Marx

I maintain that Marx is to be seen as a psychedelic exacerbation of the revolutionary instinct of British workers. Marx decided to attribute a logic to the movement and by implication to the entirety of human history. "Historic Necessity" - I maintain it is a contingency to Marx' psychedelic trip about the workers. He probably was in love with a lower class girl or two - that is an argument for its righteousness, but not for its logical reliability, nor for its pertinence. The rhetoric worked, it was impassioned; "a ghost dwells through Europe..... the ghost of Communism!!" huuu....

Then, everybody was stuck with a logic that didn't work, and the stupidest men came rising up and Stalin, Hitler and Mao happened.

Then a fuckking British Aristocrat had to step in and pound some sense into them.... sacrificing trillions of workers.
Tsk.

Never again let a German into England.

As I read him, Marx was using Hegel to apply strict "spiritual" (metaphysical) logic to practical economic conditions. What does it mean to be a worker, as in a day laborer? The secret is in the notion of ownership: every person owns themselves and their "labor potential", some people also happen to own vast amounts of capital resources. We need capital resources to live in a practical sense (food, shelter, clothes, medicines, entertainments) and mostly these are created by others, therefore we transact a common medium of value sharing-- money. But money can never truly equate one commodity to another without a degree of imperfection and remainder. Thus Marx thought that prices were the main way in which the economic system controlled the distribution and production of things, because the price sets the relative value standard. But there is only ever one price per commodity, a gallon of milk does not cost more if you really don't need it than if your baby is starving and depends on that milk. Prices don't really reflect need, they just reflect an opportunity cost by which something is produced and expected to generate a given compensation for the cost of that production.

Wages are the "price" of labor. Capital owners purchase labor (yours and my work hours) and the price is the wages we are paid. We are a commodity that capital owners purchase. This is technically a form of slavery.

Marx expanded on the older economic notion of labor value by creating the idea of surplus labor value: surplus value is what really drives purchase of labor since the price (wages) of labor is also am imperfection, one worker will work harder than another. The capital owner pays wages equivalent to the cost of labor reproducing itself over time as a fleshy mass of work power-- we laborers buy our food and keep ourselves healthy physically and emotionally sufficiently to keep working. But really it's about more than that, because the capital owner wants to extract as much work-labor from us as he can per unit price of labor (per wage hour, for example). Marx noticed that when a worker gets a raise he isn't actually now working more equivalent to that new wages; he is actually working more relative to the increase, so if worker makes $X now and outputs Y labor, when he is paid 1.2X in his new promotion he is actually required to work 1.3Y, for example.

In this way there is a diminishing return imposed upon labor as it raises the wage scales. It isn't just that capital owners will only pay what you are worth to produce for them, it's also that capital owners will keep paying you progressively less than this as a ratio of wages to work. In this way capital keeps extracting more surplus labor from the economy. This is one of the primary ways in which profits are created: the capital owner will try to pay as little wages as possible to maintain a workforce producing given quality and quantity of labor work, and the position of the capitalist relative to the worker is not a thing all equivalent since the worker does not own capital sufficient to sit around renting it to workers, the worker needs to work whereas the capitalist does not (since others work for him), and this fundamental imbalance creates a desperation on the part of workers that is exploited by capital.

I think and Marx thought this situation is a fundamental "metaphysical" one. It speaks to ontology, morality and sociology. Marx idea was for workers to start owning the means of their own production through collectives and communal companies such as co-ops, thereby replacing the function of the capitalist and allowing labor to reappropriate its own stolen surplus labor value. However this fails for two reasons: co-ops still need management to make solid decisions, thereby hierarchy is still preserved, and dispersing capital ownership across a large number of workers diffuses that capital's ability to mobilize at a larger scope and scale. Also, Marx didn't know that in the future state taxation would be able to redistribute capitalist wealth (profits) back into society at large.

Nonetheless Marx's idea did some true but in a different way: we now have shareholders who purchase ownership units in corporations much like how Marx wanted the workers to own the companies for whom they worked, except now it isn't the workers of a company that get the ownership benefits of that, it's just more capital owners buying stock in each other's companies. This doesn't free labor from metaphysical slavery, it sort of makes that slavery even more obscure and entrenched. Basically modern capitalism appropriated Marx's idea of shared ownership to itself and largely excluded workers from that, which is a perversion of Marx's vision.

