Startups solicit seed and angel money at their beginning, meaning from the start someone outside their company, who does not work at the company, has an interest in expropriating surplus labor time (perhaps in the future) from those doing the work.
You this have an enterprise from the beginning set up like this. The startup is the beginning of the organization which perpetuates "inequality", it is its main purpose to do so. Thus it will not have a role in its destruction, other than in a dialectical sense.
The US invaded and seized Guantanamo Bay in 1898. What was the cause for that?
It's a standard American imperial idea. The US seizure and continual occupation of Guantanamo Bay is "legal". Cubans reclaiming what Americans stole in other parts of Cuba is "illegal".
It's quite a joke. The US invading and seizing sugar plantations from 1898 to 1959 is legal, the American thieves being driven out is "illegal" and "without any compensation".
This sort of imperial hubris is why Arabian patriots have been flying planes into the Pentagon.
What you're talking about used to be discussed a lot. You can go to Wikipedia, or elsewhere, and read about relations of production, alienation, the expropriation of surplus labor time and what have you.
In the past, those who work organized around these issues, discussed them and had a common philosophy and so forth.
Those benefiting from your labor broke up or supplanted these organizations and now have control of the discourse. Many workers feel as you do, but the ones who benefit from exploiting you have been fairly successful from isolating you from the many who feel as you do.
I would suggest reading about the subject, then seeking out and dipping your toe in local organizations which deal with such things.
You're correct, China had a long history of famines prior to the communist party coming to power in 1949. Shortly after they took power, and achieved stability in Korea, they began to set the stage to end this from happening again.
Go to Wikipedia and read about the 1960s in the US - Freedom Riders (whites and blacks sitting next to one another on a bus) almost being beaten to death, buses burned, riots on school integration, dogs and firehoses turned on black children, people registering black voters murdered, 4 little girls murdered at a black church by the Klan, civil rights workers and leaders beaten and jailed and murdered and on and on.
Look to the USA currently - before US football games are played the team must stand and salute the USA and the controversies around that, the Black Lives Matter movement and the politician and media hatred of the concept of black lives mattering - which means police killing blacks for no reason. Or the rage against tearing down Confederate statues with inscriptions praising white supremacy like the one in New Orleans. The anti-blacks murdered someone who wanted the Confederate statue in Charlottesville taken down last year - in fact hundreds of Nazis and Klansmen and other far right groups marched there, and the state government and judiciary has blocked the city government from tearing down the statue. Dylan Roof hated blacks and walked into a church murdering blacks.
And on and on. The former African nation enslaved in the US is still an oppressed nation in the US, along with Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and such.
Africans being represented at Harvard at a level proportional to their population in the US is an anomaly in the existing oppression of Africans on the US, and all this hubbub is an attempt to correct that.
> There is zero commitment from the major nuclear powers for an eventual complete denuclearization
The nuclear powers agreed as part of the 1970 treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, particularly article 6, that they would pursue a complete nuclear disarmament. Of course, they have not fulfilled their obligations over the past half century and non-nuclear powers have complained about this, and the International Court of Justice agreed with them in 1996. A UN resolution in 1999 condemned the US for restarting a nuclear race - only the US, Israel, Albania and Micronesia voted against it. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002. The US has been in a nuclear arms race since then.
> You don't need microfilm to read the NY Times; the entire archive is available on their website.
This was not the case when I did this thirty years ago.
> You read ~1800 newspapers from 100 years ago?
I concur with your observation that if you stop reading that sentence after the first few words, it makes less sense than if you read the whole sentence.
> Anyway, can you provide a basis that substantiates any claim in the parent?
I already did.
> I don't mean one link to one article
August 13, 1918 NY Times front page - article headline "Red leaders flee, reach Kronstadt, entire Bolshevist government escaping from Moscow". Of course history shows us that the Bolshevist government did not collapse in August 1918.
> there is nothing like HN for unsubstantiated claims about Russia like the parent, which are ceaseless
I have received ceaseless upvotes for my comments on the lies the Times has told about Russia over the past century, and I wish to thank the товарищи who gave them to me - from wherever they are in the world.
I once read the New York Times from 1917 to 1922 on microfilm, guided somewhat by an index. Every article was about how the government of "Mr. Lenine and Mr. Trotzky" was on the verge of collapse. It gave a very false picture - well, the Times still gives a false picture of Russia today.
