Trump and Metaphysics: A Continuing Thought-stream

Trump just agreed to pay 25 million dollars to former students of his "university", because they claim they were scammed. But he apparently admits no wrongdoing....

The stock market responds primarily to one thing: futures speculation. This is why a single rumor can raise or lower the market by hundreds of points. We saw what happened pre-2008 with stock market being grossly inflated due to speculating on false/untrue values, mortgage backed derivatives. Problem is that this bubble never fully burst, because US taxpayers bailed out the speculators rather than make them bear the cost of their errors in value-judgment.

Stocks are a game. Yes there is some realness behind it, obviously, but also a ton of untruth. Markets like this are operating now on super-condensed time scales for values-determining, they do not take the long term value into consideration. They are hyper-focused on the immediate present which is why rumors and wild speculation causes massive shifts up and down in stock prices. It's not a good system, especially when you realize that computers are trading most shares at millions of transactions a second now.

I'll be glad if Trump brings back some US manufacturing such as Ford or Apple. Obviously that is good... up to a point.

Wall Street and the stock market respond to security. When Trump won it plummeted for a day because they like secure bets and everyone was betting on Clinton. But after seeing for a while that Trump is not actually insane and was acting normally and being gracious, security was restored and everything went up. Also, settling is not an agreement to wrong-doing. Ie. he's the president now and doesn't have time to go through the court system arguing with people unsatisfied with him.


Marx says the mode of production creates a social structure that conditions subjectivity and establishes a class struggle, alienating individuals from the totality of human nature carried by the species- this alienation is codified by the division of labor- Marx thinks we are all philosophers, lawyers, poets, farmers and doctors all at once and we are simply forced to enter limited specific social roles because of all this. Smith says there exists a free market in which competition determines the class struggle and division of labor, and in a kind of opposite view goes on to say that, instead of being everything in essence and that we can only be limited socially, that we are nothing in essence and can only gain socially, theoretically gaining in all roles just as in Marx we can theoretically be excluded from all roles.

In reality, going off Braudel and world-systems, I recognize that geography and climate dictate the existence of certain zones on the earth that are naturally conducive only to slave labor and mining, and temperate zones like feudal Europe for industry. Then with America an inter-regional continent was found for the first time. The feudal state could only become a hub of export and import internationally between those specific slave/labor and industrial zones, and thus the nobility could not collect excess goods from the serfdom that it could export and turn into profit- the feudal state was a hub of import and export from the mining and raw goods of a slave zone to a temperate industrial zone, and fueled itself with the raw goods in order to keep the serfdom producing. All the feudal state could do is take things produced in a slave zone, and acting as a hub export them to a temperate zone where they made shit with them, taking a sample of the materials themselves and fueling their serfdom; but the colonists exploited American geography and instead of just doing that produced something like tobacco in one inter-regional zone, moved it to another zone in the region, ie. the north, and colonialized the region, utilized its inter-regional disparities to create a surplus value, goods that the colonists did not require themselves and could export to other places in the world. The essence of capitalistic profit is this, that the profit can be reserved and compounded and is exportable, as was this tertiary capital the colonists were producing and could freely export. A colony can only exist in this sense, as a pseudo-independence inter-regional economy producing excess exportable tertiary capital. It is not physically possible to produce such a colony in a zone like Africa that is conducive only to slave-labor and mining.

Every human has a working-value, a basic life-energy or essence capable of sustaining existence- their single organic existence and which conditions subjectivity instead of the superstructure and mode of production: poiesis is when labor is performed by a subjectivity conformed to the limitation of its basic life-energy.

But with the discovery of the new continent, an interregional system appeared because of our geography and slavery was used to produce surplus value. A social-economic system "colonialism" and later "globalism" emerged with that which convinced man to absorb his working-value into surplus value giving the illusion of an expandability to working value, that an individual could extend his existence beyond the essence of his humanity, beyond that working-value, an illusion which conditions subjectivity.

Capable wrote:

The stock market responds primarily to one thing: futures speculation. This is why a single rumor can raise or lower the market by hundreds of points. We saw what happened pre-2008 with stock market being grossly inflated due to speculating on false/untrue values, mortgage backed derivatives. Problem is that this bubble never fully burst, because US taxpayers bailed out the speculators rather than make them bear the cost of their errors in value-judgment.

Stocks are a game. Yes there is some realness behind it, obviously, but also a ton of untruth. Markets like this are operating now on super-condensed time scales for values-determining, they do not take the long term value into consideration. They are hyper-focused on the immediate present which is why rumors and wild speculation causes massive shifts up and down in stock prices. It's not a good system, especially when you realize that computers are trading most shares at millions of transactions a second now.

I'll be glad if Trump brings back some US manufacturing such as Ford or Apple. Obviously that is good... up to a point.

