Marxism discussion thread

[narad]

Not that long ago people could disagree (even vehemently) with each other about political issues, but at the end of the day they both loved their country. It seems we don't even have that anymore. It just dawned on me, because I'm new here, that I'm talking to a bunch of people who despise America and everything it stands for.

What America stands for changes. Just to call something out in particular, the US used to lead the world in scientific discovery. The early NASA days are legendary. Now we have a government that's pulling funding on scientific programs left and right, whose policies reflect a total head-in-the-sand reaction to science advisors, and whose general education of its citizens in such things lags behind the rest of the civilized world. I would like to see America stay great and stay competitive in technology, but how can it when the only scientific advance the American administration is pushing now seems to be the time machine they somehow invented to take our understanding of the world back to the 1970s/80s.

Basically, on this one attribute, America has lost this spirit of invention and ingenuity, while other countries in the world became what America used to be. Does that sound like I despise America? Sounds to me like I despise the direction America is headed, and its failure to stand true to its legacy.

I'm sure every has their similar issues they care about.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Not that long ago people could disagree (even vehemently) with each other about political issues, but at the end of the day they both loved their country. It seems we don't even have that anymore. It just dawned on me, because I'm new here, that I'm talking to a bunch of people who despise America and everything it stands for.

I respect your right to have whatever opinions you want, not attacking you, it's just disheartening. I think I'll go play my guitar now.

You don't love America and you certainly don't love it's people.

You love a fairy tale interpretation of what you think America should be. If America was a song, you'd buy the dubstep remix. Your love affair is with the "based on a true story" of the United States of America.

If you actually loved this country you'd seek to improve it, which often means seeing faults, not use patriotism as a holier-than-thou cudgel in which to pick apart and admonish petty minutiae with people who you don't even know.

I want to live in a country where things like healthcare and a living wage aren't reserved for the ruling class. I'm sick to death of endless war, and I'm even more sick of mass shootings. Why? Because I love America, but more importantly I love the people who live here, even though they're assholes.

Except you.

 

[GuitarBizarre]

There's no way you're this dumb. Nice troll sir. Well played.

You are a miraculously stupid individual.

Since your position on things seems to be that "loving America" is only possible if you laud America as having only ever done good in the world, let me ask you whether you're proud of a few things.

1 - Are you proud of the US government for instituting MK Ultra?

2 - Are you proud of the fact that the USA, per 100,000 people, imprisons more of those people than any other nation on earth? (655 people per 100,000 are in prison in America. El Salvador imprisons 610. The UAE? 104. Saudi Arabia? 197.)

3 - Are you proud of the US Government and the NRA for failing to stop 57 school shootings this year alone?

4 - Are you proud that the US police force is disproportionately more likely to shoot unarmed black people than unarmed white people?


Now please note - I'm not asking you if you're proud to be an American despite these facts. I am asking you whether these facts *make* you proud to be American?

Let's be clear about this - if you say yes, you are a psychopath. If you say "No, these things are shameful", then perhaps you might consider that wanting to *change these things* (Which is what "progressives" want to do), is a form of patriotism.

Also, let's just ask one more question while we're at it - Do you see the irony in the fact that "the land of the free" imprisons more of their people than anywhere else in the world?

Seems something of a betrayal of the idea of freedom, no?

 

[GuitarBizarre]

I'd like to apply for a new phrase "Meme non sequitor" to refer to a meme that does not follow the current conversation.

Anyone keeping track of how many pages since anyone discussed Marxism in this thread?

Marx theorized that all social conflict is due to an underlying class struggle. How are the last three pages of discussion here related to class struggles?

I want to live in a country where things like healthcare and a living wage aren't reserved for the ruling class. I'm sick to death of endless war, and I'm even more sick of mass shootings. Why? Because I love America, but more importantly I love the people who live here, even though they're assholes.

Except you.

Apparently you missed this post.

Someone also mentioned the idea that in America people will vote against their own interests as poor people on the presumption they will benefit from those policies when they are rich later, without recognising that these policies are why they are not rich and never will be.

 

[bostjan]

"No one who loves America would embrace Marxism."
"But I love America, and I think Marxism might be a good idea."
"Ok. No one who truly loves America would embrace Marxism, so you don't truly love America."

https://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#NoTrueScotsman

 

[GuitarBizarre]

I feel like you guys are just keeping him around for funsies at this point.

oh I guess I should contribute as well.

I just want to spell out that this guy's entire logic is that if you criticize America you hate American. Unless you specifically tell him that you are a vet first. Then it's ok and you can't hate America. Sounds good to me.

