(07-28-2020, 10:13 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Hmm. Classic is trying to convince me that as I am a blue, and all blues are Marxists, tharefore I must be a Marxist. I’m glad you agree that I’m not.
He, also, has no conception of what Marxism actually is- the concept of "cultural Marxism" (or, as the Nazis had it, Kulturbolschewismus) is incoherent. Per Marx:
Quote:Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.
Ideas do not form material conditions; material conditions form ideas. This is the essence of materialism.
Quote:I also agree that there will be a lack of triggers among the big democracies leading to crisis wars in the Information Age. Thus, triggers will be rare, no need to recover from crisis wars.
Which will lead to a tendency for crises to be increasingly endogenous, no?
Quote:I will also state that September 11, Katrina, Iraq, the housing bubble collapse and other likely catalysts were not triggers. They did not make a transition to the new values inevitable. Not triggers. Catalysts. Both sets of values remained active and seemingly viable. You have to know the S&H theory to see the handwriting on the wall, to know what is coming.
I deny there's much difference between the two sets of values, tbh.
Quote:But I do not see Wall Street as happy to see COVID or Black Lives Matter.
Have you seen stock prices of late?
Quote:They wanted or needed a big stimulus for COVID, and will see pauses in profits and bankruptcies anyway.
The Federal Reserve began another round of QE last August - well before Covid. But Covid has given renewed impetus to it
Quote:No joy in Muddsville. The economy will struggle as a result of this particular crisis. I don’t see them as profiting from from Black Lives Matter either. Thus, I doubt your claim that capitalism created crisis for profits. How did they create either aspect? How will they profit from either aspect? You can’t choose your crisis at this point.
They are receiving free money, which acts as a countervailing tendency to the rate of profit to decline.
Quote:Again, you cannot count in observations from the last age to tell you anything about this one. Last age had lots of crisis wars and profit from them and their aftermath. Now? Put the observation that capitalists need crises for profits during the Information Age on hold pending their making a profit off a crisis. In the meantime, think, do not assume.
There's no hard and fast division between the "Information Age" and the "Industrial Age". Hell, Marx called the development of network capitalism back in 1857:
Quote:... But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.
- Marx, Grundrisse, "Fragment on Machines"
For whatever reason, people treat Marx like a Bronze Age thinker who couldn't forsee the transition to a knowledge economy (which he called the General Intellect):
Quote:The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it; to what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.
- ibid
Quote:Also, I see the S&H turnings as a mechanism for how cultures change. A crisis is the time when the much debated two sets of values from the unravelling are resolved in favor of the new values. A trigger is an event which makes this process inevitable. The regeneracy is the time frame when the federal government fully embraces the new values, though it only begins a several year trial and error process as the new values are tried and tuned. This time the two sets of values debated are the red and the blue. Did you notice that Marxism is not one of the two? Did you notice that the blue is the new set?
Blue is part of the old set.
Quote:Thus, we are not working from the same perspective at all. You are working from an Industrial Age perspective based on Industrial Age observations on how things work, and are pathetically out of date in the Information Age.
See the Grundrisse. Marx foresaw the Information Age and was aware how it would alter the structure of capitalist production. It has not fundamentally transformed its method of surplus value extraction, however.
