woodenghost [none/use name]

Would you say you inherited some of his ‘working with one’s hands’ sensibility?

Maybe I did to some degree, but I rarely practiced it. Went to university and only did some small projects at home. Maybe I’ll practice more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL_X7GelX5Q

Yes, working together can feel so good if no one steals what you make as profit.

Thank you! It’s really awesome of you to make all these quality posts all the time and share these cool comics.

My grandfather, a machinist, build their house in his early twenties with his own hands. It was in a kind of cooperative, where you could pay in party by working on building sites to help others build their houses. So, even though he had help from others in the coop, he really effectively build identical houses multiple times. He learned as he went and did everything except electrical work, even the heating and plumbing. My grandparents raised five kids in this house. It really was his proudest accomplishment and near the end, he told the story again and again, almost every time I saw him and I made sure to listen.

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?

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.”

Thank you!