Yes, this was my point; he made something a metaphysical thing that isn't. There is a reason the English never required communism, and never went down by it; they had already decided that workers own their labor, by structurally giving in to sensible demands made by actual leverage of self-ownership; Unions.  Marx saw this and made it complicated and, in my eyes, ruined it for the workers. He placed their self-ownership into his own sphere of self-valuing; he theorized their lives, and possessed them with a struggle that tied into some others, that together led to a hundred million dead, and a concentration of capital like never before.

Ive written on this extensively on Humanarchy, Ill dig up that thread somehow. I have fully abandoned the idea that we can theorize top down. It has never not lead to mass slaughter and concentration of power into the hands of the unworthy. No more theorizing humanity!

VO applies to animals, plants, atoms equally as to humans; it is my absolute philosophical conviction that mankind can never be healthy as long as he keeps in contempt of all other creatures that make up his environment. It is such simple, unavoidable self-valuing logic.

Back the Earth - this path is set. The other path, the Universalizing path, I entrust to you, and I will aid you, but know it is the opposite to my path. Opposite in the Paroditean sense; I can indulge it in good taste -- but only if you are the one making it.

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I remember I put some of it on BTL as H went down.

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You're right, unions are much more natural, yes. They preserve power for the workers without fundamentally upending the capitalist arrangement (of capital owners renting their capital to workers in order to extract surplus value from work-labor and appropriate it to themselves). Marx basic objection is very simple: he felt offended at the idea of being owned. Marx saw wage labor as pure slavery. The ownership of one's own efforts and products of work by another person was deeply offensive to Marx. So the analogy would be to slaves organizing into large groups to demand better conditions for their working in slavery, marginal increases here and there-- this must be how Marx thought of unions.

Is Marx'a view correct? Yes and no. You're right that Marx imposed his value into humanity qua worker. Most people didn't care and still don't care that they are "slaves" to capital owners; they don't really care that their surplus value is being stolen. But that isn't really Marx's fault either, this more or less collective indifference of most people. Only artists and philosophers could ever care that their surplus value was being robbed by someone else hopelessly reifying the common concept of ownership and property. If you go back to the sections of Hegel that I posted in that other topic you'll see where Hegel talks about property and how no moral or necessary value can be derived there; yes, however we alreeey know that property is justified based on how self-valuing appropriates its experiences to and as itself, we are literally the worlds that we experience, which is from where the conflict of slavery is necessitated. At the ontological psychological level every person is always trying to "own" every other person they are meaningfully experiencing.

Another self-valuing being is a being that will pull back from this imposition and resist being appropriated like that. Marx would have thought this must also be the case with labor and work; that we pull back from the work situation and requirement. I think the trick lies in desire: we learn how to desire the working (not always the work itself) that we do, we mentally separate out the fact that we are working from the fact of what the that work actually is. We do this to make the necessity of having a job tolerable to us because we now do not need really care about the work we are doing, we only need to care about the working that we do. This is perhaps the English virtue par excellence. This creative split in our desire is forced on us by the necessity of capitalist situation. This split is the rational basis for how one can do the same thing in one's personal life versus at a job and a whole network of laws and regulations govern doing it at a job but not when you do it at home. The correct implication here is that labor "for its own sake" (when we aren't being paid wages) is structurally free from the whole apparatus of slavery thing. If you grow your own tomatoes that's fine, but if you grow them at your job then you need to follow a dozen health codes and laws and documentation and all the way up to paying taxes.

But that isn't really Marxist, although it and Marx do come from the same place. That place is sn implicit awareness of the very strange relationship that obtains at the level of our desire when we work a job. Does that strenge relationship (desire split in itself) really justify imposing the theoretical framework at the expense of the natural earthiness of ground up logic? I honestly don't know. Marx wasn't wrong, but I can definitely see how your criticism of him is justified. Perhaps a world without socialism and simply with lots of unions would have been ideal, a natural capitalism. Perhaps people would have been happier in that world. In fact I know they would have been, overall or in general. And yet in such a world there would still have persisted this buried insight as to the fundamentally slavery nature of the system. We would all be satisfied workers, maybe not satisfied with our work but satisfied with our working.