Stocks are how capitalism works, they are the lifeblood. Literally the investments, the actual money actual people put in the company qua company. The core-valuing of our system. Wallstreet is one of several giant regulating hubs. Trump already shifts from from nanobanking to construction - from illusion to reality, from ultra short term to long term.

Stockmarkets actually get nervous because of their own short term frames. The shorter the term of a stocks rising prospect, the more jittery it is. This is a common wisdom in the bullpen. So theyre all happy with Trump, less nerves, more opportunity to create profit flows.

Capable wrote:

Trump just agreed to pay 25 million dollars to former students of his "university", because they claim they were scammed. But he apparently admits no wrongdoing....

I hope all the Universities in the US follow his example and pay off all student debts as well as millions in compensation for utterly trashing their students brains...
but of course they will claim to have been doing 'work' and 'science'... lol.

More on the stockmarket.

Futurality is integral part of human self-valuing.
Future prospects are the reality which drives human action.


Obviously this is too advanced for types like Arc, my explanations of belief as reality elsewhere apparently go twenty five stratospheres above her head, but here we should all be able to grasp how that works, so as to also understand the stock market.

Stocks are essentially beliefs based on more or less reality. A steady stock is a piece of a company that has a record of reliably fulfilling its promises.

I can get a lot more technical if thats interesting.

Nanobanking is actually the method of making use of the jitteriness of short term stocks.
What a 'nanobanker', which is an algorithm, does, is to read the patterns of the jitter in the minute ups and downs the stock goes through in a minute, and derive the steepest tangents in the next seconds based purely on the 'nerve' of the stock.

This has literally nothing to do with the value of the company, but only with the mood of the global markets, which means rumors.

Nanobanking and rumor-spreading are in practice integrally related. The drop after Trumps election was based on rumor spreading, but his manifest real value (actions) corrected the markets immediately. They recognized the future, as they are bound to do quickly with all that cognitive power, as soon as they are allowed to raise their gaze from the nanosecond onto the year or decade.

As soon a second Trump removes extreme financialization of markets, banking and investments, and removes computer high-speed trading I will agree with you. But I haven't seen anything indicating he wants to do that or will do that. Have you?

Putting more government money into construction is fine, but that isn't some kind of magic bullet that will rewrite the entire scheme of how stock markets or investing work. Remember it was republicans and democrats together who bailed out the bad actors in 2008. Has Trump made comments that he disagrees with the bailout and wouldn't have done it?

Extending loans to GM was fine, but doing it to the banks and insurance and investment firms was not. Also I think Trump wants to do away with Dodd-Frank, which would only increase financialization and the likelihood of another market bank-driven, speculation-driven collapse.

Yes, stocks are a lifeblood; but the point is whatever is being done with those funds. It isn't so simple as people put their money in a company stock and that's that, rather much of it involved bundled packages and derivatives and backed securities that amass thousands of different stocks together in complex ways to create super-trading instruments... then those instruments constitute a market all in their own and are bought or sold based on futures speculation. There is just as much betting going on that a given mass-stock financial instrument will go down as will go up, and the trick of the game and why it's "rigged" is that betting takes place in both directions: super-capitalist investors make money either when stocks go up or go down. In fact it is he cycle of ups and downs which produces profits for these mega-players, whereas average people who put some of their retirement in the markets are the ones who lose in that game.

Fixed Cross wrote:

I can get a lot more technical if thats interesting.

Nanobanking is actually the method of making use of the jitteriness of short term stocks.
What a 'nanobanker', which is an algorithm, does, is to read the patterns of the jitter in the minute ups and downs the stock goes through in a minute, and derive the steepest tangents in the next seconds based purely on the 'nerve' of the stock.

This has literally nothing to do with the value of the company, but only with the mood of the global markets, which means rumors.

Nanobanking and rumor-spreading are in practice integrally related. The drop after Trumps election was based on rumor spreading, but his manifest real value (actions) corrected the markets immediately. They recognized the future, as they are bound to do quickly with all that cognitive power, as soon as they are allowed to raise their gaze from the nanosecond onto the year or decade.

We have no reason to think recent stock market gains over the last week are due to recognizing real future value. If that were the case then we could just as easily say that the increases over the last several years, to record territory, are for the exact same reason. In fact, the last week of increases just follows the same trend upward that had been going on for years already. Remember that the mega-players (financial institutions and millionaires and billionaires) often make bets on various financial instruments (composed of stocks, bonds, commodities and mortgages) actually going down.

Parodites wrote:

Wall Street and the stock market respond to security. When Trump won it plummeted for a day because they like secure bets and everyone was betting on Clinton. But after seeing for a while that Trump is not actually insane and was acting normally and being gracious, security was restored and everything went up. Also, settling is not an agreement to wrong-doing. Ie. he's the president now and doesn't have time to go through the court system arguing with people unsatisfied with him.


