You Will Own Nothing. You Will Be Happy.

[pbrower2a]

(07-31-2021, 07:51 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(07-30-2021, 10:45 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: That is my impression of Marx' dream of Communism -- ownership of stuff will no longer be a source of power or gratification. 

This in itself is insufficient. Marx to Arnold Ruge:

Quote:I am therefore not in favor of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas. In particular, communism is a dogmatic abstraction and by communism I do not refer to some imagined, possible communism, but to communism as it actually exists in the teachings of Cabet, Dezamy, and Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property. The abolition of private property is therefore by no means identical with communism and communism has seen other socialist theories, such as those of Fourier and Proudhon, rising up in opposition to it, not fortuitously but necessarily, because it is only a particular, one-sided realization of the principle of socialism.

In this Forum, you are meeting people who do not see the path of Humanity as invariably "onward and forward". Humanity has had its ups and downs from the eruption of Mount Toba (which reduced the human population to about 3000 -- people who could survive only by beach-combing along the coastline of modern-day South Africa) about 78,000 years ago to glacial maxima (get another glacial maximum to the extent of about 20,000 years ago and there would not be enough food for the world's canine population, let alone ours) to the onset of Dark Ages that destroyed almost all of pre-classical civilization (like Mycenae) and classical (around AD 536, when the last traces of classical civilization vanish in western Europe in Rome and Celtic Britain -- the Arthurian legend comes from just before that calamity) -- to the Mongol invasions and ensuing massacres from Korea to Silesia and India to the Black Death... thermonuclear war is always a possibility, AGW will take a mess of just about everything, and should COVID-19 morph into something as lethal as the Black Death, then we have a huge loss of human population and institutions as a certainty. In the event of monumental stupidity involving thermonuclear warfare, super-viruses, and AGW and the extreme myopic stupidity in which the Holocaust or the Killing Fields of Cambodia are multiplied by a thousand, which is a possible when we develop missiles and environmental destruction without developing the conscience and wisdom for dealing with such potential.

America can go from a place that celebrates that it can put an end to Jim Crow practice to voting in Donald Trump and, which reflects a level of human stupidity and delusion that I could never imagine possible allowed that horrible man to come close to getting re-elected despite showing so many despotic tendencies unprecedented in American history. 

One need not be a Marxist to recognize the dangers that arise from greed, cruelty, and selfishness among economic and bureaucratic elites that know no moral constraints -- even the desire for self-preservation -- from supporting a fascist pig. Donald Trump demonstrates that the American People today are no better than the Germans of ninety years ago. Maybe the only difference is that we Americans have several Model Minorities instead of one. A hint: there was nothing wrong with the German people that Judaism would not have solved.     

Quote: For Marx, Communism is, as I have shown, a historically determined process, requiring the immiseration (de-propertization) of the proletariat, as held forth by the Great Reset: own nothing, go nowhere, rent everything. It is the bourgeois Left and what has been called the "PMC" who will usher this in.

Only ex post facto is history an obvious certainty. We can now all see why the Axis Powers were doomed to lose the Second World War, but that was far from clear until the Allies got to roughly the borders of Germany today that the Third Reich was doomed. If you are thinking of those science-fiction scenarios in which the Axis powers prevail, I see them losing for one main reason: atrocities. I can imagine an Axis victory as a science fiction scenario, but that requires a veritable inversion of Good and Evil as identifiable post facto in canonical history. A hint: the KKK prevails in the US, the BUF seizes power in Britain, Laval's fascist clique takes hold in France, the Weimar Republic survives, and the infant democracy in Japan doesn't get smothered. There is no redemption of Stalin. I might be tempted to start such a novel.  

Quote:Our contention is that the bourgeois "solution" for Covid/climate change will contribute to this immiseration- it will be "bourgeois socialism", stripping proletarians of property rights whilst retaining them for the bourgeois and their select servants. The proletariat have no interest in this and it predates a general revolution, producing legitimate socialism.

I see in the post-scarcity world the demise of the car culture, McMansions, education strictly as 'hire' education without any other improvement of the student, and of course the neocon assumption that the common man exists solely to make those already rich and powerful even more rich and powerful. I see the disappearance of status symbols as a personal objective. If you want to know what was part of the Age of Scarcity that won't be, then visit some dollar store or used-goods place. My mother had a large collection of Precious Moments ®  figurines --  you know, those cloying images of children in adult roles -- and I wish I could sell those on Ebay or whatever.  

