prole

_ I've been around long enough to know that this is the way the "Loyal opposition" works and always has. Republicans (maybe not Eisenhower) have similar critics and criticisms. Ask anyone named George Bush...... Huh?

This is anything but "random". It's part of a larger context of increasing radicalization and use of violence on the part of the American Right and is being stoked by racial fearmongering and redbaiting through its "media" outlets.

Still waiting, you pussified shitheel.

Yeah, I wrote it. Another one of your smoking guns? It simply states that violence under certain conditions can be a catalyst for social change and under certain historical conditions may gain legitimacy as a tactic. It's an objective statement. Can you deny it? Would I need to provide examples? 9/11, the French Resistance, the sinking of the Maine, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Battle of the Bulge, firing on Ft. Sumter? That I am not personally a pacifist (there are things that are worth fighting and dying for) precludes my capacity to condemn an idiotic, reactionary, brutal political lynching, mutilation, and murder of an innocent? How exactly do you make the leap? I am waiting.

Yeah, keep yuckin' it up while your ideological brethren keep taking the country down the toilet. Hilarious.

Though it may be productive, honestly I'm not willing to spend the effort to delve too deeply into most of this. I've never found conservative thought very compelling (big surprise), it tends more towards reactionary justification for whatever entrenched class interests happen to exist than any coherent philosophical position. It will use just about any outrageous claim at its disposal (usually fear-based, as your thoughts on the mob suggest) and seek to justify any unsavory practice that can help to maintain existing inequalities of privilege and power. You really nail the weakness of Smith's thought here (though unintentionally, of course) and a major flaw in liberal thought, especially classical economics. When you say, "(Smith) gave me an appreciation of the importance of considering the interests of both the producer and the consumer in voluntary economic exchanges" what he (and other political economists of the time) didn't give you was an historical context for which to understand the very unequal basis of the structural relationship between labor and capital and the more often involuntary exchange (wage work or starvation) on the part of the worker created by an absolute dependency on the market for his or her means of survival. All of this requires grounding in the actually existing historical relations rather than abstracted formulae (logically sound as they may seem) or metaphysical claims about "human nature", "states of nature", people as billiard balls, or reducible to greedy utility-seeking machines. How do you square that circle, Jay, that neoclassical economists must appeal to an ahistorical, metaphysical state of being in order to prop up its ideas? It's pure fantasy, you must agree. As far as the Labor Theory of Value goes, if you think this is the holy grail of debunking, you've been tragically misinformed. I think that the fundamental truth holds: like any other cost, capitalists or their managers seek to reduce labor costs to the absolute minimum required to keep that worker alive and/or showing up to work. That a capitalist can extract profit through paying a worker less than the value they produce goes without saying. I see it every day. Whether or not it has been (or is) a primary means of value extraction in a particular instance is a matter for historical or contemporary analysis. At any rate, it's not really that big of a deal for me. There are any number of Marx's ideas that don't hold water, people have been taking him to task for 150 years. His rigid notions on successive modes of production is pure nonsense, for instance. Much of Marx's thought has either been jettisoned when necessary, reworked or elaborated on by succeeding generations of social scientists whether they explicitly take a Marxian approach to their work or not. Anyway, that's more than I wanted to say.

Min. 0:21 says it all. [video:youtube]

Yeah, we already got that ONE SINGLE example and we're not even sure he counts.

You can now add census lynchers to the list.

Big surprise here. Sick fucks.

If DuBois understood the particular unions in America during that time as racist, it doesn't necessarily follow that he understood unions to be racist in general. See? General and particular, abstract to the concrete? I can't put it more simply than that. If you'd like to do more research on the subject instead of dry-humping this one dumb idea you had till it's dead, please get back to me.

Note that the union label movement started in the ~ 1880's. Now Debois wrote and said in 1930: link In the final line of my quote above I point out that unions have gone from being against African Americans and US Chinese to now being against Chinese workers in China. (See bold) As I wrote above, somethings never change. Somebody gets screwed. Racism is often close to the surface. That's me, by the way.

See post above. WEB Du Bois was not "anti-union". He was a pro-union socialist, later Communist that was against the racial hierarchies and exclusion of Blacks from American unions that were so configured. No real contradictions here, you're barking up the wrong tree.

This one's even better: Here.

Really rackin' up the points aren't you?

As if the fact that there's been racism in the American labor movement is news to anyone. Next you'll be telling us that the US Army killed millions of Native Americans!

