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Author | Topic: What is a Liberal, and What is a Conservative? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
Yes, that is true: but also not the hostility that conservatism demonstrates toward unionisation, and even seeks to restrict unionisation. Fundamemtally, a workers rights agenda is diametrically opposed to the Heroic agenda of the "entrepreneur" advocated by conservatives.
Neverthless, this power does not functionally challenge the ayuthority weilded by employers. Thus for example, some German workers have recently accepted lower pay and conditions in exchange for the firm not leaving for the third world. Our society is still constructed on the many working for the few, and the interests of those few being opposed to the interests of the many. The rich are necessarily the enemies of the people.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Without a very specific clarification on what you MEAN by Globalisation, the term is pointless. So, what do you mean? Anti-globalisation protestors, for example, do not call for a return to local economies. They criticise the neo-"liberal" privatising, slash-and-burn business model that is referred to by the term Globalisation.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: I'll concede parasitic.
quote: In theory. In practice, that is prevented by border controls, passport regimes and immigration quotas. All of which once again put the cards in the hands of the rich, exploiting the poor.
quote: That is not what the term means, however: what it means is the practice of bandit-capitalism, the low wage economy, lax-to-homicidal safety standards in "free trade zones", weak or no-existant environmental protections and military and political support for unrepresentative regimes which oppress their populations and thus keep wages low. It is entirely possible to oppose all of those things without claiming a retreat to national borders or denying the possibility of the best companies succeeding. At the moment however those companies succeed on the back of human misery and suffering, they contribute nothing to the wellbeing of humanity, and are indeed inimical to life, liberty and happiness. "And the cycle of hungry children will keep on going round'Till we burn the multinationals to the ground."
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: True; but that is also because "working poverty" - ie.e nearly Victorian conditions for the labour force - are no longer acceptable in Europe. It is said that European work to live, and Americans live to work. The fact that so many people in the American economy are in such low wage roles is not a model that Europe is remotely interested in following, except for the right-wing conservative elements. Most Europeans have an average months leave, Americans get only two weeks. We think we have a better way of life, and better living conditions, than would be the case if we followed the American model. We had it 100 years ago and it sucked.
quote: No those are just your dogmatic blinders.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Of course - becuase ALL of capitalisms expenses are passed on to the workers. The workers pay for everything - including Lord Blacks $42,000 Happy Birthday Barbara party. If a firm makes profit, it has succesfully passed all its cost to its customers (99% of wehom are workers), and has furthermore extracted from them even more wealth than the service was worth. A large part of the stupidity in capitalist argumentation is the failure to deal with consumer and worker incarnated in the same person, but treating them instead as distinct abstract entities.
quote: Thats true. Where the income of a single adult was sufficient, by and large, to support a family 100 years ago, the same requires two adult incomes now. Capitalism thus gets twice the labour ouit of us, but contributes no more to our wellbing. Once again, workers do all the work, pay for everything, but the people who get to enjoy it are parasites living off our labour. What we get is table-scraps.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Yes. In fact IIRC it appears in the UN human rights declaration.
quote: Emotively loaded terminology; a state is no more and no less artificial than a corporation. And both are human activities over which we humans have control. [qupte] Let's look at minimum wage, for example. Noble cause. However, the people and small business (not megacorportations) are the most guilty for hiring illegal immigrants to get lower costs and bypass the minimum wage requirement.[/quote] So your argument is that where a capitalist firm is so inefficient that it cannot provide a decent standard of living to the people actually doing the work and making the products and delivering the services that the company sells, those capitalists should be protected from thaier failure,a nd the workers should bear those costs. Why should we as workers accept that? If you can't pay a decent rate, out of business you go - is that not how its supposed to work in capitalist competition? Remember AdamSmith maintained the goal of a capitalist should be to keep their workers fat and content. Modern bandit capitalism is not much like the capitalism that Smith envisioned.
quote: Tax the rich. Tax them 'till the pips squeak. Its all our money anyway; we made it, they stole it.
quote: Thus the alleged fiscal liberal introduces the interventionist state to ensure that we are all morally responsible. Note this limitation is considered wholly wrong and immoral when applied to the wealthy.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Thats irrelevant - if the sale was made, all costs have been passed to the consumer. Even if they went with a lower cost competitor, then they paid all those lower costs. It doesn't matter if the consumers pick and choose - ALL costs are passed on to the consumer, including those of production and investment.
