on their properties, either physical land to live or farm, or factories and tools for the workers to use in their jobs. This is true to a certain extent that capital ownership does work like this, but it isn't so black and white as Marx thought. The fact is that whatever we own becomes our responsibility and task to manage and maintain as best as possible to increase production of new values, and we all do this to whatever extent we are able based on the amount of things we own. The owner of a factory also does this, and needs to maintain and manage his factory and all of his associated capital; he does this by hiring managers and maintenance staff, in other words he needs to use some of his own profit to inject back into the economic enterprise to make sure it remains viable in the future. The worker has no responsibility for the maintenance of the factory or associated tools/capital, therefore does not need to use any of his profit (wages) on that.

If a person acquires enough wealth to be able to "rent" it out as work or land to farm/live on, this simply means that one person is valuing a large segment of social and economic reality. This is good in so far as having something fall within the value sphere of a self-valuing is better than leaving it out, all things being equal. A tree in the forest is fine, but it is better if that tree is part of the land which someone owns; this is because ownership means inclusion within a valuing sphere of a self-valuing, which represents a net increase of value in total throughout the entire system or world, and means that now the tree is able to be maintained or cared for (valued) by a self-valuing in a way that formerly it could not have been. Even if some self-valuings will end up making bad choices with what they own, which happens of course, and squandering value, it is still the case that having this system is better than not having it, and instances of bad choices serve to inform self-valuing the next time around, teaching us about how better to value.

Ownership isn't evil, and having an owner of the factory you work for doesn't mean you are a slave, or that the owner isn't working or expending any personal work-effort in the task of maintaining and caring for that which he owns. In fact, it is a huge benefit to the worker that the owner is willing to share his property with the worker, so that the worker can engage in a process of creating values which he otherwise would not have been able to engage in, and of course (due to the voluntary nature of this transacting) the worker also gains the wages from doing that. Any profits made by a company are necessarily shared with the workers, otherwise there would be no workers working there. And the fact that a company or owner makes billions of dollars in profit is only an illusion, because that billion you see is concentrated into a single person or small group of people at the ownership level or at the level of the company itself as single entity, whereas the rest of the profits have already been distributed amongst each of the workers in that company as well as in the costs of maintaining and caring for the capital of the company itself. Saying "well this company made a billion dollars in profit last year but only pays its workers $12 an hour!" doesn't factor in how the total profits of the company are being shared amongst the however many workers there are, plus going back into investing in the business and capital itself. Again, if the worker was not receiving any value from working there, any share of the profit, then that worker would not be working there.

And if a job does end up paying its workers so low that they are really not sharing in the profits of that company, then those workers can always find new jobs which treat them better. This is because there is a natural incentive for companies to not abuse their workers like that, since a company with better workers is going to make more profits, all things being equal. Therefore the more companies that are abusing their workers with artificially low wages, the more a natural incentive for other companies to share more of the profits with workers in order to attract more and better workers to their own companies.

Something I wrote as part of a conversation with Parodites, this is very applicable to this thread and our current situation in the world today:


Surplus capital is just wealth, a pile of money. That can be created in many ways, mostly by profit. Profit isn't created just by exploiting geographic disparities, but by the mutual exchanges of value between people and organizations, and between areas too such as north and south in the general sense. Each person, organization, area, has something others do not, or has productive capacity others do not, or has desires others do not, and therefore these little differences will always produce potential profitability that can be discovered and harnessed by a free market system.

It is all based on how hard someone works, and by extension how profitable a business or enterprise can be. The more someone works, the more they produce; the more they produce, the more the are able to trade that with others maximizing that value-differential between them in order to produce profit which, at a certain point, becomes wealth. Wealth is then "surplus capital", just a surplus of... capital, that is all it is. It is not some mystical sort of thing Marx talked about. The only "surplus" as in a true excess about it, is in the fact that it has to be produced by an excessive productive process, by concerted effort within such a process.