Marx says the mode of production creates a social structure that conditions subjectivity and establishes a class struggle, alienating individuals from the totality of human nature carried by the species- this alienation is codified by the division of labor- Marx thinks we are all philosophers, lawyers, poets, farmers and doctors all at once and we are simply forced to enter limited specific social roles because of all this. Smith says there exists a free market in which competition determines the class struggle and division of labor, and in a kind of opposite view goes on to say that, instead of being everything in essence and that we can only be limited socially, that we are nothing in essence and can only gain socially, theoretically gaining in all roles just as in Marx we can theoretically be excluded from all roles.

In reality, going off Braudel and world-systems, I recognize that geography and climate dictate the existence of certain zones on the earth that are naturally conducive only to slave labor and mining, and temperate zones like feudal Europe for industry. Then with America an inter-regional continent was found for the first time. The feudal state could only become a hub of export and import internationally between those specific slave/labor and industrial zones, and thus the nobility could not collect excess goods from the serfdom that it could export and turn into profit- the feudal state was a hub of import and export from the mining and raw goods of a slave zone to a temperate industrial zone, and fueled itself with the raw goods in order to keep the serfdom producing. All the feudal state could do is take things produced in a slave zone, and acting as a hub export them to a temperate zone where they made shit with them, taking a sample of the materials themselves and fueling their serfdom; but the colonists exploited American geography and instead of just doing that produced something like tobacco in one inter-regional zone, moved it to another zone in the region, ie. the north, and colonialized the region, utilized its inter-regional disparities to create a surplus value, goods that the colonists did not require themselves and could export to other places in the world. The essence of capitalistic profit is this, that the profit can be reserved and compounded and is exportable, as was this tertiary capital the colonists were producing and could freely export. A colony can only exist in this sense, as a pseudo-independence inter-regional economy producing excess exportable tertiary capital. It is not physically possible to produce such a colony in a zone like Africa that is conducive only to slave-labor and mining.

Every human has a working-value, a basic life-energy or essence capable of sustaining existence- their single organic existence and which conditions subjectivity instead of the superstructure and mode of production: poiesis is when labor is performed by a subjectivity conformed to the limitation of its basic life-energy.

But with the discovery of the new continent, an interregional system appeared because of our geography and slavery was used to produce surplus value. A social-economic system "colonialism" and later "globalism" emerged with that which convinced man to absorb his working-value into surplus value giving the illusion of an expandability to working value, that an individual could extend his existence beyond the essence of his humanity, beyond that working-value, an illusion which conditions subjectivity.

I agree that geography and climate are important, but it doesn't all reduce to that. There can easily be highly capitalized zones of financial or consumer modern capitalism in Africa or wherever else. Mostly we see the global centers where they are -- in US and Europe -- because the US and Europe created this system we have today. Europe developed more quickly than Africa or ME or the Far East, therefore those other areas became exploited for resources and labor flowing into Europe during colonialism and the vast international 'trading' (stealing resources and labor from Africa, ME and Far East and moving it to Europe) that was already taking place even in the 17th century. America got in on the game too. It still goes on. I think relative differences in progress of cultures and societies is the primary cause why Europe and America were exploiting the other geographic areas, and still are.

Working value versus surplus value needs to be examined more. Marx made this distinction when he noticed that people were using their individual labor power both in terms of physical and intellectual/knowledge labor to work for companies that "steal" the fruits of this labor by paying wages that are below what the labor actually produces-- this is the "surplus" and the basis of profits, for Marx. Right now we have wage stagnation because companies are in a free market of low wages where since everyone else pays low wages so can they, because right now they're not so much competing over the best talent as they are over how to get good enough talent at bottom dollar. And everyone needs a job, so you take what you can get (unless you're a capital owner and you simple sit around renting your capital property to others to "work" for you).

Capable wrote:

As soon a second Trump removes extreme financialization of markets, banking and investments, and removes computer high-speed trading I will agree with you. But I haven't seen anything indicating he wants to do that or will do that. Have you?

Putting more government money into construction is fine, but that isn't some kind of magic bullet that will rewrite the entire scheme of how stock markets or investing work. Remember it was republicans and democrats together who bailed out the bad actors in 2008. Has Trump made comments that he disagrees with the bailout and wouldn't have done it?

Creating construction markets is definitely a way of altering the dynamics of the stock exchange. It means that the packaged securities will simply have less weight in the overall process.

The mechanism will be tax breaks to construction companies if they work for the state, and commissioning them to do a lot of that sort of work.

Construction is the bedrock of any economy. As soon as that sector starts pulling jobs again, it will become the spearhead of the economy. It simply means more trust in the future; one does not build a massive Bridge for the short term.

This is how Heideggers bridgeconcept actually extends to the financial markets; building gathers different 'banks' of existence together.

Quote :

Extending loans to GM was fine, but doing it to the banks and insurance and investment firms was not. Also I think Trump wants to do away with Dodd-Frank, which would only increase financialization and the likelihood of another market bank-driven, speculation-driven collapse.

