For the Record: What Is Capitalism

Class Strugle--The board game. Via Wikipedia.

Covering some ground I'm afraid we may have covered before—

employees while the CEO keeps getting richer and takes rides into outer space in a flying penis rocket. But it also applies to Linda making a decent living by selling homemade cupcakes at the flea market. If she's selling something she produced and pricing it at...

— Ghost of Gene Rayburn of House Moderna🍸 (@ghostofgener) February 8, 2022

That is literally not capitalism. Linda is not an alienated wage slave selling her labor for the benefit of an owner sucking the surplus value out of it. She's an independent artisan who controls her own means of production, in a pattern from long before capitalism was invented.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

Piketty Redux

Shirelock strip by TricksyWizard/DeviantArt.

Thomas Piketty has written a new book, The Guardian reports, under the title Capitale et Idéologie, as long as War and Peace, appearing tomorrow in French, with an English version scheduled to arrive in March. I doubt I'll be making any attempt to read it before then, but I want to put a heads up at the beginning of the presidential campaign for something in the Guardian's coverage that has really captured my imagination.

One of the things that was lacking from Capital in the Twenty-First Century, you may remember, was any very clear idea of what could be done about the increasing concentration of wealth around the world in the hands of an increasingly small group of aristocrats other than the thought that it would have to involve taxing rich people. Apparently he's got something much more specific this time, and it really warmed my heart:

Among the proposals in the book are that employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; that the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%; much higher taxes on property, rising to 90% for the largest estates; a lump sum capital allocation of €120,000 (just over £107,000) to everyone when they reach 25; and an individualised carbon tax calculated by a personalised card that would track each person’s contribution to global heating.

In an interview with the French weekly news magazine L’Obs, Piketty made no apologies for the impact his ideas would have on the stock market. He said: “[Yes], it will also affect the price of real estate that is crazy in Paris, and it will allow new social groups to become owners and shareholders.”

For the record: Happy birthday Uncle Karl!

In 1861, via Wikipedia.

The old boy's turning 200 in a few days (May 5), and this guy called Jason Barker, who has written a piece of historical fiction in which Marx is the protagonist, got an op-ed in the Times to celebrate:

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right! https://t.co/iEPenRz6GC

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Right, this philosophy professor (in South Korea!) and novelist (https://t.co/8J1oUWZqCY) argues, in that everybody now knows the basis thesis, that capitalism is unsustainable over the long term, is correct. pic.twitter.com/KOJz1XrO14

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

I'd add that since that 2002 statement the research of Piketty and Saez on longterm tax collection has demonstrated empirically that it's true, as continues to be corroborated https://t.co/6UeGKFbbGk

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Also gratifying to note somebody agreeing with me that Marx's work represents a definitive break with the Enlightenment, in his rejection of idealism for materialism, a leap comparable to Darwin's in natural science. pic.twitter.com/j9ln3QBTvj

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Communism is long dead, thank goodness, and there's not going to be a revolution, but Marx's critical spirit is alive, and more needed than ever, pic.twitter.com/KYfovsVjW1

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 30, 2018

Three revolutionary epiphanies

Office in the sky. By Qantas, 2014.

1. Millerites

The Millerites were the ancestors of all the modern Adventist denominations, a millenarian Baptist cult in the Burned-Over district of upstate New York, led by a farmer, William Miller, who discovered in the early 1830s, based on his research into the Bible and Apocrypha, that the Second Coming of Jesus would occur sometime in 1843 or 1844. Eventually it acquired a substantial body of followers spreading all over the northeastern US and Canadian Eastern Townships into Britain, Australia, and even the Sandwich Islands, thousands of them, discussing their experiences and hopes in correspondence with Miller's Signs of the Times newspaper (still published today by the Seventh-Day Adventists) and various other publications throughout their increasingly international community.

Miller had been unwilling to predict exactly when this event was going to take place, but he was confident that March 21, 1844 was the last possible day the thing could happen, and when the Lord failed to appear then he may to some extent have lost control of his flock, who began working independently on the important question. Eventually they settled on April 18, when nothing happened, and then sometime in July, and then finally October 22.

White House Fool Report: In your heart you know he's left

FarmAid 2005 via Kate McKinnon.

Happy Afterbirthday, Mr. President! And happy to hear you saying the right things:

He said hard-liners in Iran who chant “death to America” are “making common cause with the Republican caucus.”

and

“If the rhetoric in these ads and the accompanying commentary sounds familiar, it should,” Mr. Obama said. “Many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.”

As well as pleased to welcome Senators Tim Kaine, Barbara Boxer, and Ben Nelson to the Doing the Right Thing caucus on the Iran nuclear accord. Senator Schumer? Chuck? Are you there, Chuck?

There are more Marxist Obots out there, I'm glad to say, starting with one really wonderful one, the Middle East expert Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss. He made such a lovely statement:

Of course it depends how you define left, but on several issues I care deeply about, from opening Cuba to healthcare to racial justice to, most important, the Iran deal, Obama is pushing the country left, trying to solidify gains that will make his presidency historic. Palestine was also clearly on that list, given his description of the humiliations of the occupation in Cairo in ’09, but he was stopped cold by the Israel lobby and did not have the political smarts to know how to take it on, or the political base to be able to maneuver.

Now he seems much freer. His speech to the White House Correspondents dinner where he had an “anger translator” who expressed racial resentment, his “bucket” (Fuck it) list where he said he didn’t give a shit about any political consideration, his inspiring performance in Charleston, his mastery at the press conference two weeks ago in answering criticisms of his Iran deal and the signs that he is solidifying support in the Congress, and his visit to the El Reno prison at which he stated There but for the grace of God go I and many of you too, motioning at the reporters—these are great political moments for me, they show someone who wants to use what power he has to do good in what time he has left. The era of passivity and fecklessness is coming to an end.

Read the whole thing, with Michael Smith's cranky Nobot response.