Value is produces in one of three ways, which I wrote about here last year or something: 1, taking existing resources and applying work-effort upon them to change them into something of human value (wood into a chair, for example, or into a house); 2, extracting more resources out of the earth and making them available to the processes above in (1); and 3, refining the efficiency of existing productive processes of (1) and/or (2).

Those are literally the only ways anything is ever created, and this is simply what the economy means, combined with the fact that people trade around their resources and products and labor. Work-effort is a commodity too, like any other product, because it is something that is literally produced, by a worker, and has a relative value attached to it, a value that cannot be objectively determined but must be allowed to be indirectly determined by the free market of everyone freely exchanging with everyone else based on their own individual value-determinations and how willing they are to do, sell, or buy something based on their own inclinations and situations.

So profit can be and is produced without any kind of superstate system, there is no need whatsoever for the State to come in and create monopolies that acquire trillion of dollars to themselves; that is false wealth, because that wealth was stolen, not created. The state is theft via taxation, and the state is also theft via legalizing or tacitly allowing monopolies by putting the State's force of backing (literally force, since that is what government is, the legal use of force) behind such entities which would otherwise not be allowed to continue to exist in a free market system, since the fundamental and philosophical basis of such a system is competition. An individual person can become immensely wealthy, but an individual corporation or business can do that and be broken up into smaller entities set in competition with one another, just as two or more individuals cannot merge together to form a super-individual set against other individuals, so it makes no sense to allow businesses to grow so massive that they become super-entities against which nothing else can reasonably compete. That is the idea behind anti-trust, which helps to ensure the continuation of the free market system against uses of force.

The inevitability I see is that eventually you will have some people and some businesses that become super-rich. What do you do about this? In the case of individuals, nothing at all; in the case of businesses, you break them up into smaller entities, separate their internal capital-productive structure like pulling it apart, redistributing it back into the larger system as a whole. This does not destroy surplus capital, because the surplus still exists, now in the form of several rather than just a single entity, and also because in my view capital must always be owned by an individual person and not by a corporation. A corporation or business does not really exist, not really, it is just a complex extension of objects subject to the direction of human beings. Such a complex extension of objects cannot ever "own" anything and has no personhood, no subjectivity, no ontic integrity, and so should not be seen as something which can "own capital". Individuals are the ones who actually own things, even in our weird system where corporations are allowed to own capital directly, in the end the corporation is still owned by individuals, i.e. shareholders or actual owners on paper.

So anyway, I see no reason why profits cannot and would not be produced without State interventions and globalist debt systems. What the State and these globalist debt systems actually do is siphon off trillions of dollars from the markets, from the 1-3 productive processes I mentioned above, and from individual people via taxation and via selling the people cheap products that the people become habituated to purchase against their own interest due to the effects of propaganda (advertising), so that all this siphoned off wealth, literally hundreds of trillions of dollars, get pushed upward above the market system, above the level of the people, and sits up there at the top able to be disposed of by a relatively small group of super-elites, so called, who are only "elite" because they have succeeded in stealing all of that wealth in the first place.

The international institutions, the fiat debt-based reserve banks, it is all a scam, it is not necessary and it serves no good purpose for humanity. It is the cause of most wars, most poverty, most failed states, most addiction, most corruption, most loss of freedom, most death of people, most growth of the big brother tyrannical world-government system that views humans as nothing more than means to ends, etc. etc. etc. etc. There is absolutely no reason why such a super-system needs to exist or should exist. It is not necessary for the productive processes to form and exist, to produce profit, to distribute profits amongst the people, to create wealth for the entire society and also to create super-rich individuals. All of that exists and would exist without any kind of tyrannical State. Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to see what is happening and what has happened in the formation of this tyrannical State, which is now an International State, and at this point there is very little anyone can do about it because it has already stolen those hundreds of trillions of dollars and taken over pretty much any entity and organization that would be important to exposing this rigged system.