Any regulation needs to be extremely sophisticated and 'thin' for it to not impede with the dymanics. I have tried to get a good image of the Dodd Frank thing but it seems rather opaque, just a bunch of 'checking institutions' which arent checked by any philosophy or logic.

Any Wallstreet law passed by Obama is very suspect to me, as it was his government that bailed them out.

Quote :

Yes, stocks are a lifeblood; but the point is whatever is being done with those funds. It isn't so simple as people put their money in a company stock and that's that, rather much of it involved bundled packages and derivatives and backed securities that amass thousands of different stocks together in complex ways to create super-trading instruments... then those instruments constitute a market all in their own and are bought or sold based on futures speculation. There is just as much betting going on that a given mass-stock financial  instrument will go down as will go up, and the trick of the game and why it's "rigged" is that betting takes place in both directions: super-capitalist investors make money either when stocks go up or go down. In fact it is he cycle of ups and downs which produces profits for these mega-players, whereas average people who put some of their retirement in the markets are the ones who lose in that game.

It is actually that simple, but in insurance and real estate stocks and other areas of pervasive crime, it gets layered, so that it becomes invisible what risk is in the packages. The mechanism isnt changed by this. The mechanism is: Someone Values a company, gives money (value) to it, the self-valuing of that company increases.

That the market 'must always rise' is simply a consequence of there being a future at all - but the past 10 years, the markets have been extremely jittery and uncertain, meaning hardly any stable prospects, and the net value of American companies has not increased.

A true self-valuing is marked by a steadily rising stock, and a healthy economy is one where investment is a transparent game.

I think the ethos of what Trump represents is very simple and very primal: government for the last half-century at least has been seemingly trying to cultivate a paradigm whereby human beings are "pets" to be taken care of but without real power and only illusory freedoms... Trump just said, "We won't be pets anymore". That shit resonates deep.

Clinton was saying, "I'll take a little better care of you, my pets; you'll be a little happier and less burdened if im your master". Yeah... no thanks.

I don't expect Trump to be perfect or know everything or even to be that honest really. Based on whatever I've seen so far I can't drink the Trump kool-aid, but I definitely support the push back against "pet-ness" that politics/government has become.

Granted that we don't need to tear down society to achieve that. I don't think Trump can tear down society, and I don't think he and his far-right clan can magically fix everything either. But at least the human spirit feels affinity with human being again and has stood against docility, complacency and free dog treats.

Fixed Cross wrote:

Capable wrote:

As soon a second Trump removes extreme financialization of markets, banking and investments, and removes computer high-speed trading I will agree with you. But I haven't seen anything indicating he wants to do that or will do that. Have you?

Putting more government money into construction is fine, but that isn't some kind of magic bullet that will rewrite the entire scheme of how stock markets or investing work. Remember it was republicans and democrats together who bailed out the bad actors in 2008. Has Trump made comments that he disagrees with the bailout and wouldn't have done it?

Creating construction markets is definitely a way of altering the dynamics of the stock exchange. It means that the packaged securities will simply have less weight in the overall process.

The mechanism will be tax breaks to construction companies if they work for the state, and commissioning them to do a lot of that sort of work.

Construction is the bedrock of any economy. As soon as that sector starts pulling jobs again, it will become the spearhead of the economy. It simply means more trust in the future; one does not build a massive Bridge for the short term.

This is how Heideggers bridgeconcept actually extends to the financial markets; building gathers different 'banks' of existence together.

Quote :

Extending loans to GM was fine, but doing it to the banks and insurance and investment firms was not. Also I think Trump wants to do away with Dodd-Frank, which would only increase financialization and the likelihood of another market bank-driven, speculation-driven collapse.

Any regulation needs to be extremely sophisticated and 'thin' for it to not impede with the dymanics. I have tried to get a good image of the Dodd Frank thing but it seems rather opaque, just a bunch of 'checking institutions' which arent checked by any philosophy or logic.

Any Wallstreet law passed by Obama is very suspect to me, as it was his government that bailed them out.

Quote :

Yes, stocks are a lifeblood; but the point is whatever is being done with those funds. It isn't so simple as people put their money in a company stock and that's that, rather much of it involved bundled packages and derivatives and backed securities that amass thousands of different stocks together in complex ways to create super-trading instruments... then those instruments constitute a market all in their own and are bought or sold based on futures speculation. There is just as much betting going on that a given mass-stock financial  instrument will go down as will go up, and the trick of the game and why it's "rigged" is that betting takes place in both directions: super-capitalist investors make money either when stocks go up or go down. In fact it is he cycle of ups and downs which produces profits for these mega-players, whereas average people who put some of their retirement in the markets are the ones who lose in that game.

It is actually that simple, but in insurance and real estate stocks and other areas of pervasive crime, it gets layered, so that it becomes invisible what risk is in the packages. The mechanism isnt changed by this. The mechanism is: Someone Values a company, gives money (value) to it, the self-valuing of that company increases.