America is the least worst option compared to China, the Saudis, the UAE or Russia.

That said, if those are the people you're beating out to be a "good country", then what does that really say about you?

 

[diagrammatiks]

My quality of life is about the same in America as in China.

The secret is to ignore politics and just make money.

Paying 2 countries worth of taxes isn’t fun but thems the breaks.

Edit. Actually now that I think about it some more quality should really be judged on how things are if you are on the lower end of the economic scale. In that respect from what I know I’d put America belong China. Can’t comment on Saudi Arabia or Russia.

 

[bostjan]

Never been to China, but I've seen and read enough to know that you do not want to be poor and live there.

I've been to Russia, and you don't want to be poor there, either.

These are the sorts of places where poor people have no real life expectancy. The middle class makes very little money, but the cost of living is so much lower that you don't see it in ways you might expect, coming from the West. Like, in a place where a smartphone is under $15, you might see a person with a smartphone who makes ~$5000/year in salary. Since public transit is much more affordable, that person probably won't own their own automobile, or, if they do, it's 35 years old and barely runs. Since housing is relatively expensive, they likely live with extended family in a single family flat or apartment. It's not at all a bad existence, but there is really no mobility. A poor person panhandling in the USA might make three times what a worker in Russia makes. But, most likely, that person is sleeping in a cardboard box under an overpass and possibly eating at least five meals a week out of the trash. A person in that sort of situation has a terrible lifestyle, but might only be a few weeks savings away from getting a used car and drastically improving their options to have a much better lifestyle, where the worker in Russia is pretty much locked into that lifestyle, since there is not really any way to move up, socially or economically. But that's a poor person with a job and a family. Same person without a family, won't have a place to live, and would likely freeze to death the following winter.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

Never been to China, but I've seen and read enough to know that you do not want to be poor and live there.

I've been to Russia, and you don't want to be poor there, either.

These are the sorts of places where poor people have no real life expectancy. The middle class makes very little money, but the cost of living is so much lower that you don't see it in ways you might expect, coming from the West. Like, in a place where a smartphone is under $15, you might see a person with a smartphone who makes ~$5000/year in salary. Since public transit is much more affordable, that person probably won't own their own automobile, or, if they do, it's 35 years old and barely runs. Since housing is relatively expensive, they likely live with extended family in a single family flat or apartment. It's not at all a bad existence, but there is really no mobility. A poor person panhandling in the USA might make three times what a worker in Russia makes. But, most likely, that person is sleeping in a cardboard box under an overpass and possibly eating at least five meals a week out of the trash. A person in that sort of situation has a terrible lifestyle, but might only be a few weeks savings away from getting a used car and drastically improving their options to have a much better lifestyle, where the worker in Russia is pretty much locked into that lifestyle, since there is not really any way to move up, socially or economically. But that's a poor person with a job and a family. Same person without a family, won't have a place to live, and would likely freeze to death the following winter.

Kind of off topic, but I was reading an article about how much more expensive beater cars are becoming, and especially maintaining, as cars get more advanced and more expensive and more middle class folks are buying used vehicles.

I'll have to find it, it was on a wrenching blog I check in on occasionally.

It went something like: in the early 00's you could get a reliable, easy to maintain 10 year old car for something like $1200. Now, in 2018, getting something with similar reliability and economy is something like $6000.

I'm really going to try and find it. It was focused on how the barrier into being self sufficient with travel is getting higher and higher for the working poor.

 

[Drew]

I mean, the thread is about Marxism. How much more anti-American can you get?

McCarthyism comes to mind, actually.

I'm honestly perplexed why you think people in this thread hate America. We want to see this country become better than it is, and we think Donald Trump is doing extreme harm to the nation, but that's a pretty weak definition of hate, you know? Trump isn't America. Thank god.

 

[bostjan]

Kind of off topic, but I was reading an article about how much more expensive beater cars are becoming, and especially maintaining, as cars get more advanced and more expensive and more middle class folks are buying used vehicles.

I'll have to find it, it was on a wrenching blog I check in on occasionally.

It went something like: in the early 00's you could get a reliable, easy to maintain 10 year old car for something like $1200. Now, in 2018, getting something with similar reliability and economy is something like $6000.

I'm really going to try and find it. It was focused on how the barrier into being self sufficient with travel is getting higher and higher for the working poor.

There's a lot to that, I think:

There are obvious things like car parts becoming more expensive (but why are they, since they are being made in larger bulk and to lower quality standards?).