I don't want to steal human wealth, give it to a few insane unelected super-elites, let them push technocratic tyranny over the earth and form a singularity into which everyone will be permanently absorbed losing his or her consciousness, identity, meaning, etc. to the loss of the human future. That is what we are talking about. There is the sort of system I describe with real capitalism, which guarantees a future, and then there is the superstate elitist system that does not guarantee a future.

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regarding anti trust, it would give control to the law, administered by judges, not give control to “the State”. the determination if any one corporation becomes so large as to effectively stifle (use of force) the free competition options of a large section of the rest of the economy. that’s a simple legal issue, it has nothing to do with giving the State power. it has precisely to do with giving the people power, under the law, to administer that values test according to the legal system which is subject to the people. because if it were the other way around as you are suggesting, then literally every administration of law would be handing over power to the State, and that isn’t the case. proper laws are based on rationality and principle and merely administered by the State which is the only legitimate function of the State, to administer by force these basic laws of rationality and principle and at behest of the people.

one mega corporation owning everything is stupid, anyone can recognize that. it’s like the free market, you can’t objectivity quantify the value of a product, value is emergent and subjective. so you write laws with this in mind and establish your principles and reasoning and then let that work itself out in individual court cases. it’s not that difficult really.

as for surplus value, rent is not anything special. to rent one’s property to another is to give something of value to someone else who doesn’t own it, for their and your own benefit. renting a farm means you give someone something they don’t have, access to farm land and equipment, so they can maximize their own work-effort in better ways than they could otherwise, and the profits (value gains) are shared to both parties. debt is quite different, debt is borrowing future value into the present moment, which can be good in small scales when the borrowed value will, in the present, produce more net value than the loss of future value plus cost of interest on that debt, so everybody wins; but debt in the large scale is used to compensate for the fiat debt banking system which steals literally trillions of dollars out of the people and their economies, so that this theft must be compensated for somehow so no one notices. that is where massive government debt comes in, because such debts are not used as i describe above to borrow from the future a little into the present to produce more net gain, but simply to offset the theft that has already occurred, to cover up the fact of that theft so no one noticed it.

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Continuing on this subject, regarding wages and capital ownership vs. workers,


...in a free market system labor is a transaction that both parties need to agree to, and can be terminated by either party at any time. Therefore it is going to benefit both parties, if both have to agree to it. One does not just agree to be a slave, each person has the responsibility to try and find the best possible employment situation he/she can get, and again it has to be mutual on both ends. No one has a right to force an employer or the government to give them a good job or give them money to live off of, we each have that responsibility ourselves. That is how it works. So when the farm worker is working the farmer's land, and the farm worker is getting paid, that payment is not "slavery" but the exact opposite of slavery; the wages to the worker are compensation agreed upon by the owner and the worker, because the worker cannot earn more money to himself without borrowing the capital of the owner and working on it (otherwise he would just go do that other thing which earned him more money, whatever it is, and it would be another kind of job.. or crime, those are really the only two option. there is charity too, I guess), AND the owner cannot generate more value from his capital than by employing the worker, because if the owner could do that then he would simply do it (i.e. use other workers, or sell his capital off, liquidate it).

That is why I do not agree with this whole marxist notion that profit is exploitation. Profit is generated not by the fact that a capitalist arbitrarily prices his product higher than it cost to produce it, that is not the mechanism by which prices are set. Prices are set based on what another person is willing to pay, that is the main factor, and this willingness to pay a certain price or not is itself determined by a lot of other complex processes such as supply and demand, perceived value, actual value, availability of discretionary income at the time, etc. To me, saying with marx that any pricing of a product over and above what it cost to produce it is somehow theft or exploitation, is insane, because that isn't at all how pricing operates and if we just assume everyone should or could set the price at exactly what it took to make the product then nothing would ever get made. The "profit" (extra value created by the fact that another person is willing to trade with you more value for something, in your own eyes, than value it took you to produce that something) is merely a symbol, like money itself; profit is a symbol that value is being created, money is a symbol of that value which was created.