That the market 'must always rise' is simply a consequence of there being a future at all - but the past 10 years, the markets have been extremely jittery and uncertain, meaning hardly any stable prospects, and the net value of American companies has not increased.

A true self-valuing is marked by a steadily rising stock, and a healthy economy is one where investment is a transparent game.

Dodd Frank, which Trump will repeal, places requirements on banks that they must hold reserves sufficient to cover the costs of bailing out from bankruptcy or if they fail and need to be partly or totally liquidated. It increases oversight on predatory credit card and mortgage lending, and provides tools for fighting that. And it prevents taxpayers from footing the bill for failing banks and financial institutions like in 2008, by instituting those reserve requirements for such large banks and financial institutions. It also has some nice consumer protection provisions like making the process of getting a mortgage more transparent.

It probably does a lot of other stuff too, probably some that isn't good. I don't trust Obama either here. But neither do I trust big business republicsns to "self-police" their own excesses.

I agree about markets, but is Trump really going to fix it? Increasing construction is fine but we don't survive by building bridges, but by building ideas, knowledge, and technologies. I hope intellectual and technological building gets priority too.

Most of the stock market today isn't people like you and me investing a few hundred or thousand dollars in companies we like. It's large-scale meta-transactions with questionable derivative financial instruments like MBSs or pension funds, and as Parodites said it's based on debt: draw a debt and invest it to a profit, this can be done at the expense of real values though. The future is very much as you say a guiding principle for market growth over time, but the danger is getting into a "positivity trap" where we believe we will grow, therefore we grow, therefore we believe we will, therefore... while slowly we lose touch with reality in the fantasy of believing. Keynes doesn't really work due to this "trap". Yes it's true this is how we operate psycho-epistemically to create the values we believe in, but there is a weird and unstable pressure there to keep believing despite the evidence. The whole process has become to squeeze as much marginal profit out of everything as possible, I talked to a former CEO of a financial firm recently and he told me the same thing, it's all about immediate return on investment now. It's also why CEO salary is through the roof now, there is a closed loop of positivity here where companies can't afford to not pay increasingly huger sums to CEOs because it's all about image now, if you don't follow the trend then your image is tainted because you don't seem to value your CEO commensurately and your stock value declines. These weird psychological closed loops have really been overdetermining things.

Hardt and Negri wrote about how financialization was an inevitable consequence of global capitalism, which seeks to push profits as far and as "meta" as possible. Profits from profit, basically in a time-collapse. When the game runs on positivity then no one can afford to pause and sound an alarm, they're all hoping the positivity-orgy will lift the reality with it. History suggests this won't work. Values are emergent cumulatively from the bottom and not dispersed from down above, economically speaking. Trickle down doesn't work, unless you're already on the top... like Trump is.

As Zizek said and as Parodites was also saying, debt now drives things because debt is used to prop up consumerism (1 billion a day into the US) and this in turn props up companies artificially which in turn props up the stock market. It's a very weird situation. The positivity trap forces it to continue as more and more external exploitations are needed to flow excess into the US, which the US pays for with debt it can get because it's economy is already so massive and entrenched in this game. This is the real reason for Fed lowering interest rates and doing QE. The US needs to be able to keep borrowing. But I hope Trump can indeed spur more real world growth so banks and others can start re-investing capital "on the ground".

Yes, nanobanking is the ultimate consequence of these short term gains. They hire people with asperger syndrome who can make risk assessments based entirely on value-neutral probabilities, trends, numbers, quantity-shifts. Values get satructurally conflated.

This is more powder for my keg though - construction is simply unable to yield short term profits. Especially if it works under a tax break system, or a great tax return plan, then profits will be registered in very earthy and re-investable terms.

My aim is to create greater cycles for humanity to cultivate itself in. Self-valuing itself is a cycle, and the nanoprofit is part of a minuscule cycle, an extremely petty self-valuing, not remotely human.

Thew beauty of the stock and bondsmarket is that it is inexhaustibly diverse, and yet works under one guiding principle; trust and futurality.

But yes absolutely you are right, the way the economy is supposed to "grow" perpetually (I dont consider growth in percentages of profit but in overall production and acquisition capacity) is totally coercive - a coercive faith much like religion.

Growth would under my direction be planned in a cycle of 29,5 years. I see construction economy as the only kind that can operate in such terms; the type of economical will that results in city-building. Rebuild cities like Baltimore and New Orleans.


Debt is a complex concept - the debt used to build economies is not the same type of debt as perpetual loans by individuals. Debt in enterprise simply means investment. Student loans were presented like this as they were extended: invest in your future - but obviously it does not work that way. A debt made in business is made on the promise of return. Imagine that, that a student could simply dfemand his debt erased because he cant find a job that pays enough for him to repay it? That would actually be the sane and ethical way.


