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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:28
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quote:
Originally posted by Velociryx
If that's true, Che, then I should not be where I am. Am I just that damned good? Are all the people around me whom I have WATCHED bootstrap themselves from the gutter to something significantly better? |
You seemt to have a problem with understanding simple math. 90% != 100%
Gate was born to a wealthy family. Yes, he is now among the world's richest men, but he was already rich. He is not an Andrew Carnegie or a John D. Rockerfeller. Let's look at our President. This is a man who has had everything handed to him: his education, his businesses, and his political positions. He hasn't had to work for anything in his life, and he's the most powerful man in the world. More or the ruling class is made up of Bushes and Gates than Andrew Carnegies and John D. Rockerfellers. On the flip side, I can't imagine too many Rockerfellers and Carnegies working in a steel mill or flipping burgers at McDonalds. Jeb Bushes daughter has repeatedly been caught with illegal drugs, and she's not in prison.
The system is different for those at the top and those at the bottom. The fact that there is room for movement both up and down doesn't mean that it isn't stratified and largely rigid. The fact that the Colorado flows into Mexico isn't proof that the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams aren't holding most of it back.
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:28
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
It's very easy to bash capitalism for being "evil," so a lot of socialists and communists fall into that trap. One merely need point to the rather vicious and violent measures to which both legal and illegal capitalists will go to protet their wealth and means of generating that wealth. The most naked examples, are criminal enterprises, such as the mob, drug gangs, etc. On the legal end, we have Coke hiring death squads to murder union activists in Columbia and Guatemala, Nike hiring children for a dollar a day to make $200 a pair shoes, Exxon cutting back on safety equipment and spill containment equipment and overworking their employees than taking the clean up expenses and damages as a tax writeoff, etc.
Injustice isn't inherent to the system, but the powerful are able to get away with it because of their ability to control the means of communication and politics. Sometimes they go to far, do something so egregious to common decency that they must be punished, even if it's only a slap on the wrist. At other times, they threaten the entire system with their greed, and the system must intervene.
Speaking about the injustice of the system as it is fires people'e sense of righteousness and indignity. In other words, it's a hook. This is only part of the reason that socialists and their ilk want to bring the system down, an overdeveloped sense of unfairness.
Marxists, i.e. scientific socialists, however, "oppose" the system for three other reasons. Reason #1 is the inherent instability of the system. It is precisely when the system is at it's most productive that it falls down. When it is producing more than can be consumed, the economy falters, people lose their jobs, their homes, and their lives for being too prodctive. This is the capitalist paradox. Only so long as their is room to grow is it "efficient." Too much production means capital is allocated "inefficiently" and excess capital must be cleared away, generally by a crisis (aka depression, aka recession, aka slowdown).
Reason #2 stems from #1, the magnitude of these "slowdowns" has a tendency to increase, or rather, they did until after the Great Depression. Keynesian economics has mitigated this tendency greatly, at the expense of growth. We don't fall down as far as we used to do, but we do it more frequently (though not in the last twenty years, as Keynesian policies have been dismantled). Sometimes, even a crisis cannot clear away enough capital and labor for the system to become productive again. In these cases, war is necessary to phsycially destroy competitors. Both World Wars were examples of this.
Reason #3 flows from the previous reason. These crises are inefficient. Labor and capital become unproductive, people's livelihoods are destroyed, sometimes even their very lives. The ultimate expression of these crises, war, is even more wasteful. On top of this, much human productivity is wasted in such things as advertizing (necessary from a capitalist standpoint), the military, prison systems, various stock and financial schemes, etc. All of this could be put to better use. Add again unemployment, underemployment, and the waste of many potentially productive human beings because of poor education, crime, etc., and there is a vast army of capital and labor that serves very little productive purpose. It's inefficient. We could use this energy to lower the amount of time we have to work and maximize the amount of time we have to be with friends, family, and increasing our human potential.
To this I could add the problems of human alienation, human spacial organization, racism, heterosexism, agism, pollution, overuse of resources, etc. The world could be managed much more efficiently by direct, democratic oversight, rather than the anarchic "take what you can grab" system we have now.
As much as people claim that corporations have resource management in their best interests, the fishing industry is great example of how this is false. Each individual company knows that the resources need to be better managed. If they wipe out tuna stocks, they can't sell anymore tuna. That's why we don't have Atlantic halibut anymore. Unless they are coerced by an outside force, however, they cannot voluntarily stop, because their competitors won't stop. So fish stocks have collapsed in the oceans around the world . . . with the exception of the Pacific Halibut which is managed very strictly because the government go involved (many, many decades ago, when it was nearly fished out of existence) Today the Pacific Halibut stock is abundent and quotas are strictly managed.
In this case, a democratically managed system of resource allocation has saved the resource, provides jobs, and profit. We Marxists argue that the entire world could be run similarly.
Course, it hasn't ever worked out that way, because every place socialism has appeared it has been under seige from day one. It is amusing that those who are the biggest proponents of the Israelis acting as despotic as necessary to protect themselves from terrorism always claim the opposite when it regards socialist countries. More than thirty thousand Palestinians have been killed since 1948, 1% of their total population today. That's a huge number, more than were killed by the "dictatorships" of Cuba, Nicaragua, etc. But we're the murderous bad guys and they are the set upon heroes.