The worker also is an owner, namely of his own labor-power, his intellect-power, his general work effort capacity. He may not own any land or capital, but if he works and applies himself then he can acquire some. That is the whole point of the economy, of a free market system, it allows people to better themselves. No one "just has" capital or wealth or property, it doesn't magically appear out of nowhere, it had to be generated at some point in the past. So the difference between the worker's situation and the owner's situation is not some kind of sign of unfairness or inevitability in the system. The only inevitability is if a person decides not to apply themselves to utilize their own individual work-effort and desires in a free market economy to end up bettering themselves. If they choose not to do that, for whatever reason, then that is on them.

Of course if they don't have access to a free market economic system that is different, but that still has nothing to do with marx, in fact it is because of marx that free market economic systems are not more common around the world.

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The "cost" is not the value of your skill and physical exertion, that is not what cost represents. The "cost" represents the perceives value of what you made to other people. The value of the product you made is set not by you, but by the person to whom you are attempting to transact it. That is the interesting thing about value, each product has a different value for each person. To you, yes the value is basically what it cost you to produce it in combination with what you can sell it for; to the person who buys it, the value is whatever value-gain the product will give that person's life, minus the cost to purchase it from you.

The capitalist owner does not "pay you less than that excess" or less than the cost of components, that is not what wages are. Wages are a redistribution of the profits generated by mutual work on the part of the worker and the owner. The owner has responsibility for maintaining his capital and land and productive processes, not the worker; it is the owner who pays for all the bills, the legal, the insurance, the infrastructure, HR, taxes, all of that, and then has to also upkeep his own property at the same time. Most owners of businesses work 15 hours a day, they are not just lazy fat cats who sit around doing nothing, because it actually takes a lot of time and effort to upkeep something as large and complex as a business or arable land. But back to wages, the wage is simply a redistribution of value produced such that this redistribution is the minimum required to get you to continue producing on the owner's capital, namely you are satisfied enough with the wages to continue choosing to work there, and the owner is satisfied enough with the value you produce based on your work, minus the wages he is paying you. It is a win-win situation. At least in a free market economy where you could have access to many other potential jobs and potential kinds of jobs, and where you can learn new skills and knowledge and educate yourself and all that.

[As for the employer continuously generating/stealing surplus-value out of the worker ad infinitum and never allowing the worker to rise above that situation], no, because you can save your money and acquire your own capital to yourself, you can quit your job for a better job. People do that all the time. The entire middle class is based on the reality that you can work hard and save up and elevate yourself and your family into better conditions, you can acquire capital over time and end up becoming a capital owner if you want to.. you can start a business and hire people. Again, people do that all the time.

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I am posting these here because I think this is all very important to the study of globalism. Globalism is basically the denial of everything I am saying here, and not only the denial but the deliberate hatred of and attempt to destroy everything I am saying here. Globalism is the system that wants every person without freedom, totally enslaved, without possibility of improving his or her life except by sucking off the globalists (in some cases, quite literally). Globalism is a tyranny the scope of which humanity has never been faced with before, and China is just a template, a test case model of what tyranny can do in a closed society with access to advanced tech. Just wait, that is what the western world is also being geared up for.

Anyway. Continuing the dialogue of previous posts,



Value isn't arbitrary subjective impression, I don't think that either. It is relative and tied to the individual person who values. It is the individual person capable of valuing, who makes an ascertain of relative value in the moment, namely "is this product worth the cost I have to pay?" That is a somewhat unconscious process with conscious aspects to it. Value is relative to the valuer, I do not believe in any kind of absolute value of value, in any objective value so called. Value literally means to that entity capable of valuing, and if we try to give objective value of something then we are basically undercutting that process whereby the entity capable of valuing determines the value of something to itself, which is how it works because as I said, everything has a different value to different people.