Debt is not new. Caesar is still the worlds greatest debtor, and Cassius the worlds greatest creditor.

This guy looks like a very good choice as CIA director. Very balanced mind, clearly embedded in people-land more than in numbers-land.



What an incredible phenomenon, this Clinton, this absence of any moral standard whatsoever... being smugly triumphant about prioritizing her personal friends over the employees whose lives she is responsible for, while she is making her hours in office - she is not only proud of it, she considers it a lowly thing to do otherwise. I did not think humans could get to this level of delusion. Let alone run for office!!


shorter version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWsp9TuSBkw

On value and work, I think it goes like this: human beings create values when we work, we are self-valuings and we can literally not create values, since we are a "creating-values" already, so when we do voluntarily, self-motivated work at the real world local levels we are basically destined to be creating values; then the mass effect of all that local value-creating at the real world level is that "an economy" forms at the meta-level, as statistically derivative of all that individual work. But since values can be transferred upward and out of the local far less than money can, the economy gradually becomes more centered on money as excess and less centered on value as excess.

The individual person, and his/her locale, is still going to be primarily centered on value excess, but as the scope increases to "the economy" we see a reversal and money become primary excess, which means that the machinery of the economy at the upper scales becomes drive by money-as-excess, which is just profit in the narrow definition. Marx was only half right, because while it is true that capitalists appropriate individual work-effort to themselves and monetize it into profits, the real value of individual work, at the human level, can never be appropriated like that, it can never rise up to the level of an institution or a system qua economics -- this upward transformation can only occur when values actually transform the larger society itself, such as with what happens when a new idea, art, invention, book, etc. inspires culture in the broad sense to re-mobilize itself around values. Culture is the impregnating of society at large with values, whereas economics is just 1) the mass effect of local individual self-valuings working and by working also furthering their own human values, and 2) capitalists (owners of capital) trying to appropriate more and more work-value into monetary terms and then throwing around those large chunks of money in new ways trying to create even more profits for themselves.

An institution is far more susceptible to corruption than is an individual, therefore. In fact an institution could be defined as 'susceptibility to corruption', structurally speaking, while the individual could be defined as resistance to corruption, also structurally speaking. The mega-economic movements of capital that are always transforming things (for good and ill) are just filling out the economic space wherein no actual human values can ever be truly created, because only individual human beings can create values and only in their own highly individualized locales. It takes a work of true genius to spread such values into culture generally, so it must be quite rare when it happens. We could probably do an analysis here of all the times that true genius has created values capable of permeating society as a whole in terms of cultural uplift; I bet there would only be about a dozen or so such instances, maybe a couple dozen, in the last 100 years.

I guess the implication, of this revelation of her people on the ground meeting with an 'al quaeda' member (never did get clear on what that term means, my sister wrote her final thesis in social geography on it and concluded that it doesnt exist, lol...)

is that the state department orchestrated the attack....? Are they really going to probe on this level? That is fucking serious.

Capable wrote:

On value and work, I think it goes like this: human beings create values when we work, we are self-valuings and we can literally not create values, since we are a "creating-values" already, so when we do voluntarily, self-motivated work at the real world local levels we are basically destined to be creating values; then the mass effect of all that local value-creating at the real world level is that "an economy" forms at the meta-level, as statistically derivative of all that individual work. But since values can be transferred upward and out of the local far less than money can, the economy gradually becomes more centered on money as excess and less centered on value as excess.

Fully agree.
Thus, people working with a lot of money are far poorer in value ownership than an artist who manages to get by.

In this sense it is very much justified to be resentful about taxation for welfare. And it is very noble to, as a friend of mine says it, be happy to share half of what he earns so that people less inclined to find acceptable employment can have a good life. Im, not leaning one way or the other, Ive just never collected welfare and am happy about that.

Quote :

The individual person, and his/her locale, is still going to be primarily centered on value excess, but as the scope increases to "the economy" we see a reversal and money become primary excess, which means that the machinery of the economy at the upper scales becomes drive by money-as-excess, which is just profit in the narrow definition. Marx was only half right, because while it is true that capitalists appropriate individual work-effort to themselves and monetize it into profits, the real value of individual work, at the human level, can never be appropriated like that, it can never rise up to the level of an institution or a system qua economics -- this upward transformation can only occur when values actually transform the larger society itself, such as with what happens when a new idea, art, invention, book, etc. inspires culture in the broad sense to re-mobilize itself around values. Culture is the impregnating of society at large with values, whereas economics is just 1) the mass effect of local individual self-valuings working and by working also furthering their own human values, and 2) capitalists (owners of capital) trying to appropriate more and more work-value into monetary terms and then throwing around those large chunks of money in new ways trying to create even more profits for themselves.