There's also a subtler thing in that car dealers and manufacturers in the USA are keen on suppressing budget models. Like, visit Chevy's, Ford's, or Toyota's website and you can find a new compact car with a manual transmission for around $12-13k. Call any dealers and they'll explain to you that you need to pay a couple thousand in delivery fees and special fees tacked onto that, and you might as well buy a $20k car and not pay the fees. If you go back and forth long enough, some of these dealers will flat out refuse to sell you a cheap car. By advertising that it's available, they get to say that a cheap alternative exists, but by carefully controlling access to the cheap alternative, they can make it so that, to the buyer, the cheap alternative does not exist.

You used to be able to buy a brand new 1100 cc 4 speed Yugo GV for under $4000. Yeah, it's a speck of a car, but, if you think about it, it's not that much different than the 1200 cc 4 speed Toyota Yaris that now sells for $16000. I tried to track down one of the base model Yarises and I'm convinced that they don't really exist.

 

[bostjan]

 

[Explorer]

For me, when someone defends Nazi-ism against the claim it is more anti-American than Marxism, there's no reason to expect that person to suddenly get intelligent.

----

I thought the Marxism-versus-capitalism discussion foundered on the point that no one could explain the dividing line between a worker who built up a successful business, and that same worker hiring employees and then having his business seized and given away.

 

[Drew]

I thought the Marxism-versus-capitalism discussion foundered on the point that no one could explain the dividing line between a worker who built up a successful business, and that same worker hiring employees and then having his business seized and given away.

I mean, I guess for me the bigger critique I have with capitalism (and I say this not as a defense of communism, but as a flaw in the capitalist model that we need to take seriously if we want too have a market economy that offers a fair and equal opportunity for all Americans) is that when you start talking about utility maximization as a price-setting mechanism with the price being set by the person ascribing highest utility to a thing, etc, then one of the presuppositions you're implicitly making is that all participants have an equal amount of capital, either human capital ("labor") or economic capital, to use to maximize their utility. And that's not really the case.

I think the thing that made this glaringly obvious to me was reading an account of surging prices of bottled water after the Houston hurricane, and seeing some economist in the WSJ, I think, defend profiteering on the grounds that given that there was a finite source of bottled water, setting a high price for the water would ensure it would go to the people who valued it the most, and that "price gouging" was actually an economically sensible way to distribute a scarce and in-demand resource.

In theory... Sure. But, for that to be true in theory, you, I, and the dude down the street need to have an equivalent ability to buy a single $10 bottle of water, and to have that represent an equivalent portion of our total potential utility. That's not really the case in a capitalist economy. If I have a net wealth of $250,000 and you have a net wealth of $2,500, then the "cost" to me in terms of total resources available for utility maximization is 1/100th of it is for you, and in fact I can essentially corner the market by bidding the price of a bottle up to $2,501 - 1% of my potential utility - and bringing it to a price where you physically cannot match it. That doesn't mean that the bottle is "worth" more to me than it is you, necessarily (it very well may be, but that's beside the point), just that I have to make far fewer other sacrifices to obtain that bottle than you do.

This is something that mainstream economics recognizes, that as wealth increases the marginal utility of each additional unit of wealth declines, but it's something that I think needs to be formally addressed in a market economy for market price setting to be an equitable means of resource allocation. Otherwise what we have isn't a textbook-defined efficient marketplace (something even Adam Smith recognized in Wealth of Nations, pointing to monopolies as an impediment to a free market and that accordingly a free market required some sort of regulation with monopoly-busting powers, for instance; this is a closely related problem, though its veering more towards monopsony than monopoly).

Anyway, pretending this is still on topic here, lol.

 

[wat]

How does living in America make an individual a bad person?

 

[Andrew Lloyd Webber]

How does living in America make an individual a bad person?

For starters, they chose to be born there.

 

[Drew]

For starters, they chose to be born there.

Lucky Sperm Club 4 LYFE. \m/

 

[wat]

Do you truly believe that? I mean, in a country of 320 million people there are bound to be a lot of assholes. Are you sure you aren't taking your tiny sphere of personal experience and using that to paint an entire country full of people with the same asshole brush?

Seeing people advocate for straight up wholesale theft from business owners of their assets is disheartening.

Seeing them advocate for this while calling it "patriotism" is downright terrifying.

 

[narad]

Seeing people advocate for straight up wholesale theft from business owners of their assets is disheartening.

Seeing them advocate for this while calling it "patriotism" is downright terrifying.

Who was advocating it in the first place?

 

[wat]

Who was advocating it in the first place?

Marxists.