Yes that might have been better, you're right. Marx was a dynamite that exploded into the soul of humanity and forever made it impossible for people to in a simple natural and naive way just enjoy themselves as labor-capitalized worker. Marx ended the possibility of happy workers. But look at the blowback now: natural capitalism reasserted itself in the human soul, today people are even more desperately trying to forget what Marx said so they can go back to naively enjoying their wage-labor. People didn't want to become aware that their working too, not just their work, was also a slavery. I make no moral judgments at all about that natural desire for naïveté which Marx shattered-- we must all remain structurally ignorant of certain truths at all times, this is a healthy and necessary feature of subjectivity. I know of no method at all for saying whether this certain truth which Marx forced on the world was a truth that was better to express or keep hidden; but regardless and in either case, the genie is out of the bottle now and has been for 150 years.

The communist idea is just that machines will eventually replace our labor and people can be free to do whatever they want with their time. Communism has never existed yet because we still need to labor, the robot revolution of the economy isn't here yet. Marx also failed to notice that the climb of capitalism would move most work into immaterial, intellectual work and that while you can replace physical labor-force with a machine and essentially get a perfect equivalence, if you try to replace mental labor-force with a machine you effectively undermine the very core of human beings.

I want to propose that a human has no surplus-value. I want to say that he only has his self-valuing. His work-value, or production-value is just as dependent on the structures that allow him to produce, (factories, farms, shops, butcheries) as on his physical and mental capacity. If he is very capable, he may find a way to become a capital-owner. That is capitalism, and Marx entirely negates its virtues - independence and self-determination.

Marx precludes self-determination, I want to make this clear.

What I see as noble is a man with a capacity finding a way to use this capacity to bring good things into the world. Marx hates this, he puts a price on it. He says: you cant share! You cant give of yourself freely! The Bestowing Virtue is evil and taught to you by the Magnates!

That is what he says, basically. He prevents the working class people from rising through enterprise, and forces them to cling together and overthrow all that they might have risen to attain.

Marx leaves death and rubble, because he denies the one good and true thing we have; our self-valuing virtue, our generosity. He makes humans into parasites, and givers us the logic to become whole society of parasites.

My surplus value is "owned" by all of you, as I want it. I don't get paid shit. And Ive been doing this for sixteen years straight without ever thinking about being compensated.

A sane factory worker felt the same; I am fucking making shit. There is no better feeling for a real man, I reckon. Who the fuck givers a shit for "fairness" if you are an unchained, unowned, living, breathing, sweating, creating part of the world? You are already privileged beyond fathoming.

Surely, conditions need to be okay. The Brits had already done that simply by Unionizing - as I said, I think Marx just had a hallucination about that. I hope it is clear that I am not joking - a lot of intellectuals used a lot of drugs then, and I find his theory absolutely 'from the clouds' - no earth, no humanity in it.

I must also note that ''wage-slavery'' is not literally slavery, and that the term can not be used as such, as many Marxists do - the devil is in the 'details' - such as chains and slaveships, and pay, and freedom to walk away hungry...

Essentially, under/to Marx, we are all slaves. And that this become reality is what he has made sure of, too. No 19th century worker was as enslaved as one who has student debts. The 'enlightened proletariat' as he called it...

Genocide of muslims is not implied here- just the fact that Socialism would long have absorbed Islam if it hadnt been for the West.

Parallel to my absolute rejection of Marxism as a valid enterprise-related theory, I have seen it also as the empirical resolution to Islam. Afghanistan is the example, a perfect hippy state until Mr Brzezinski decided to use it to kill the USSR.

Now, precisely because Marxism and Islam are so friendly to one anothers negating terms, they now form a real threat against occidental thought. But of course we will prevail, it is only a matter of whether or not the world remains ours, or if it will for the coming age belong to A Greater Power.

Eventually we'd find a way to break into the cabin, which is unmanned - but it may take hundreds of years. A T2 scenario without the time travel, so without the urgency - the killing robots are all perfectly real, except that terrestrially terminators come in dog form.

Part of me thinks we have to overcome the robots and zombies that our subconscious mirrored us with through cinema one way or another to become human - so it might as well be head on. But what if this is head on? What if this is the final battle of the Occident, which is really a war of Value - the locally and empirically-immanently rooted self-valuing against its almost fully explicated opposite - what if this is the final challenge to finally pick a human, and not a robot?

Formally, as if that wasn't obvious from the 1940's; Nukes wont destroy Russia in the least. A war will mean she wins.