This isn't to bash Israel. They have to do what they have to do (we can argue about efficacy elsewhere). So did/do the socialist states. Protecting yourself from invasion, terrorism, and subversion causes massive inefficiencies. The USSR was invaded twice, and suffered from terrorism from 1917 to 1991. Cuba was invaded, bombed, and still suffers from terroist attacks. Nicaragua was invaded and terrorism. Vietnam, the same, China got off with just terrorism. Eastern Europe got off with just terrorism. And so on. Peasant countries all, which had to industrialize and defend themselves at the same time. Yeah, it's pretty inefficent, but it's an external inefficiency forced upon them. |
Thought I'd quote this since MtG and Vel have ignored it.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:28
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quote:
Originally posted by Kidicious
By your own interpretation you could be digging ditches any day now. A bunch of poor people will start competing with you and put you out of business.  |
One of my favorite barfight starter lines is to go up to someone and ask "Do you know the difference between a smartass and a dumbass?"  (hint, there is no correct answer)
Of course people go into competition. If you stay static, produce nothing new, save none of what you earn, and generally display a reverse Midas touch (everything you touch turns to **** instead of gold ) about everything, you can get the result in the marketplace your incompetent actions deserve.
In the worst case, it's unlikely that you'll revert to digging ditches, because you've acquired a more marketable skill set.
If I manage to make my software business go belly up, I can still get decent paying work in software development, since I have a fairly good set of core skills that relate to each other. I can also continue to do the energy consultancy work that bores me at this point. Either way, 27.5 years after dropping out of high school (to go and not finish college), I have two totally independent marketable skill sets where I can make six figures per yer in either.
The point is that you grow, save, improve, adapt, etc., in an on-going process, as does everyone else, in response to competition.
What's your alternative? The central planning bureaucracy guarantees your present income in your present field for life?  Or is there "competition" in your fantasy of a socialist paradise and you were just digging (no pun intended) at Vel?
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:28
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You see Vel, your main point is a strawman. As I pointed out, it isn't that capitalism is inherently unfair (although that has turned out to be the practice). Capitalism could be managed in such a way as to ensure that only by your merits and nothing else, could you succeed. Then perhaps the world would be ruled by Velociryx's and MtGs, rather than Bushes, Kennedies, Carnegie-Mellons, etc. But, having succeeded, who wants to then toss their children to the winds of fate and let their personal empires be dismantled?
The point is, capitalism punishes society for being too productive, it wastes capital and labor on unnecessary endevers, and it periodically even requires the destruction of societies and the murder of millions of humans to go on. In fact, tens of millions are human lives are sacrificed each year on the altar of the market. For the rich and powerful, we withhold life saving medicines and subsidize food at prices which drive people out of the market. We overthrow governments that threat the property rights of the rich and powerful.
It's not about redistribution of wealth, it's about creating a new set of opportunities for everyone.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:28
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quote:
Originally posted by GePap
The market does not give a rats ass about any individual, nor how ambitious or hard workind they are. You suceed based on whether what you bring to the table is wanted by the market or not. That is it. Lets take some poor farmer boy in mexico, who works ungodly hours in terrible conditiuon to feed his family. He then decides to risk his life to cross the border and get a job a bit less hazardous picking produce. His likelyhood of beaing wealthy are extremely low, no matter how much he struggles, how much he works, if only becuase he never picked up the skills the market values. If everyone studied fiannce, then finance majors would get paid **** after college.
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One of the premises of ambition, and of the points Vel and I have made (and others in the supply side thread) is that you have to respond to supply and demand. If Juan Lechuguero insists on picking lettuce the rest of his life and wants to be wealthy, it ain't gonna happen, of course. What he can do is realize agricultural labor dooms him to a substandard existence and he'd better acquire some other skills.
quote:
The point I am tryin to make is that I think that maximizing the creation of capital and maximizing the abilities (or creativity, or excellence, whatever) of man ARE NOT THE SAME. Capitalism is about maximizing wealth production. That is it. It does not teach us any morals, life lessons, nothing, becase that is not what its purpose is. People fail in the capitalist system based on how worthwhile they are to the maximizing of wealth.
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Of course, once you have money and don't have to work your ass off to scrape out a meaningless subsistence, you can do all the rest of that stuff to whatever extent you want. And you don't even have to worry if the Party is going to condemn what you read or believe as bourgeoise or counterrevolutionary. 
quote:
Someone whos life ambition is to be a great poet might (but most likely won;t) be a great sucess in the capitalist system, but only if what he writes also is popular. If it isn;t, he won;t be a great success, no matter how much he worked. Is that wrong? I don't know. |
There's also the possibility of rich patrons And it's not like the poet can't teach creative writing or some other bourgeouse subject at unis or writer's workshops or something.
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Velociryx
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of Candle'Bre
Apr 1999
time: 05:28
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Che: The river not being owned by anyone in particular (a "public good") is certainly at risk of being poisoned by one or more groups, that is true. Thus, wherever public goods exist, get some third party agency involved to manage the river (and give that agency the authority to harshly punish those who misuse it. This has been done in one case that you yourself pointed out (fisheries), and has worked.
But what works for public goods is not, does not, and historically has not worked for the rest of the economy.
Are there boom-bust cycles in the economy? Yes. Of course there are, and we have found ways of mitigating the damage they cause. The fact is, however, that if the economy is to remain vibrant, those cycles are unavoidable. They are growing pains, as it were.
When I was a kid, I used to get awful leg cramps. Those were growing pains too. The solution though, was not to cut my legs off....
-=Vel=-
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16-06-2003 01:25
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