Commodity fetishism is a stupid concept, in my view, because while yes people can indeed fetishize consumption and become addicted to materialistic hedonistic consumerism, the idea of commodity fetishism goes much deeper than this and is basically saying that any valuing of products is "fetishizing" them unless you simply transact at the most minimal level possible namely the cost to produce something. So basically we should all be bartering for minimal value, with no one ever generating any profit, and all values ought to be "objectively" assigned so that individual valuers are not able to assign their own relative value to things. To me, that is idiotic. I despise marx with a passion, I really do see that marx has ruined humanity.

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It isn't arbitrary subjective impression, I don't think that either. It is relative and tied to the individual person who values. It is the individual person capable of valuing, who makes an ascertain of relative value in the moment, namely "is this product worth the cost I have to pay?" That is a somewhat unconscious process with conscious aspects to it. Value is relative to the valuer, I do not believe in any kind of absolute value of value, in any objective value so called. Value literally means to that entity capable of valuing, and if we try to give objective value of something then we are basically undercutting that process whereby the entity capable of valuing determines the value of something to itself, which is how it works because as I said, everything has a different value to different people.

Commodity fetishism is a stupid concept, in my view, because while yes people can indeed fetishize consumption and become addicted to materialistic hedonistic consumerism, the idea of commodity fetishism goes much deeper than this and is basically saying that any valuing of products is "fetishizing" them unless you simply transact at the most minimal level possible namely the cost to produce something. So basically we should all be bartering for minimal value, with no one ever generating any profit, and all values ought to be "objectively" assigned so that individual valuers are not able to assign their own relative value to things. To me, that is idiotic. I despise marx with a passion, I really do see that marx has ruined humanity.

Also regarding commodity fetishism, it is just a fact of how subjectivity and psyche work that we end up supplementing and expanding our subjective identity based on the things we own, the things we surround ourselves with. This is because these are aspects of ourselves because we choose to acquire them, so these objects, "commodities", symbolize something about ourselves to ourselves, like looking into a mirror. Also, products we purchase can add more value to our lives, they can give us more time, or expand our scope of power and influence, or give us new experiences and new possibilities, or stave off anxiety or suffering or want, etc. This whole idea of a blanket concept for fetishizing commodities totally ignores all of this. I really hate the leftist critiques of economics, despite that they aren't real critiques at all but just a bunch of idiotic non-philosophical whining about nothing at all except their own feelings, which aren't even feelings but basically butt-hurt and preprogrammed responses of a very low order, this whole manner of thinking is essentially a death cult, in my view. There is so much philosophically interesting depth to things like work, the economy, commodities, and it all entwines together with psychology and philosophy, we barely even take an honest look at it, and yet marx and his suck off buddies just dismiss it all with a few fancy words. What a fucking joke.

I am 10000000 times smarter than fucking marx or any of his suck off fuckoff buddies. Fuck them all. I should be the one writing the world-renowned texts on economics and philosophy and psychology, and how these all entwine, not these fucking worthless "critical theorists". Fuck them and their idiotic systems of death.

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Technology allowed workers and owners (owners are workers too, incidentally, they just perform different job functions than traditional "workers" (wage-earners)) to become more efficient, yes, and this increase in efficiency translated directly into addition of value, because now the same productive process could produce greater scope of the same products, and more sophisticated products, all of which represents an increase in value because other people, valuers, will appraise them accordingly. People want more products, and better products, and they want them cheaper. That is just a fact. So since I define value as whatever a valuer assigns as value to something, this all means that technological development quite literally unlocked totally new avenues of value into the world. More value is quite literally created.

