403 karma · joined June 19, 2021
From 2000 to 2020, the labor participation for men from 20 to 44 has fallen. Labor participation for men 45 to 54 varies from flat to down. The labor participation rate for men 55 and older has risen. Working age men are less employed than they were, retirement age men are more employed than they were.
https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip...
Marx said "I am not a Marxist" and "I do not write recipes for cookshops of the future", so there is no Marxist society other than the one he envisioned in the far future (certainly not a nearer term socialist future) which had the banner "From each according to ability, to each according to need".
The slack can be heirs forgoing the size of their profits, by boosting wages where needed, as opposed to slack in the wages if the people doing all the work and creating all the wealth.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
Was 86% or above before 1950, never above 70% over the past 5 years. The trend has been downward the whole time.
If you look at what the people in Crimea voted for, they voted to be part of Russia. If what people in a region want is paramount as you seem to say then eastern Ukrainian regions seem to want to break from Ukraine and align with Russia. Russia has not done anything in the Ukraine which England has not done or is not doing in Ireland, to your apparent approval.
> The last all ireland vote occurred in 1998
The Dáil vote was all ireland, the 1998 was two separate votes, on the whole island for the same issue. Any how the result from the second Dáil and the 1998 vote were on the same principle affirmed, the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies.
> I also mentioned India
Your original comment has modern Ireland as unmolested by the British military, which is not the case.
Maybe US corporate media, owned and controlled by 1% heirs, has a particularly imperial bent, wanting to expand the American empire even farther, in this case US tanks and missiles alongside Ukraine's long border with Russia (which incidentally is filled with Russian speaking ethnic Russians who do not want this). US media is also filled with beneficiaries and think-tankers from the military industrial complex president Eisenhower talked about. The interferers in European affairs George Washington warned about. Anne Applebaum, quoted in this thread, is an un-American, anti-American who wants confrontation with Russia for whatever psychological or political reasons. With the average inflation-adjusted US hourly wage below what it was a half century ago (even before Covid), with a country racked with Covid, the US should not get dragged into a military adventure on Russia's border. Let the Europeans deal with the diplomatic niceties, the US should stay out.
The British government does occupy Ireland, its military is stationed in Thiepval and Holywood.
The last all-island democratic vote in Ireland was the second Dáil, which voted for the island to separate from the UK. A century on, British troops, who have been on a bloody campaign in Ireland from Drogheda to Bloody Sunday and on, still occupy Ireland.
Some Islamic terrorists use terror to try to form a Qoqaz caliphate on Russian territory, and Russia fighting this development within their own borders is "being an aggressor". Meanwhile the US flies to to the other side of the world to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, which I suppose was a defensive action by its Department of Defense.
The revival of Ukrainian nationalism in the modern era was actually a major project of Lenin's. The west is picking up and working on Lenin's own project, although in a slightly different form.
The Cuban government has for decades asked the US to remove its military presence from Cuba, including the detention center where it kidnaps people from random countries (again, against protest from those countries) and tortures them. Perhaps white upper middle class western liberals can rally to the Cubans cause.
The Russian military was in the Crimea back when redcoats were stationed in New York City, and has been in the Crimea ever since.
The major removal of agency for working people is by corporations and their aristocratic heir majority owners. Lawyers suing corporations for harming children are one of the things working people have to regain agency, as are laws to protect us. There is too little of it, not too much of that.
From 1993 on, Louis Rossetto heavily pushed the idea in Wired magazine that Silicon Valley was heavily libertarian[1]. I had not been to the Bay much at the time and actually believed this was true of the Valley.
> authoritarian technocracy on the left
Like who, the Kellogg's workers who were on strike? The GM strike in Mexico? Even the left in what remains of non-gentrified Oakland is different than the bubble of upper middle class Bay FAANG liberals.
[1] By libertarian I mean libertarian in the American sense, which nowadays is right-libertarian.
Marx's studies show that the existence of unemployment in those not disabled was a category created when the capitalist ruling class displaced the feudal ruling class ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ). One purpose of it is as a wedge in the "lutte" of a worker creating wealth - between the worker keeping the wealth they created in wages, or it being sent as a dividend of profit to an heir.
