This was Obama’s slogan, because he would always call out issues but then act like he was powerless to do anything.

Biden’s strategy is to act like problems don’t exist and actually it’s the people who are wrong, the economy is doing great. To say otherwise is to imply you actually support Trump.

It’s honestly impressive how well Marx understands accounting. People who aren’t involved in accounting may not think it’s important but accounting is how you can understand how money flows within and without a capitalist enterprise. The whole idea about how fixed capital adds value proportional to its “wear and tear” is essentially the same thing as how we calculate depreciation on equipment. Cost accounting is how costs are allocated to things that don’t directly incur a cost that can be measured per item produced, and Marx uses that conceptually throughout Vol 1 & 2.

Absolutely. Maybe I can just scan them to text and share, might be a bit disorganized since I just did it free form to help my knowledge but if it’s helpful I can share them.

I haven’t been involved in Vol 1 since it had been a while but I wanted to follow along still. But, I just finished Vol 2 so I really want to get involved there. I missed ch 1-4 but here I am.

Ch 6 is an absolute beast. It’s confusing and Marx isn’t clear in a number of areas. Even David Harvey I think got some conclusions wrong (no fault of his own, he’s never worked in accounting in a manufacturing setting like I have so it’s understandable).

That said, I think it might be one of the most important if not the most important chapter in the book, certainly in its relevance for modern capitalism. The idea that value is created only in the production sphere is ground breaking and the implications for an economy that has hollowed out its own productive capacity (like the US has) are profound.

Ch 6 is a struggle. I read it through and was really confused, so I sat down and took like 20 pages of notes (I write big though) and committed to not moving on until I finally grasped it. It was a ton of work but I’m at the point now where I think I get it.

If you’re struggling to understand what kinds of cost add value and which do not, I found that thinking about modern production is only going to confuse you. Instead, think about a grain farmer. For a grain farmer, storage adds value because grain, by its very nature, MUST be stored. Otherwise you can’t just have everyone eat grain for a month and starve the remaining 11 months. Likewise transportation costs must be productive because farms are far away from cities.

I highly recommend checking out Ian Gough’s paper Marx’s Theory of Productive and Unproductive Labour in conjunction with chapter 6. I’ll try and summarize my notes as best I can but probably easier if I try and answer questions as they come along.

Because the market processes all information at a speed that makes regularly beating the market impossible; and literally every investor on earth is looking for an “edge” at the same time. The stock market is “efficient” from the standpoint of, any profit you can make by trading on new information vaporizes in a nanosecond.

I use quotes around the word “efficient” because I’m NOT implying the stock market is efficient from a Marxist or resource allocation perspective. Just that today’s stock prices reflect the sum of all information that we have about a given stock up to the moment.

The outperformance of index funds is largely due to their lower expenses and the fact that money managers, just by trying to beat the market, often do the wrong thing.

I would call them “workhouses” but Americans have no idea what “workhouses” are and how horrific they were.

Death to Israel and death to America.

grossly mismanaged the pandemic (killing a lot of people), did horrible stuff for the environment, passed a bunch of shit laws, including repealing net neutrality, deported a bunch of ppl for no reason, and he supports isreal

All that is literally and precisely what Biden has done, too (except net neutrality I guess, but you’re also leaving out Biden signing off on the biggest expansion of the surveillance state since the Patriot Act).

He fucked over queer people in the us

Lots of queer people on Hexbear, ask them if the barest crumbs Democrats throw to queer people (i.e. doing nothing to stop anti-queer actions, but not being the ones to propose the laws) is worth supporting genocide.

increased the federal debt by 7 trillion

Imaginary number doesn’t matter.

You seem well-meaning, so let me put my cards on the table: I don’t believe in validating the invalid dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by voting for anything beyond the local school board and various propositions, so it’s not like I’d be voting for Biden anyway. But what I don’t get about when libs push leftists to vote for Biden is… at what point does someone committing heinous acts mean that not voting for them is the only moral action? If Joe Biden murdered my daughter, would I not be in the right to say I wouldn’t vote for him? Even if in this weird scenario Trump also would have murdered my daughter… at what point do we measure someone by what they do and not what the other person would have done? And it doesn’t matter if my kid isn’t actually involved, I have seen enough death and sadness from parents and children in Gaza that the fact that it’s not my kid is totally and completely immaterial to me.

I, as a German-American, feel very unsafe when people around me say things like “Nazis are bad” or “The Third Reich was genocidal”.

While I do like the LotR movies, the worst thing about them is one very specific directorial choice made by Jackson that isn’t in the books: to show the “good guys” as being reluctant to fight and downplaying the threats faced.

Theoden is portrayed as unwilling to fight at first. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen reactionaries on Twitter reference Aragorn’s line about “open war is upon you, whether you would have it or not” when talking about tRaNsGeNdEr iDeOLoGy or something. Theoden has to be convinced to fight. Likewise, Treebeard and the Ents initially refuse to fight until Merry delivers his Sorkin-esque speech about how they’re a part of the world, so they have to fight for it.

But none of that is actually in the books!

Theoden and Treebeard are not indecisive. They immediately join the fight without hesitation. Everyone recognizes the threat posed by Sauron and they join in. The Hobbits, while they are Little Englanders, are more in an isolated bubble far away from trouble, so it’s more that their courage is never tested until the Scouring. They are unaware of what’s happening in the world, not that they know about it but don’t want to fight.