And that new value is not evenly distributed between wage earner and capital owner, because the onus for distributing it falls primarily on the owner, since it is the owner who can dispense with his property and capital, and pay wages, according to his own free choice. Therefore he will keep more of that new added value from technological development/industrialization to himself, rather than just give it away for free to workers who are already freely choosing to work at his property. Giving them additional wages over and above what they are already willing to work for would need to be based on something other than producing more value due to increasing productive efficiency, it would be based on the direct value of the workers to the entire productive process. See, this is where marx gets it all totally wrong, he thinks in "objective value" that for example the price of a product should be just an expression of what it cost someone to make it, or that if a capital owner refines his capital productive process via industrialization this automatically means he should pay his workers a higher wage, because the capital machinery he owns is now generating more value -- no, it does not fucking work like that. Marx is an insane idiot, he could not see even the most basic facts of how these things work. It is not 'objective' like that, and in the case of wages paid, wages will increase only based on if the worker himself has more value to add to the process, and/or if the owner wants to attract better labor and compete with other businesses for quality labor, and/or the owner is trying to incentivize workers to stay on at his business long-term because that way they become better workers and he cuts down on the cost of hiring new people.

Just because a capital owner introduces new industrial machines and lets his workers use these, thereby the workers are producing value more efficiently than before, does not somehow magically mean the workers should be paid more wages. There is no inherent connection there. The industrial machines are part of the owner's capital, as is everything else he already had pre-industrialization. It's like saying that wages should go up every time the capital owner adds more value to his own capital, and regardless of what the worker is actually doing. It makes no sense. But wages do rise, for the reasons I mentioned above; and in terms of the added value from the increase in efficiency of industrialization, this added value is not just simply hoarded by the capitalist himself but is distributed out into the entire economy, which we clearly see in the rising wealth and standard of living of the average person if you look at it from before industrialization up until today.


I agree that we need to figure out our desires over time and by trial and error. That is just a part of life, it is what we should be doing anyway. And it is what we all do, all the time. Desires we had when we were younger were based more on ignorance compared to desires we have today, it is just a learning process.

So I more or less interpret the Loss of Being as basically the fact that we are not born perfect but we must work and experience and discover and figure things out, by trial and error and over our entire lifetimes, achieving a little bit closer to perfect all the time but never getting there, because there is no "perfect" to achieve. There is simply better (or worse), and that is the basic question facing every human being: will he, over time, orient his life toward betterment of himself or not? This can mean in terms of knowledge, philosophy, economics, relationships, emotions and psychology, artistic production, or anything else. But life is a kind of endless climb for something higher, especially human life is this, and I agree we are born into this basic state and there is no escaping it. To idealize any kind of perfect state either "before the fall" or at the far end of eternity, is really fucking stupid.

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i see a ton of disconnects in all this marxist theory. for example the two i already mentioned, where i said there is no connection there, and now i see a third disconnect in the idea that the empty center of politics is replaced by the idealized commodity for which we strive when we purchase a product, a specified coke for your [Parodites'] example; what we are purchasing is an experience as well as a product, there is no product in a vacuum without the experience of it. this is why separating the product out from the experience makes no sense to me, it is another error of false objectification. idealization is how thought and desire work, it is how subjective experience works, we interpose our own mental images and ideals as possible, condensed, or reified states of being with the object of our desire, and that is quite literally how we experience the object. fantasy isn’t something we can separate from human conscious experience. rather, i agree with you about the example of the coke can in terms of advertising because advertising just takes advantage of this intrinsic idealizing aspect of human conscious experience, but the advertising nor the images it creates nor the additional desire and idealism it produces in us are the same as our own basic capacity for idealized conscious experience. ads just play on that, raise and distort it a little.

you said that the worker’s relation to the industrial tech producing added value is stolen or taken by the capitalist because the worker is producing more work now with that tech rather than without it (my paraphrase), but that’s no argument for higher wages to that worker. the worker needs access to that industrial tech to even be productive like that, and that tech is owned by the capital owner. it is all part of the same thing. with or without extra industrial tech the basic process of worker to owner relation is the same, and the degree of productivity added by industrial refinement of efficiency doesn’t change that in any fundamental way. therefore i don’t see any kind of theft of surplus value going on, because without access to renting that tech and capital the worker isn’t going to be creating any surplus value to begin with.

