Dave B
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I suppose the more refined argument would go along the lines that people with ‘genetic’ a propensity for religious beliefs and ergo be against contraception would outbreed the rest. There was a kind of parallel argument in the 19th century that the uncultured and less religious working class were more productive than the ruling class and would end up taking over the world. And they were even jealous of their survival rate and ‘rude’ health of the ‘stock’. There was a kind eugenics thesis that the pampered ‘unfit’ children of the ruling class went on to survive ‘when they were never meant to’. On sex, religion and procreation etc; that wasn’t always the case eg the cathars which was part of the Marcion tradition which itself was a major current in early Christianity. Thus; Basic Cathar Tenetsled to some surprising logical implications. For example they largely regarded men and women as equals, and had no doctrinal objection to contraception, euthanasia or suicide. In some respects the Cathar and Catholic Churches were polar opposites. For example the Cathar Church taught that all non-procreative sex was better than any procreative sex. http://www.cathar.info/ The Cathars thought all the material world was a ‘Matrix’ like illusion; created by Satan basically. Which you might expect as a kind of rationalisation from people who thought the world was shit. I suppose it is entertaining what goes around comes around as at least part of the ‘idea’ has returned in science. Digital Physics Meets Idealism???????? Eg the retro causality experiment about 18 minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiZLlpqAQ7U
On a slightly connected issue I have asked to prepare some stuff for a Manchester ‘talk’ on green things and had volunteered to do some stuff on packaging as it is professionally close to home etc. And I suspected it would be interesting. And I think the summer school is on the environment. We actually had a corporate email circular sent today from the PR manager on a Greenpeace article on plastic bottles. What is of interest is increasing amount of recycling that is ongoing in Europe mainly as a result of an EU directive from 1999 and rolling to 2020 etc. The recycling targets were quite ambitious and ‘commendable’ the UK are meeting targets ; Germany is ahead of the game. It would appear to be a kind of reform as you would expect the capitalist class to prefer to have it all put in a hole the ground. Plastics are still the main problem. But they are employing robotic sorting technology with magic eyes to separate stuff out. Technology developed in the food industry itself for sorting food eg potatoes. And new polymer chemistry to break it down and reconvert it to other materials. So I suppose the question is there some kind of social altruistic consciousness at work here? I think an important strand of popular anti capitalism is coming the green movement. We talk of voluntary labour and Wikipedia etc and I don’t live in a bourgeois area but it is quite refreshing how nearly everyone sorts their own trash into the four types of bins, without being paid for it. They are doing it at the factory I work at but it seems to be more as a result of compulsion; by various external methods eg legal demonstration and accounting for waste recycling and increasingly forced prohibitive costs of landfill. There is still a lot of bling in packaging I think as the marketing people work with ie making the product look attractive etc. I would imagine in socialism everyone would mostly eat out rather buying small packages of food and ready meals etc. I have given up trying to understand what Mr Ponzi is on about.
Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate. https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
The GRBe income account earns ecos from an ecosystem impact charge on shareholder and commercial accounts so it is a green taxation system then?
There is a lot of this kind of stuff scattered around volume 4. I suppose what is interesting in the quotes below is how far ahead the English were of the Germans in the labour theory of value! From ‘Our friend’ William Petty circa 1670. The first question is, what is the value of a commodity, or more particularly, of corn? “If a man can bring to London an ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he can produce a Bushel of Corn, then one is the natural price of the other; now if by reason of new and more easie Mines a man can get two ounces of Silver as easily as formerly he did one, then Corn will be as cheap as ten shillings the Bushel, as it was before at five shillings caeteris paribus” (p. 31). “Let the production of a Bushel of […] Corn he supposed of equel labour to that of producing an ounce of Silver” (p. 66). This is, in the first place, the “real and not an imaginary way of computing the prices of Commodities” (p. 66). b) The second point, which has now to be examined, is the value of labour. “The Law… should allow the Labourer but just wherewithal to live; for if you allow double, then he works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would; which is a loss to the Publick of the fruit of so much labour” (p. 64).The value of labour is therefore determined by the necessary means of subsistence. The labourer is impelled to surplus production and surplus-labour only by being forced to use the whole of the labour-power within his capacity in order to get even as much as be just needs to live. However, the cheapness or dearness of his labour is determined by two factors: natural fertility and the standard of expenditure (needs) conditioned by the climate. “Natural dearness and cheapness depends upon the few or more hands requisite to necessaries of Nature: As Corn is cheaper where one man produces Corn for ten, than where he can do the like but for six; and withal, according as the Climate disposes men to a necessity of spending more or less” (p. 67). And even Hobbes; doesn’t sound like much but this is Marxist theory touchstone. Labour power: “The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power” (l.c., p. 76). “A man’s labour” (that is, the use of his labouring power) “also, is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/add1.htm
there is some stuff here on the corn theory of value; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theory_of_value
Ok so we are going “nationalise” the oil wells, mines, wind-farms, agricultural land , intellectual property rights etc. They will be in collective possession and an income stream will be obtained from them by renting them out?????