But she doesn't want to win this. She loves the US. All Russian leaders after Stalin have expressed themselves well about the American people. ALl they tried to defeat was the banking system. N one ever came closer to defeat Russia than Gorbachev, who of course was just a shadow of Stalin, a conscience. But the bizarre magic of the old land produced Yeltsin as an absolutely irreducible "Always Close Russian" - and as he got drunker and drunker and the corporations bought him in deeper and deeper, Putin turned out to have been sneaking his way up and did some cosmically badass magic. My best guess is they will keep doing this. Stalin beat Hitler by crying in his bedroom for 12 days, so that they all froze to death.

Russia will be the victor because the US will immediately and utterly collapse, and break up into absurdly powerful factions pitted against one another and global enemies, nations and individuals and sects, agencies, corporations, religious partitions, it makes me laugh just how many enemies spring to mind. That is what they will be, just Enemies. No other function that to be against each other. In themeantine Russia has been perfectly ready for these things since long before the devices were invented, for several reasons - their land mass, their absolute acceptance of suffering, their acceptance of Regime as Soul, (Parodites Reification of Nationalism and Statism), and their sixty years of experience maneuvering the wealthy classes into atomic bunkers, which are the subway system, of which all stations are massive temples to Lenin and the Worker with all sorts of conveniences such as malls and no doubt hospitals, school facilities, and everything. From there they can rebuild in areas the US couldn't afford to nuke. The US will have nothing to rebuild with after all their guns are empty.

All this may or may not happen. I think it's not unrealistic given the realities on the ground - and in the soul.
That is the main thing. Temper temper. If you see veins popping from the head in anger at an uncomfortable but blatantly absolute truth, I mean really, that is scary. Not to me, as to me Trump comes as an unexpected human in a seemingly primordially rooted series of robots, but systemically the temperament of the woman now running is about as threatening as signals about systems ever get.

As usual your analyses and insights are wonderful and life-affirming. I suspect that the US would not fracture into mini-States simply because of the rich history value here of shared identity, even when people fight from opposite political ideals they are always still trying to appropriate to themselves the core value of "what America really is"; this is a secret or not-so-secret strength of Americans, that we always frame our internal conflicts in the same terms and so we converge at the upper levels of a shared substance, and we daemonically and productively fight over the meaning of that substance.

The US still produces and manufactures a great deal, we have tremendous exports but of course we input even more-- we are able to input so much only because we also export so much. I believe the US is the second largest exporter on the planet, and the number one importer. Even just the state of California is I think the sixth largest economy on earth. The magic of the US is purely existential, rooted in meaning an equal shared hierarchical substances where differences converge upward like the roots upward into the trunk of a tree. The massive real disagreements amongst Americans over politics and other issues is the actual source of America's ontic power and longevity. That Americans disagreements are seemingly more polarized now is just the middle spaces de-prioritizing to make way for more needed and powerful ideas. The middle will return once the work of the extremes is done.

Russia and the US are probably very close to each other... our peoples I mean. Similar values, religious sub-structure to society, similar world-power status, similar pragmatism when cooler heads are prevailing. Americans like technology more, we are more consumers here, but even that is a surface reality. And perhaps Russians like to experiment with themselves and their values, from a position of overflowing strength, just as Americans like to do.

Indeed there are such similarities, I see that too - certainly, Russia and America both have a great soul that inspires reverence and loyalty across the world. Hate and fear are counterparts of that - the trick is for both nations to not succumb to these lower sentiments that their sheer Value evokes.

I am glad you read my posts as life-affirming.

America is exports by far the most important goods - cultural goods, novels, shows, movies, philosophies... not to mention the technological means for a true global society.

I think now that this society, the Internet basically, if it remains rooted privately and protected in the US, as Trump wants to keep that way, can be the arbiter of distribution of force and of thresholds in political tensions.

The background threat of force will always remain, indeed as this is a way of life itself - but I think that a balance of such powers is sufficient, and that it may even be preferable for the US's low level self-valuing there to arbiter as you say than to have a purely non-national force - perhaps most practically, a force controlled by the US and Russia, the perfect check and countercheck to each other, as the cold war has proven (we're all still here).

That's how I see an international system of law and enforcement across nations and only minimally within them... the US and Russia together could guide that into being.

Now we have in place a framework of thought through which the future can properly be disclosed; ontic horizons are possible again, truth in politics is possible now, it seems.  I dont know if that has existed after Napoleon.

To celebrate this point, I call to mind again this recent Russian plan.

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Building, Dwelling, Thinking.