i don’t see why refinement of existing productive process somehow leads to worker exploitation if the worker’s wages don’t rise commensurate to the new added value produced as a result of increased efficiency in the productive process, again there is no connection there. the worker does not “own” the value he produces when he works for someone, he has no right to it because it isn’t his property to begin with. his wages aren’t based on some right he has to the products of his labor when he borrows someone else’s machinery and makes something, this idea of there being such a right is another disconnect; rather his wages are just another price versus cost value assessment that has to occur on the side of both parties, worker and employer, and both have to agree to the terms in question. that’s it. there is no more right a worker has to the value he makes using someone elsw’s property than there is a right for a consumer to purchase someone else’s product or for a seller to have a right that someone buys his product at a certain price.

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“...it means that now the worker is not being paid for the surplus beyond his physical labor: he is selling his labor-power, relative to what the machine can be used to get out of him.”, no, i disagree with this because that’s not what wages are based on. wages are only based on workers production of value from the perspective of the employer, and that’s only part of the equation. again, wages are a commodity transaction, work for wages, and the value produced or not is secondary to that. there is no connection there.

also, the worker is also gaining extra surplus value from the employer too, because without access to the employer’s capital the worker won’t make as much value, and won’t be compensated for that’s value. he is compensated for the value he makes only at the discretion of the employer who hires him and not out of some mystical connection between the worker’s effort and the actual amount of value he produces by renting access to the employer’s equipment.

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i don’t see it as a problem at all, this lack of integration, because none existed to begin with, and because it is precisely this lack which allows value to disperse out into the economy as a whole. if work was integrated in the way you mention between worker and owner then no value would escape the productive process of work, and society wouldn’t raise over time, no value could be added and no employer would employ anyone because there would be no consumers to purchase products.

it is precisely the lack of “integration” that is allowing for economics itself.



there is no integration because even if all three grow at the same rate, which i don’t think we have any way of actually determining anyway, that would only mean that no value is escaping the productive process into larger society. if that were the case then no one would work, because economy would be impossible. even if all three are more or less flattened to the same level, there being minimal skew between them, that isn’t a good thing, and it’s only an approximation anyway since the value gained on either end, by worker andowner, are not commensurate. there is no qualitative link between the wages a worker gains and the products an owner receives from the worker working with the owner’s capital.

an analogy: if i paint a mural on someone’s building i don’t own the mural nor the building, the owner of the building does and he can paint over my mural if he wants to. so much more so don’t i own it if i had to use his own paint supplies to paint on his wall, which would be an even more accurate analogy to how employment works.



In that case of family farms, they had to work 16 hours a day just to produce enough to maintain themselves, there wasn't a lot of extra value that they could use to move upward. And because of that "integration" society as a whole didnt rise much either, because there was very little extra values escaping the productive process out into larger society. A reduction to minimal of efficiency of productive process just means a minimal of value created compared to cost to produce that value, which again isn't a good thing. Luckily we did use technology to improve efficiency, 100 times as you said, probably much more than that. But the worker has no right to the products of his work if he does not own the materials and capital machines he uses to make that product. I think this is where we disagree the most.

If a worker owns his land and supplies and capital, like in the example of a family farm, then yes he owns the product of his labor. But if he is merely renting access to these from someone else, then no, and his work-effort becomes literally a product that he sells to the owner, and the owner and worker must agree on a price for that product (the worker's labor). The product does not magically become owned by whoever assembles it, even if just one worker manages to assemble something from start to finish, which is almost never the case, because individual workers only do part of the process.

