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.

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”.

It’s fine, you could do a lot worse. I think it’s unreasonable to think that he’s going to give the precisely correct line on it all the time, but you can usually tell when the lib brainworms are talking. Probably won’t find a better source to learn about it in audio form. It’s 97% sticking to the facts.

@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.

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.

And mailers.

Angela Davis is very cool, I wish I knew more about her. Apparently one of her heroes is Joseph Weydemeyer, my all time favorite obscure communist.

Was looking at some of the “no party affiliation” candidates in CA senate primary election. I came across a questionnaire that Laura Garza filled out for the OC Register (link). It first mentions she was “Former vice presidential candidate on Socialist Workers Party ticket in 1996”. I’m thinking hmmm… that’s sounds kinda Trot-y, but maybe not. Let’s see what her positions are. First question was about Palestine, “israel”, Ukraine, and Russia… and this was the response:

I defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews and condemn the Jew-hating pogrom organized by Hamas with the backing of the Iranian regime. The capitalist regime in Tehran and the reactionary forces it backs in Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are enemies not only of Jews but of working people of all nationalities. So long as capitalism exists, in times of crisis, the rulers will turn to scapegoating Jews to smash the working class as they did in Nazi Germany. The fight for workers’ power and socialism is the only solution to end the anti-working class poison of Jew-hatred.

I stand with the people of Ukraine in their battle for independence and sovereignty over all of Ukraine and against Moscow’s reactionary invasion.

I don’t support the policies of the U.S. capitalist class and their military, which is used worldwide to defend U.S. profits and imperialist domination, not the interests of working people here or elsewhere. I am for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea, the Middle East and Europe. I defend the Cuban Revolution and call for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba, which is used to suffocate the Cuban population for their decision to reject living under Washington’s boot.

What a fascinating mix of leftist language and absolute dogshit, sprinkled with some good takes (but also ones that even normal libs support, like ending the blockade on Cuba). Honestly, her takes on “israel” sounds like what an actual neo-Nazi would come up with if they were trying to make a caricature of a leftist.