Mathematics student who upon completion of his degree was ripped from the university’s caring bosom and cast into the ghastly cold world of employment
- 1 Post
- 58 Comments
No, obviously there were exploiters and rent-seekers during the Bronze Age, but capital has a distinct dynamic as opposed to other means of production such as land, namely that it can be expanded: A hectar of land in an agrarian society only produces so much grain, vegetables, or livestock every year, but the only upper limit for the production of machinery is the amount of available labour.
A land-owner can only expand at the expense of other land-owners, while capitalists also can - and are even required to - expand at the expense of the workers they employ. They use machinery and labour to obtain wealth and then use that to obtain more machinery, and so on. This arrangement has a dynamic of exponential growth, which no previous form of production had, and therefore capitalists are in a position to shape society in vast excess of what land-owners can and could do.
There weren’t any capitalists around the time of Jesus’ death. The word “Capitalist” refers to someone who extracts surplus value from labour by owning the capital - either machines and factories, or the financial means thereto - which workers operate. A capitalist can only exist in the context of industrialing or industrialised society, and there were no such societies during the Bronze Age.
Eating a lot is not the original meaning of gluttony in Catholic mythology. If you look at some of the self-evident deadly sins like envy, pride, greed, or wrath, you see these don’t refer to a specific action you commit, but rather an abstract emotional attitude, a “pre-sin” from which actual sins stem. For instance, sloth is not you spending an afternoon on the couch, it refers to a general lack of goals and eagerness to the point that it is harmful to you; and lust does not refer to have a lot of sex, it refers to your thoughts being dominated by desire. In the case of gluttony, it refers to a general obsession with having things in excess of what is good for you.
On a side note, in German traffic law they later came to mean the seven ways of wrongful driving that warrant criminal prosecution: Not respecting right-of-way (pride), wrongfully passing other cars (envy), driving wrong at pedestrian crossings (gluttony), driving too fast at an intersection (greed), not driving in the right lane (wrath), attempting to turn on motorways (lust), and failing to mark defective cars in traffic (sloth).
We do not support the DPRK because of any supposed liberal-democratic trappings. We support it because despite suffocating under US-American pressure, its government compares exceptionally favourably to others with similar national wealth, eg. Somalia and Haiti, when it comes to development of its own material conditions as well as the quality of life; which is why it is frankly delusional to conceive of the West installing any government in North Korea, be it dictatorial or democratic, that makes better of the poor resources than the current one.
In a few years, homeless people and city planners will have mutually raised their intelligence and creativity far above average by permanently having to outwit each other, in a manner similar to biological co-evolution, such that eventually every homeless person is bound to win a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal at some point and then use the prize money to buy an apartment. This is the United States’ plan to solve homelessness.
I struggle to fathom what impact insurance and pension payments are supposed to have on this argument. Will there be extra matter emerging from a wormhole in spacetime if Earth’s physical resources are insufficient to respect human contracts? Should we start from their 1099 forms and then deduce the mass and volume of our planet?
Ok so first of all whatever landlords do isn’t “work”. But apart from that, the distribution of labour in a planned economy is still very much a concrete problem that has to be solved mathematically. In socialism, people will still need to work X hours a year, even if X is now determined by their mental or physical aptitude, the difficulty of the labour performed, the progress of technology, or external conditions; and this X has to be determined in the central planning agency in a calculation that cannot be circumvented by moral philosophy. I’m not saying we can do the same sort of computation for the minimum possible amount of “bad” in the world, morally speaking, but to quantify labour is possible and indeed necessary in order for scientific socialism to be realised.
These are justified criticisms you have every right to make, but please remember to wear a facemask while pronouncing the “TH” sound in public