Thus there is no "right to the product of one's labor" if that product is made with someone else's stuff. If such a right existed that would be quite literally theft. If I magically own the building wall I paint a mural on, even if the owner gave me consent to paint it there, that would make no sense, and the owner of the building wouldn't agree to let me paint a mural if he agrees that I would then own his wall. It just makes no sense. This is why I so fundamentally disagree with marx and that whole line of thinking. You and I agree that marx's solutions are not actually solutions, but we seem to disagree on the problem marx identifies; you think it is a problem, I don't. I see no intrinsic evil in the capitalist system whereby if you want to rent access to someone else's materials and capital productive machinery then you do not somehow now own the product you helped to produce. Rather, in such cases, you simply agree to sell your labor power as a product to someone else, because by doing that you can earn more value to yourself in wages than you could produce value for yourself otherwise, without being employed in that job. I don't see how this can be refuted, it is just the way it works. And it is much better than trying to return to an "integrated" model which would destroy the motivation to even work or employ people, since in such a state of integration profits would only pay for the cost of the product to be made, since the owner would be paying the worker so much in wages as to not himself, as owner, acquire additional value beyond the cost to produce the product plus its value in the price he fetches for it in the marketplace, and if that were the case then there would be no incentive for the owner to employ anyone. So the higher we raise wages relative to that skew in profit to the owner, the more we undermine the entire structure of the economic system by undermining the incentive for owners to employ anyone; and most people can't own a farm or own the entire means to produce products, that isn't realistic and even if it were, most people don't want to put in all the effort and time it takes to upkeep something like a farm. I would rather work 8 hours a day 5 days a week and receive wages, than own a farm and work 16 hours a day 7 days a week, even if the latter would mean I was not having my labor contribute to the creation of surplus value which is escaping me. This escaping of surplus value is precisely what allows societies and economies to rise, what allows wealth and quality of life to improve for the average person.

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The worker still retains his right to his labor-value, no one is forcing him to work at any particular job. He has to choose, freely, to work somewhere, he has to agree to the wages he is paid. The fact that he is producing so much more value now because he is renting access to advanced industrial machines doesn't mean he is now somehow losing his right to how own labor-value, because he didn't have a right to any specific degree or level of value-production to begin with. If he did, that would indicate he has some right to use those machines which are increasing his productive efficiency, and no such right exists.

His right to his own labor-value is preserved in the capitalist system because he agrees to the wages he is paid for selling his work-effort as a product to the employer. He can stop working at any time and go get a different job, or not work, or try to produce products entirely on his own means with his own capital, but he typically does not do that because most people do not own enough capital to do that, and even if they did most people do not want to put in all the additional time and effort it requires to produce something entirely on one's own. That would be horribly inefficient, as in the case of old pre-industrial farming etc.

I simply see no evil in this capitalist arrangement. I think it is inherently good for everyone, all other things being equal and looked at over time. I am quite glad to be able to work and receive wages rather than slave away at a plot of land, and I am quite happy not to have to go through the extra time and effort to market and sell the products I help produce at my job. We gain so much time, freedom, by the worker-employer relationship, compared to the older "integrated" model, so I cannot see how this is in any way a bad thing. Besides, while I agree that we own our own labor-value, that does not magically translate into actual value produced; we have to produce it ourselves, we have to apply our labor-value somehow. There is no right to being able to apply our own labor-value in any certain way.



to [the idea of the underlying metaphysics of this hegelian-marxist approach that originates in this idea of Being without Loss] yes I can agree that this globalist mixed model state capitalism, not really capitalism at all, leads to that end you mention. i would say that if we had stuck to true capitalist principles this “end of history” would never have happened. progress may have been slowed down a small bit (or maybe sped up even) and we would have had closer alignment between capital and human being, so that we could more responsibly use the technology we create and not simply worship it and want to dissolve ourselves into it as people want to do today.

to me the underlying metaphysics are a huge problem as well. i can see that traced through Luther to Kant to Hegel to Marx to Nietzsche to all the postmodern bullshit we have to deal with today. it is a deep error to be sure. and even though i’ve articulated the way to set up economics without such an error, and you are articulating how to look at psychology and philosophy beyond the error, i’m not sure it will really change. the error is so deeply embedded at this point. i wonder what practically speaking would it take to actually root out such a deep and pernicious, nearly ubiquitous error? i don’t even know.