Quote:Again, compare and contrast:

Quote:Then it turns out that, assuming *the rate of surplus value*, i.e. the exploitation of labour, as *equal*, the production of value and therefore the production of surplus value and therefore *the rate of profit* are *different* in different branches of production. But from these varying rates of profit a mean or general rate of profit is formed by competition. This rate of profit, expressed absolutely, can be nothing but the *surplus value* produced (annually) by the *capitalist class* in relation to the total of social capital advanced. E.g., if the social capital = 400c+100v, and the surplus value annually produced by it = 100m, the composition of the social capital = 80c+20v, and that of the product (in percentages) = 80c+20v | +20m = 20% rate of profit. This is the *general rate of profit*.


What the competition among the various masses of capital — invested in different spheres of production and differently composed — is striving for is capitalist communism, namely that the *mass of capital employed in each sphere of production* should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.

The falling rate of profit results in industrial processes when the markets for stuff expand as prices fall. 

Quote:This set was the first color set for sale, in March of 1954. It was priced at $1,295. Westinghouse ran a full page ad in the New York Times introducing the set, for sale at 60 stores in New York. Not one of the stores reported a single sale.
We have acquired a second Westinghouse 15 inch color set. This one appears to be a prototype for the H840CK15.
Consumer Reports reviewed the new Westinghouse in their April, 1954 issue. They concluded:

CU is as optimistic as the next man about the future of color television. But on the the basis of the evidence at hand, it appears that only an inveterate (and well-heeled) experimenter should let the advertisements seduce him into being "among the very first" to own a color TV set.

In April the price was cut to $1,110 after only 30 sets had been sold. Only 500 were built, and most were never sold, because there was very little programming in color at the time, and the set was expensive and temperamental. This is one of only a few of these sets still in existence.

https://www.earlytelevision.org/westinghouse_color.html

..............................

Even at a 50% profit between the manufacturer and the retailer, $555 for thirty TV sets is not as good as $20 profit on a TV retailing for $120  if one sells a billion TV sets. $1100 in 1954  

A hint: prices are up by about a factor of ten today from 1954. $13000 might not buy a new car now, but can buy a poor person out of much trouble. His and her complete dentures, maybe? 

The technology gets better -- more reliable and more usable, and less capricious. Production runs lengthen, so fixed costs per unit tumble.  "Me-too" competitors enter the industry to offer cheaper knock-offs, some of which might even be good. Prices fall, and more people buy. The rate of profit falls, but capitalists more than make up on that with volume. Improving technologies allow people to do more with less, which explains why a 60" flat-screen TV today costs much less than the dreadful first color TV that sold for $1295 in 1954.*    

Quote:Now witness the forthcoming Great Reset:

Quote:feudalism did not evolve out of Roman conditions but instead came into being as a defense against barbarian invasions

The latifundia predate most 'barbarian' incursions into Roman territory.

Nothing so compels change as does failure. When COVID-19 or heat waves the result of global warming start decimating the working poor and forcing pay increases, the maybe the dimwits who assume that we live in a perfect universe because the economic elites can live very well find reality pounding them. One of the best constraints against thermonuclear war was that the economic elites of nuclear powers recognized that their pampered ways of life, if not their lives, would come to an end. Or worse -- they might be obliged, should they somehow survive, to face harsh judgment for war crimes. The elites going into the Crisis loathe how things turn out if the Crisis goes badly. 

I want people scared of COVID-19 and of AGW. I prefer evolution to revolution because revolution often fails in overthrowing a rotten social order and makes a brutal Reaction a near certainty, or the winners of the revolution prove no less corrupt and cruel than the Old Order.  I look at the struggle between the Reds and the Whites in the Russian Civil War and regret that either side won.

Maybe we need to do away with the car culture, a diet heavy in meat, and commodity fetishes. Maybe? I can imagine giant apartment complexes with no real windows for those who live inside; they will have to settle for giant television screens that offer them a view. Maybe the Golden Gate from Kansas City? Outer space from an orbiting telescope?  Lake Como from Las Vegas? Mount Fuji from Roswell, New Mexico?  The Brandenburg Gate from Stuttgart... Arkansas? Single-family residences are obviously something for a time when the world had three billion, and not ten billion, people.  

Zero population growth is the necessary start. 

* An oddity: as social critic Vance Packard put it,

"Television is not a patrician medium". 

TV antennas proliferated not so much among high-income, well-educated people like the family of a "Ward Cleaver" (an engineer) but instead among ill-educated, low-income people like the bus driver "Ralph Kramden". In the 1950's, evening television was mostly a stream of vaudeville, newsreels, stale movies, violent dramas, sporting events, and daytime TV was  washday weepers and  programs on cooking (men were not watching these shows) until the kids came home from school when cartoons would appear. On rare occasions a network might broadcast an opera, symphony, or play that might have some intellectual appeal, but that was rare. The sporting events were often boxing and wrestling which have little appeal to people with triple-digit IQ's. If a TV antenna appeared at a high-end house it was a fringe benefit for the (domestic) staff.