Yes... it is exhillirating and uncanny when this excess of the money pillar produces some cultural moment, 'event', scene in a movie or aphoristic phrase; but in all those cases we see how thin it is, how arid the air, how much fatalism in all of its joy.
Its temperament cant avoid the knowledge of the cost it comes at. I saw that in London too.
The message being, as it has always been since he was VO, that value can be calculated before it is translated into monetary terms - it is far more difficult and slow but yields infinitely more gain, as all inter-self-valuing value transaction amount in increase of valuing capacity.

The self-valuing of the transaction itself is an interesting object of pondering of mine, it's very fluid obviously, and its character is rather fickle....
Just like all crafts and arts are foremost means to discipline oneself, as consistency is required for self-valuing so also doing the transaction, is a way of increasing ones production capacity somehow. Artists wont agree, because art is not 'meant' to be sold. Its jusat being sold by people who stand in awe of the process that blinds that artist to the possible outcome of monetery gain.

Quote :

An institution is far more susceptible to corruption than is an individual, therefore. In fact an institution could be defined as 'susceptibility to corruption', structurally speaking, while the individual could be defined as resistance to corruption, also structurally speaking.

Excellent, yes.

Quote :

The mega-economic movements of capital that are always transforming things (for good and ill) are just filling out the economic space wherein no actual human values can ever be truly created, because only individual human beings can create values and only in their own highly individualized locales. It takes a work of true genius to spread such values into culture generally, so it must be quite rare when it happens. We could probably do an analysis here of all the times that true genius has created values capable of permeating society as a whole in terms of cultural uplift; I bet there would only be about a dozen or so such instances, maybe a couple dozen, in the last 100 years.

Indeed, just as over the course of 2500 years there have maybe been 12 actual scientists.

I agree that geography and climate are important, but it doesn't all reduce to that. There can easily be highly capitalized zones of financial or consumer modern capitalism in Africa or wherever else. Mostly we see the global centers where they are -- in US and Europe -- because the US and Europe created this system we have today. Europe developed more quickly than Africa or ME or the Far East, therefore those other areas became exploited for resources and labor flowing into Europe during colonialism and the vast international 'trading' (stealing resources and labor from Africa, ME and Far East and moving it to Europe) that was already taking place even in the 17th century. America got in on the game too. It still goes on. I think relative differences in progress of cultures and societies is the primary cause why Europe and America were exploiting the other geographic areas, and still are.


--

Yes, but only in the present era assisted by modern technology is this possible, my point was that before the discovery of America economics did reduce to a matter of geography; nobody was producing profit, that is, surplus-value in the capitalist sense because they were limited to extra-regional economics of import and export, and the world was very rigidly stratified in temperate zones like Europe and zones like Africa for slave labor and mining, with Europe becoming a feudal hegemon and the top hub for export between those two types of zone. But America, destined to become its own separate power and host the US as a new nation-state, utilized a colonial system of inter-regional independent economies (true colonies) and its oceanic access to both the Atlantic and Pacific- a new economic model which the old Empire simply could not understand, (it thought it was just going to use us as another slave zone, gather some spice to import and export back to other temperate zones, and that would be that, maybe grab some gold too) itself being limited to exchanging between the two types of zone on the earth, and thus America became the new hegemon, leaving Europe behind to become basically a banker society. But with the transition to the globalist system of international debts, the US is in danger of losing its status as world-hegemon and becoming nothing more than a banker state as well, and there is a possibility of this new power, the globalist system, that is not a political government or an economy or a nation-state, of gaining superiority. Thus Trump is here to prevent us from losing hegemony and to stifle the globalist power from supplanting our position. Being a nationalist, I desire my nation to succeed above all others, but all the developed nations are threatened by globalism equally so they should want to opt out of it too as with Brexit's example.

"over the course of 2500 years there have maybe been 12 actual scientists."

These were humans that were able to translate the changeless and timebuilding selfvaluings of the cosmos into the time-built human changeling selfvaluing.
Natural Laws are diplomacies and mutual graces between human and non human self-valuings.

So based on my last post:

After the European hegemony based in the extra-regional economies of feudal states designed to keep a nobility afloat was supplanted by the American hegemon based on inter-regional economies and the capitalists there generating surplus-value to compound profit:

The colonial expansion stalled and collapsed due to limitations on exports in America. Civil War.

We entered a primary stage of free trade and economic expansion after the industrial revolution and technological revolution, but the innumerable smaller businesses could not capitalize on geographic disparities properly in the world stage in order to export enough surplus-value- the wealth couldn't concentrate and thus the whole thing destabilized and precipitated WW1.

The state intervened to replace that free market with a narrow field of potential trades and introduced manipulations to taxes, to the end, with Braudel, of stabilizing surplus-value and the flow of tertiary capital with monopolies and corporations. This caused Hitler and Germany to say fuck that to these limitations to the growth of nation-states and initiated the second world war.

Globalism properly appeared, and a system of international debt was established to stabilize the world-economy, which has held up to the present.