This seemingly small change has been latched onto by liberals and chuds alike for 20 years now. Because no one reads books anymore, we just assume the movies are the books. I doubt Ferguson has read the books any time recently.

And for as long as LotR has been published, everyone wants to interpret their own allegories into the story. It was very popular to read Mordor as Nazi Germany, which Tolkien had to always push back against. While Tolkien was the first to say things like his experiences in war and his religious faith influenced the books, he absolutely and in no uncertain terms was NOT writing anything to be allegorical to the real world. And to any fan of the books, it’s offensive to try and read allegory into it when you understand that act of story telling and world building - and not allegory making - was central to the writing process for Tolkien.

@TransComrade69@hexbear.net , her comments are still there she wasn’t banned or anything, just moved on.

I was there when it all happened, “revisionism” is absolutely the word for it. So many cissies trying to weasel out of just doing one little thing to support trans comrades here. 100% behind patching this.

The typical American probably thinks that, outside of Hong Kong, everyone lives in extreme poverty in shacks. Or at best, in very small apartments in massive plain concrete buildings that look like prisons.

Just last week, I was talking with a coworker who didn’t realize South Africa had paved roads.

Thanks! That alone is pretty helpful information.

I really feel like my knowledge of Algeria is lacking, given their successful anti-colonial fight, and that at least at one point they were a socialist country in some regard.

Yes, though where I live that number isn’t relevant due to both state laws and market conditions. There are entry level jobs at places like Target, Amazon, McDonalds, etc that pay around $17-$18 per hour.

But even that is still about HALF of the minimum salary needed to live comfortably. Incredible because it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago where there was the push for $15/hr as a living wage (because it was back then).

Maybe I’m thinking about this too hard, but is this actually a bit self-deprecating? Like, the gamers and the women both have their backs to each other. The women seem to be completely oblivious to the presence of the men, and vice versa.

I remember seeing a couple conclusions that some nuclear scientists came to recently:

1.) 100 Hiroshima-sized nukes (the nuke dropped on Hiroshima was tiny compared to current nukes) going off could cause catastrophic climactic results across an area the size of a continent, i.e. a continent-wide nuclear winter that would potentially lead to hundreds of millions of deaths outside of lives lost to the immediate blast + fallout.

2.) If the US and Russia both unleashed just 5% of their total nuclear stockpiles, you are definitely wiping out civilization and getting humans down to close to extinction levels.

IIRC a lot of this is worse than previously understood because past models didn’t account for just how much dirt and debris are kicked up in nuclear blasts.

Though keep in mind just because a user doesn’t post here, doesn’t mean the person themselves aren’t still here. After 7k comments I’m concerned about how much info I’ve posted, so I plan on not using this account anymore and using a new one. I know I’m not the only one, either.

Political repression is obvious not ideal - political openness and free expression are objectively preferred over limiting political expression. But… this is the ideal. The practical reality is that, in times of war every country represses political expression. In the US, UK, and France, for example… in WWI or WWII, what happened to you if you spoke out against the war? Spoke in solidarity with workers in the “enemy” country? What if you expressed that you wanted your country to capitulate to the German Empire/Third Reich?

And make no mistake, for the entirety of the existence of the DDR, it was in a state of war. The capitalist west poured as many resources into toppling socialism in the east as they would a real shooting war. Allowing complete free expression would have opened the door to complete manipulation by the west. To do otherwise would be to betray the very workers - the great majority of the people - who built the DDR. You’re in a workers state and the state is entrusted with the protection of those workers. Anyone who is acting in a way that betrays those workers should be dealt with. Political repression isn’t great but as you saw what happened in the 90s in the former DDR, the workers suffered immeasurably from “losing” the Cold War.

There is very strong relationship between how much political expression a government allows and the level of existential threat that same government faces. In the US or Germany today, sure you can express your politics all you want. Because any form of political expression poses ZERO threat to the powers that be. If we were ever in a situation where in the US, the left posed a real threat, I guarantee you all our free speech protections would go out the window. By the way, in the free, capitalist Germany of today, what would happen to you if you went into the town square and openly expressed solidarity with Hamas - an organization which poses zero threat to Germany or Germans?

And to another point… I am more familiar with USSR than the DDR, but I think it’s fair to say the former was more repressive of speech. And the reality is that, at least after Stalin, in the USSR you could fit the number of people jailed for political crimes in any given year into one-half of a basketball court (that’s in a country orders of magnitude larger than the DDR). That’s for several reasons, but a big one is that the USSR had a policy of prophylaxis. First off, if you were just complaining about your representative or if you were a capitalism enjoyer, you were generally left alone. You actually had to do enough to get on the radar. And if it got to that point, someone would approach you and tell you to knock it off, or there would be consequences. And lots of people who were brought to trial weren’t convicted because they weren’t a big enough threat, and plenty more similarly had convictions overturned. The point of all this is to say, in much of the Eastern Bloc, it took quite a bit to actually get in jail for political expression. If you’re at the point where you are in jail, there’s likely a long road that brought you there. So when you say “my grandfather was jailed for speaking out against the government”, I am going to apply a hefty dose of skepticism that he was just expressing his displeasure to friends at the local cafe or whatever.