There was a little bit of a hat tip to the physiocratic idea by Karl as below Capital Vol. III Part VITransformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-RentChapter 47. Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent The physiocrats, furthermore, are correct in stating that in fact all production of surplus-value, and thus all development of capital, has for its natural basis the productiveness of agricultural labour. If man were not capable of producing in one working-day more means of subsistence, which signifies in the strictest sense more agricultural products than every labourer needs for his own reproduction, if the daily expenditure of his entire labour power sufficed merely to produce the means of subsistence indispensable for his own individual requirements, then one could not speak at all either of surplus-product or surplus-value. An agricultural labour productivity exceeding the individual requirements of the labourer is the basis of all societies, and is above all the basis of capitalist production, which disengages a constantly increasing portion of society from the production of basic foodstuffs and transforms them into "free heads," as Steuart [Steuart, An Inquiry Into the Principles of Political Economy, Vol. I, Dublin, 1770, p. 396. — Ed.] has it, making them available for exploitation in other spheres. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm
Not sure exactly where he is coming from yetI suppose we will have to wait and see; might be something to do with the wheat/bread theory of value. Which I think I might have mentioned just before he appeared? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiocracy The idea dropped out of the problem as to where surplus value or profit, or whatever you wanted to call it, came from. It was based on an accepted Adam Smith premise that value was based on labour. But ‘if’ labour or wage labour was purchased at its value, as was sort of presumed then where could surplus value ie the accumulation of wealth or additional income streams or whatever come from? Which was becoming too obvious to ignore in capitalism. The idea was that the agricultural labourers produced surplus wheat/bread/food* ie more than they needed for themselves. They would then exchange their surplus wheat/bread/food for manufactured products but would hand over or exchange more of it than was required by manufacturing workers themselves. The profit of the manufacturers/capitalists thus originated from the ‘surplus’ surplus wheat/bread/food produced by agricultural workers etc. And the manufacturing capitalist would use that ‘surplus’ surplus wheat value to buy more machines etc.Or fund and feed the workers making them etc This was all done through the medium of money which, as it was claimed, just obfuscated what was really going on. Actually the argument sort of reappeared in Russia in the mid 1920’s with the support of Trotsky. The idea being to screw a load of “wheat/bread/food” value out of the peasantry to fund industrialisation. It was ‘opposed’ by Stalin who then adopted it after he got rid of them; according to Raphael Abramovich. Something the Trots and Stalinist both choose to avoid like bargepole. Thus? The main chapters of the book were based on a paper read by him in August 1924 to the Communist Academy on The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation, where he argued that the backwardness of the Soviet economy in the face of world economy meant that, in order to survive, it would have to industrialize rapidly until the productive resources reached the highest level attained in any capitalist nation……………..by the artificial fixing of prices so as to drain resources from agriculture and concentrate them in industry. There was no other way to accumulate the capital necessary for the development of new productive techniques and the expansion of the nationalized industries. https://www.marxists.org/archive/preobrazhensky/1921/fromnep/biog.html I suppose you could expand the surplus wheat/bread/food model into other things if you so choose?
Art. 3. BANK ASSETS: The assets claimed by the Bank are the resources of nature outside national jurisdiction. The shareholders value the natural production capacity of ecosystems in this region at 6,000 trillion Global Resource Bank dollars on par with United States dollars. http://www.newciv.org/whole/globalresource.html what would be an example of "resources of nature outside national jurisdiction" oil wells, land, sunshine, sheep????????????
I thought I would try and bait them first, looks like that failed. Who was the picture off? I though it was one of young Joei thought
the filmthe young karl marx. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Karl_Marx
What the Pope was saying is in fact out of the gospel as JC said or prophesised. Matthew 7;20- 22 20So then, by their fruit you will recognize them. 21Noteveryonewhosaysto Me,‘Lord,Lord,’will enterthekingdomofheaven,but onlyhe whodoesthewillof MyFatherinheaven.22Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’… http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-21.htm What JC allegedly said had several themes. Criticising the rich and the hypocritical organised religion of his time which provided the theological or ideological justification of the ruling class etc. 'Political support' for the poor and oppressed. Speaking ‘truth’ to power. Direct action against the financial class. For which he was punished by the lackey’s and collaborators of Roman imperialism etc etc. It is pity that Karl and Fred failed to prophesise neo-Leninists and state capitalist nomenklatura and that many would say; ‘Karl, Karl did we not prophesy in Your name, name big roads after you and in Your name drive out bourgeois capitalist class and perform many revolutions?’… There was loads of posters all over Berlin advertising it and they seemed to be showing it or about to at a cinema in Old East Berlin on Karl Alley. Which is anything but an alley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee
You would have thought that the most interesting case study would be the ‘exceptional’ nation the USA. Which had been for sometime a confederation of fairly autonomous statelets. The; European emigration, 1820–1978 On its own is quite interesting; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Americans