More importantly, Marx noted what is quite obvious, but not in the quotidian hegemonic discourse - that the idea that a mine worker is poor as he does not own the mine he creates wealth in, whereas the heir is rich, as he does own the mine the worker creates wealth in, is fetishism. The focus on ownership of objects as opposed to human relationships is fetishism. There is a relationship between the worker and the heir, there is an expropriation of the surplus labor time of the worker by the heir. This focus on various objects is fetishism. It begins to reach its zenith in the modern age with concepts like intellectual property.
So this discussion is in this context. There are those in the poverty class, and those in the class of heirs, and a professional/managerial class and a semi-skilled working class, and these classes have relations to one another. The class mindset of the various classes flows from their relationship to one another in the context of the means of production.
Half of Finnish people between 35 and 44 have a degree, whereas only 7% of people in that age range from South Africa do, so South Africa must be much better off than Finland.
Well that does sound like "bullshit" as you put it, but it bears no relation to what I said.
From the time of the cave paintings and Venus figurines 50,000 years ago (and before that) until 10,000 years ago, there is no evidence of inequality, class society or surplus production anywhere. Nor today in the few remaining hunter gatherer bands in the world today.
2000 years ago travel 100km north of modern Stockholm and you found a completely egalitarian society.
Your history is wrong which does not say much for your prediction.
Incidentally, in the past five years five posts with a phrase like Standing Rock or Dakota Pipeline got over 15 points - Americans like to be sanctimonious about the indigenous in China, not the indigenous in the US who they sic dogs on and pepper spray when they try to stop a pipeline going through their lands that will burn up the atmosphere.
Yaa, I heard they're locking kids up in cages, leaving them exposed to Covid.
Oh no, that is what the US is doing to Mexican kids.
No one is ever a paid shill for US imperialism, NED grants are for independent thinkers...
> In post-industrial societies where mass production and media predominate, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
I don't know if the target of the text is only academics, but certainly it is at people who this opening sentence reminded them of another opening sentence -
> The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity.
Which is the opening of Marx's Capital. Marx was talking about (in this and after) how there were not wealthy people who owned and had a relationship to an immense accumulation of things, nor working and poor people who owned and had a relationship to no or much less things, but workers and capitalists, who had a social relationship from one class to another as well as an internal class relationship. The ruling class expropriating surplus labor time from the working class, the fulcrum of the exploitative relationship, the resulting alienation of the worker etc.
If this is the base of social relations in society, Debord was discussing the hegemonic superstructure, which became a more important topic than it was from World War I on, from Antonio Gramsci to his successors. Everything else in society aside from production - media, church, school - but especially media.
Or on things he had done in New York State as governor.
> Supreme Court if they wouldn't accept his unconstitutional changes
His changes, and the Congress's changes, which the American people had overwhelmingly supported in his 1936 reelection where he won by overwhelming margins which almost decimated GOP representation in DC.
Also with Roberts switch in time that saved nine, the Supreme Court accepted many of the reforms.
FDR had reduced judge pensions, which kept the GOP judges on the bench longer and gave them an axe to grind. He did not have to act like Mussolini he could have just broke his campaign promise about judge pensions and have seen a lot of retirements by 1936.
The US never came anywhere near the conditions that gave rise to fascism in Italy and Germany.
Chen moved to the US to experience the American equivalent of this.
It's a social thing really. Food Not Bombs would gather food from dumpsters (more excess food than half-eaten rolls), then eat communal meals in parks along with any hungry or homeless people. Fancy restaurants throw away unused food, people are hungry and don't have much money for food, FNB puts it together for free meals once a week.
I know Food Not Bombs was doing this in Florida and had trouble with the police. It was a real all-American conflaton - hungry people lining up for free food, even if it came from dumpsters, police cars rolling up with night sticks and guns to stop this, anal-retentive upper middle class white liberals pontificating about the feeding, the discarded food from the upscale restaurants going to waste amidst the police breaking up the food lines. As American as apple pie.