quote: There is no necessary relationship between "value added" and profit; it is quite possible to find yourself obliged to sell at under cost. What determines the sale price is the probabilioty that all units can be moved at that price, not any assesment of added value. "Added value" is just a post facto justification for a price that is higher than cost. Profit does, of course, allow for the investment and the expansion of the business - just as a feudal lords dues and renders from their tenants allowed them to maintain and expand their lordship. Asserting this fact - that is, the redistribution of profits and goods from those who produce to those who merely control the exercise of violence in defence of property - does not in any way justify it as good or legitimate. Village communities, which have been in existance hundreds of time longer than capitalism, also generated -profit and also invested, and they did so without expropriating the producers product.
quote: In principle. But who pays the price of that competition? The workers/consumers by and large. I consider the problem of lavish parties and similar something of a second order problem, because this is, as you correctly point out, technically bad business within capitalism. In fact, its often illegal becuase the employees and dirtectors have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, a director throwing a lavish party can rightly be said to have stolen from the firm. But it is still a problem becuase of the social authority that the culture of entrepreneuarial hero-worship encourages; they have their hands on the purse strings de facto, and their subordinates quickly learn on which side their bread is buttered. Whistleblowing in all these cases is rare, and slow. This is indicative of the serious degree to which this heirarchical relationships distort human relations, makes humans part of the machine instead of running the machine.
quote: Run by workers, for profit yes.
quote: A state capitalism is not a model of a worker-owned society, thus the perceived analogy fails. This message has been edited by contracycle, 09-02-2004 09:01 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Nothing is for free. But as I said initially, this means that in the capitalist system, the wealth extracted from the consumer/worker by the capitalist is equal to production plus a special slice to the capitalist who contributed nothing to the process. The capitalist is a parasite who lives off others sweat. Our economy would be much more efficient without them, their destructive competition and spendthrift excesses.
quote: Yes, thats is what I said. But there is of course another option available to capitalists - increase the exploitation of workers to lower costs proportional to product. That is, Capitalism benefits from a coercive relationship with the workforce. Capitalism is a system of expropriation by which a minority steal the wealth created by the many.
quote: Several; points here:1) it is not the case that this limits raisable capital; after all the products are still be sold, its just that the wealth is in many hands rather than a few. There is nothing preventing a workers collective from choosing to invest its wealth, and many of the same motivations to do so. 2) the individual worker may have little influence, but at the moment they have none. This influence is critically important when, for example, we are talking about outsourcing or manufacturing flight. What happens now is the workers get turfed out; if they owend the firm they could for example just split the proceeds and break up, or retool for another role. Either way, it would not be the coercive relationship that pertains today between employer and worker. 3) what I take to be an apeal to the central focus of the owner/manager demonstrates that capitalism is in fact a command economy, which is ruled by capitalists. quote: Of course.
quote: Quite right. But it is free, unlike wage labour, and does not show the same degree of parasitism by non-productive exploiters.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Ah, no they want us to be grateful to the parasites. That capital was only accumulated through the expropriation of workers, and all the executive is doing is arse-licking like any skilled courtier. Its exactly this lord and supplicant relationship that makes capitalism no better than feudalism, and the arse-lickers function is only required because of the pre-existing exploitationg and appropriation. If the arse-licker wants to get paid, they should get a real job and start paying their own way.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Does that also apply to the person who said this in post 160 of this thread?
quote: Well? Isn't calling your opponents prima facie irrational indicative of someone who cannot carry an argument factually and logically?
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: No, I know that is the case; they themselves taught me to do the accounting that shows that they steal, rob, and sit on their tails.
quote: So do many, many wage workers. Yet they are not rewarded on the same scale - why not? It is a process of theft, thats why.
quote: Really? You just argued that equal work should produce radically unequal pay, and yet you accuse me of a delusional view of how organisations work? Back to accounting school for you, son. This message has been edited by contracycle, 09-06-2004 05:56 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Erm, of course - becuase even in this post you have repeated the canard that Leftist politics is about state ownership. Seeing as you apparently feel a need to lie about leftists arguments in order to advance the criticism that they are "irrational", that is a pretty fundamental charge. This is another demonstration of the Idealistic nature of conservatism; they keep shadow-boxiung at an enemy of their imaginiing becuase it is more comfortable and satisfying to do so than to engage with reality.
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