The entire look for the union label movement started as a way for people to encourage consumers to avoid products derived from the labor of African-Americans. African-Americans were excluded from unions and when they could find equivalent work were happy to perform at a lower wage. As a result they were taking business away from unions. The business of unions when they actually do create higher wage is to screw somebody else. Screw the black guy across town. Screw the Chinese immigrants. Srew the poor guy in China trying to get ahead. Some things never change. Related link from today's paper: More job losses...to the South and Far East. Are you competing against Kojak in the "my-ass-is hanging-out" contest? Read Up.

Yes, I agree, actually existing capitalism is a failure even on most of its own terms.

Isn't obama trying to do the same thing with health care?

Every democratic philosopher since the beginning has stressed the overwhelming need for an educated populace to make the system work. We're not fitting the bill. California's fucked for the simple reason that the population wants services, has voted for them through initiatives but doesn't want to pay taxes and has voted them down through the same process. It's a good thing we have such a high-quality public education system that is more expensive per capita than most industrialized nations. Yeah, so we should privatize it and subject it to the same pressures and incentives as the American health-care system!

Every democratic philosopher since the beginning has stressed the overwhelming need for an educated populace to make the system work. We're not fitting the bill. California's fucked for the simple reason that the population wants services, has voted for them through initiatives but doesn't want to pay taxes and has voted them down through the same process.

It's not clear to me that the semantic distinction between elevating prices by "artificial" vs "political" is terribly consequential, as workers who drive the cost of whatever it is that they're making above the price that consumers are willing to pay will ultimately meet the same end. The marketplace is littered with the remains of enterprises that domestic competitors ultimately put under. Candlemakers can only secure legislation that outlaws windows for so long before they lose either the political battle against the glass lobby or someone invents the lightbulb. But assuming for the moment that we accept your propositions, and that the workers in the public sector win the "political struggle over the conditions of employment and control over the work process" against the tax payers and manage to increase their compensation by a percentage of your choosing, while providing no more services to the public, how exactly does this benefit anyone other than the public sector employees? It's really quite hard to argue when I reject so many of your basic assumptions. It's no fun to start every post with "in the beginning...", or "first of all..." Nor am I much interested in playing along, accepting the premises of a system that is abhorrent merely for the sake of argument. I didn't letter in Debate and many of the arguments playing out here bear directly on too many lives, my own included, for parlor games. The point above about artificial vs. political is not semantic. There is no such thing as "artificial" unless the you accept that the system you're talking about is a universal constant. Such a system can only exist outside time and space in a computer model or on a cocktail napkin. In fact, the struggles over how things are made, by whom, for whom, who controls the process, etc. play out in real time in a historical process. Capitalism is not a metaphysical constant with artificialities, anomalies, distortions. It's a set of relationships held in place by political power and ideology, riven by structural contradictions and conflicts. Thank you for pointing out again and again and again (in nearly all your posts) the fundamental structural conflict that exists between labor and capital. Many on this board have pointed out a similar existential contradiction with regard to the "conflict of interest" that exists between "health care providers" and patients in a for-profit health care system. The same fundamental conflict of interest runs clear across the spectrum of capitalist relations: owners and management seek to extract the maximum profit from its enterprise at the least cost possible and seeks to minimize those costs by all means at it's disposal. In the case of cutting labor costs those means run the gamut from packing up for Chinese FTZs to "social dumping" to beating striking workers. It's been clear to the critics of capitalism since the beginning that it's enormously productive, that its means of generating efficiencies and economies of scale are unrivaled. The single minded pursuit of those things alone however are not necessarily compatible with human health and welfare or that of the ecological health of this planet. That people stubbornly refuse to commit social suicide in the name of greater efficiencies, cost cutting, economic growth, etc. is a mystery to you, Jay. Why? And why do you personally trumpet their miseries in the name of "creative destruction"? Part of it's probably your job, part of it is that you're comfortable enough that you can, but intellectually, I expect it's an undying commitment to human progress. As someone whose worldview extends from the same philosophical tradition as your own, I respect that. But at some point you guys started to fetishize the system, admiring its purity, its capacity for efficiency and left the human beings and their environs out of the equation. I'm not going to argue with you about the merits of milking the efficiencies of lowest cost per unit of production by minimizing the cost of inputs. As long as we're talking about people and not gears in a machine count me out of the parlor game.

Horseshit. Unionized workers are no more "artificially inflating" the price of labor than the owners or management of capitalist firms are "artificially suppressing" wages to maximize profits or tax-revenue. It's a political struggle over the conditions of employment and control over the work process. Nothing more. Your metaphysical abstracted "point of equilibrium" is no different than the other forms mumbo-jumbo you rail against on this board. Free your mind from these superstitions.

'Cause you've been spraying from there all day?