woodenghost [none/use name]

The reason is that all those other things create actual value, thus cutting into profits of capitalists if publicly funded. If you’re a capitalist state that wants to steal massive amounts of wealth from the people and redistribute them to the rich by funding an Industry, then war really is the industry you want because it only destroys value.

For example, if you cancelled the Pentagons budget and funded centrally planned healthcare instead, no private healthcare provider could compete. It would completely close down a huge market. Same with education, infrastructure, etc. War doesn’t have this problem of closing down a market, but has the advantage of opening up new markets (resources, cheap labour, more consumers, even rebuilding after the war, etc.) via imperialism.

Edit: In short, imperialism is in part a reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and offers an opportunity to renew primitive accumulation.

San Juan Wolf carefully replacing that building, but accidentally knocking over another with his ass was hilarious and relatable.

Yes, it looks like Lego!

Like, how would the numbers on the map I linked change, if real estate weren’t included in the calculation?

Yes, for real value, quantitative studies might be impossible.

Rent just means income without work or exchange. If you want to account for real estate, you can’t wave rent or ground rent in the Marxist sense, because expected rent during depreciation plays a part in determining the price for things like land, which don’t have an inherent value, because no labor is used to produce them.

I was manly interest in the impact on revolutionary potential in the core.

Edit: Oh, sorry, you meant the premise of revolutions, hence no more rent. Yes, of course.

Yes, that’s true. The calculation includes real estate “value”, or rather prices, which are highly distorted and far removed from value based on labor power. But what would a more Marxist analysis look like and what would it’s likely outcome be? Complicated concepts like absolute and differential ground rent from Capital volume three get involved, if you really want to do it thoroughly.

Agree, the labor aristocracy in the west has their material interested intertwined with imperialism and stands to lose from revolution in the periphery. Now just add to the picture: if all the countries, including the west, had communist revolutions, including redistribution, average people in some imperial core countries like the US and Germany would still initially be better of. People in Canada, France and Spain would lose wealth. They would only get freedom, security, peace, fullfilment from end of alienation and survival of the planetary ecosystem, but this is all less immediate and less material.

Source

This is from 2019. As global inequality increases, more and more workers might stand to win wealth from revolution.

Disclaimer: this simple calculation doesn’t take into account, how supply chains would shift after revolutions. It basically just looks at the immediate effect of a hypothetical redistribution of wealth. The real impact of global revolutions on workers in the imperial core, as well as the periphery would depend on structures of international solidarity forming. Still, a quantitative perspective like this can be helpful.

Totally agree on dialectical materialism, though there is no such thing as a universally accepted scientific method. I say this as a scientist working in a technical field: science in capitalism is ripe with contradiction.

Maybe, “philosophy is useless” is a philosophical statement though.

Yes! Finally someone else who is amazed by this! It’s crazy to think, that magnetism can be understood as nothing more than a relativistic phenomenon.

Maybe it’s about measurement, but also look closer, the change is not 2006, it’s 2007. It’s when the financial crisis related to the US real estate bubble hit. Also the x-axis is in percent. So it might just be, that the crash hit the regions harder, whose banks had invested most in the bubble: US and Europe. The apparent rise we see might just be production in the global south staying constant, while falling elsewhere.

Also China started huge investments, but I think most of that was at the end of 2008.

Edit: No, I was wrong. Looks like production shifted from medium skilled south to low skilled south. I have no explanation.

Really? The one in the entrance hall or the one in the whale exhibit?

Not an expert, but I think they’re a bit like DJ’s. Some of those are famous too, right? And the musicians are like tracks, except they don’t always keep their tempo, volume and pitch automatically, so the conductor job is more difficult than a DJ’s. The conductor fine tunes all of this. Telling the individual musicians when to start and stop, how fast to go, how loud to play. The sheets leave plenty of room for interpretation.

Lots of other things are controlled by the conductor, too.

There is a great walking tour about Marx and Engels life in London. The guide even sang the international for us in front of the pub, where the first international met.

Wow, that’s really good advice 👍 I’m on boardgame geek and hadn’t thought of that.

This would work inverted as well: “Yeah, I’m running a quick vibe check on the data to find out where the noise is coming from.”

What everyone says doesn’t completely answer the question. Yes it’s about selling your data and attention to advertisers. But if it’s about the “meta”, than there is a twofold strategy about it: first exploiting the network effect (wikipedia link) while growing. And then locking in the market (“keep you in their ecosystem”), thereby locking out competition. It’s ironic, but capitalists hate competition (in their own field) so much they would do everything to avoid it.

Their ideal endgame is what Amazon has achieved: becoming so big, they can start selling other capitalists access to their walled in market.

All these platforms could have been made compatible with each other (like federated instances). Without content walled in behind logins, we would be able to put together our own feed with content from all over the Internet and choose our own algorithms to sort it. But then no one could sell your attention or data to advertisers and small creative upstarts would be able compete with big entrenched content providers.

Thank you!

There are some good critiques of thirdworldism in this thread already, so I won’t add to them. But it really bothers me, how few people preface their comments with:“Yes, unequal exchange and superexploitation are real. Yes sometimes the working class in the imperial core benefits from them.”

Acknowledge the material reality first, then make your argument. Also using “we” and “here” as a synonym for westerners or US citizens, as if no one else was using this platform is problematic.

I’m not thirdworldist and do think the international working class does have common interests and should stand united, but it is important to realize that sometimes western workers behave like a worker aristocracy.

Don’t be like them avoid these errors. For example:

• When trade unions in the US support strict tariffs on China, because the bosses promise real hard, that then they’ll refrain from moving production offshore. Then those unions enter into an alliance with western capital and become complicit in exploitation.

• When German leftist organizations want to be seen as reasonable, and acceptable by the state to avoid persecution and keep the little institutional support they get, there is one single thing they know they need to do(and most do it): fail to be anti imperialist and instead support NATO and Israel unconditionally or at least conveniently remain “neutral” to put the interests of the workers “at home” first. In doing so they betray the international working class and become complicit in genocide.

• Wherever people say "Yes, we support [struggle abroad / struggle of racialized minorities], but people wouldn’t understand yet if we did something about it. So instead, let’s focuse on [struggle of privileged parts of western working class] first.