When I say that economics can be based on true human value I don't mean the present economic model, but one that does not distort working-value, one in which poiesis is maintained.

Parodites wrote:

I agree that geography and climate are important, but it doesn't all reduce to that. There can easily be highly capitalized zones of financial or consumer modern capitalism in Africa or wherever else. Mostly we see the global centers where they are -- in US and Europe -- because the US and Europe created this system we have today. Europe developed more quickly than Africa or ME or the Far East, therefore those other areas became exploited for resources and labor flowing into Europe during colonialism and the vast international 'trading' (stealing resources and labor from Africa, ME and Far East and moving it to Europe) that was already taking place even in the 17th century. America got in on the game too. It still goes on. I think relative differences in progress of cultures and societies is the primary cause why Europe and America were exploiting the other geographic areas, and still are.


--

Yes, but only in the present era assisted by modern technology is this possible, my point was that before the discovery of America economics did reduce to a matter of geography; nobody was producing profit, that is, surplus-value in the capitalist sense because they were limited to extra-regional economics of import and export, and the world was very rigidly stratified in temperate zones like Europe and zones like Africa for slave labor and mining, with Europe becoming a feudal hegemon and the top hub for export between those two types of zone. But America, destined to become its own separate power and host the US as a new nation-state, utilized a colonial system of inter-regional independent economies (true colonies) and its oceanic access to both the Atlantic and Pacific- a new economic model which the old Empire simply could not understand, (it thought it was just going to use us as another slave zone, gather some spice to import and export back to other temperate zones, and that would be that, maybe grab some gold too) itself being limited to exchanging between the two types of zone on the earth, and thus America became the new hegemon, leaving Europe behind to become basically a banker society. But with the transition to the globalist system of international debts, the US is in danger of losing its status as world-hegemon and becoming nothing more than a banker state as well, and there is a possibility of this new power, the globalist system, that is not a political government or an economy or a nation-state, of gaining superiority. Thus Trump is here to prevent us from losing hegemony and to stifle the globalist power from supplanting our position. Being a nationalist, I desire my nation to succeed above all others, but all the developed nations are threatened by globalism equally so they should want to opt out of it too as with Brexit's example.

If I am understanding you correctly, what you are saying is that the US basically became a microcosm of how the world had previously been running economically, namely with a southern (Africa, ME, and Asia) zone of raw resources and raw labor-power easily bought or controlled-managed, and a northern zone (Europe); that this setup with Europe vs. the rest of the known world (Russia excluded) was logically replicated in the US, in a single country, and therefore all of the gains and economic production and growth that had been taking place across the entire world was now condensed and transferred to the US alone?

If this is true, then it explains a lot. Not only was the US a central hub due to the oceans as you say, access to trade in totally new expanses, but primarily the north/south divide replicated the conditions of geographically and spatially dislocated regions whereby it becomes possible (as logical principle of difference) to find a maximum efficiency of organization of the size of the two regions and the distance from each other, efficiency maximized in terms of growth in production and wealth-concentration, also therefore with spurring maximum imports and exports.

So the US duplicated the structure of the entire world economic situation, basically, and therefore concentrated all that logical structure into itself alone, thereby compelling the US to super-state status and hegemony. I'm sure it helped that the US had the first true Constitution in human history, demarcating clear divisions of power and an objective legal apparatus including meaningful checks and balances... and these things too are also working on that same principle of differentiation, namely trying to find the maximum efficiency of spatial arrangements whereby values-production is able to do two contradictory things at once: be distant enough so that there is a meaningful difference between zones (each zone gains something of its own self-valugin autonomy), and be close enough so that there is meaningful possibility of interaction and 'trade'/exchange between different zones.

If I am understanding you correctly, what you are saying is that the US basically became a microcosm of how the world had previously been running economically, namely with a southern (Africa, ME, and Asia) zone of raw resources and raw labor-power easily bought or controlled-managed, and a northern zone (Europe); that this setup with Europe vs. the rest of the known world (Russia excluded) was logically replicated in the US, in a single country, and therefore all of the gains and economic production and growth that had been taking place across the entire world was now condensed and transferred to the US alone?


--

Yes exactly, and this is why we became the world hegemon, the dominant force on earth, so quickly, just in 200 years.

I think Italy and especially southern Italy was also somewhat part of the southern zone, pre-America, if I remember accurately something I read on history and economic in Europe. Italy has been a hub of socialist resistance in part because it has this history of being laborers, farmers and then factors workers en mass, as a kind of industrialization center for the rest of more Northern Europe.

So now what I do not understand, is why this logical setup in Europe pre-America was generating "profits" or surplus 'value' (as capital) differently than how the US ended up doing it? They both used the same logical structure, although the much condensed version of this structure in the US was probably part of the reason why the US gained hegemony in a new way, but also I am thinking the US Constitution and legal/political system must have contributed as well.