If you have access to microfilm, instructive is an article from June 23, 1918 titled "Lenine ready to resign". Of course this was another false story - although he was shot two months later which caused an illness in him that caused him to slowly withdraw until his death five years after.
But there are many stories of this type. Ultimately, however, dominant communist power in Russia ended because Russian communists themselves decided to hold Multi-Party elections (to be even more tangential - some think Lenin would have had a coalition government of Bolsheviks and left socialist revolutionaries if he had not been shot and retired to Gorki).
Instructive is the smear campaign against SMTP Creator and IANA head Jon Postel by anonymous "senior government officials" in the months before his death. It was a classic government smear campaign, against someone who did so much, for such low pay, to get the Internet working. He was repaid by the government hounding him in the months before his death. Thankfully John Gilmore held up the torch on all the shady deals going on after he died, even though not much was done.
> Unions prevent those businesses from being able to maintain competitive pricing in global markets due to labor costs, so those obligations eventually put the company out of business or force it to move operations - normally out of sheer survival since other companies in the space will be doing the same.
Well this is false on a number of levels but is a common argument - "if you're the one doing all the work and creating all the wealth, don't organize with the other workers to keep more of the wealth you create, or the soi distant 'job
creator' heirs expropriating your surplus labor time might send you into poverty".
Of course no one ever tells the heirs who expropriate profits from these companies that they should shirk in fear in organizing together for their class interests.
You make a number of discordant points. If we are in an economic system, the fourth one in the past few millennia, where "the growth phase is over", then clearly it is also the beginning of the end of the fourth economic system, and the birth of the fifth system which was born in the Paris Commune is coming.
Pensions are dying as are other old age moneys - it is under attack, and organized workers are what keeps it alive.
Companies don't have a problem with competitive pricing. They have a problem with below-desired profits. The business press says this. See the recent (non-union) Facebook drop.
"Out of business or move"...GM was organized in 1936. Larry Page's grandfather helped do that. In fact Page has held up the weapon his grandfather carried during a strike. The grandfather then made enough to send his son to college. And the son's son formed Google. Maybe GM profits fell at some point, but the family had already moved on.
Compare to the completely unregulated textile mills in the Carolinas. No unions, yet the plants still closed down and left the country. Low paid grandchildren with no college education now see the big employer in town shutter up and they are out of luck.
Thanks, I would prefer the former case.
As far as understanding international capital flows and cycles, Karl Marx spoke about that a century and as half ago and spoke about overproduction, recessions, falling profits, continuing income inequality etc. Not in a liberal social democrat way, but in a way that showed the system would eventually self-destruct as feudalism in Europe had, or how the Roman Empire and it's slave latifundias did, or as hunter-gatherer bands had on the face of the agricultural Sumerian slave empires.
The contradictions and self-destructiveness Marx pointed out are still happening - one example being the 1999 Glass-Steagall bank deregulation followed 9 years later by the "too big to fail" taxpayer TARP bailout.
It's not hypocrisy - it's contradiction. It's cognitive dissonance which will eventually rent things apart - which has been renting things apart.
As a worker creating wealth, I'll take my own council and organize together with my fellow workers as opposed to prostrating myself before the parasitical heirs expropriating my surplus labor time for scraps of food.
A social worker I know told me about little girls with venereal diseases, which they got from their mother's boyfriends or stepfathers.
Sometimes people make the decision to move to a place which is nice because of a homeowner association's strictness, then complain that the HOA is enforcing it's rules on them as well. Or the same really for living in a suburb with an eagle-eyed police force.
If you live in an area where people want you to watch your kids then you will have to watch your kids.
The real problem is children of very negligent parents who are not being protected, not yuppies who move to or travel to some uptight suburb and then complain the police enforce the law on them too.
> one is economic theory and one is political theory
It is an absurd notion that there are two manners of discussing how the pie should be divided up - one objective, scientific, fair-minded etc., and one "political". Obviously it is all political.
As it was originally called - political economy. The term economics was promoted by Alfred Marshall, one of the most political of those focused on the economy.
> What ordinary person would elect to time-travel one-way to 11:30PM on Diamond's clock, as opposed to living at 11:59PM?
Perhaps those immigrants getting on boats that are so much in the news in Europe and the US?
Things exist which did not then, but many of the problems which exist now did not exist then. Global warming, anthropocene mass extinction, discussion of a new nuclear cold war on Russia's western border - go back 10,000 years and these problems fade away, particularly ones that could lead to human or other mass species extinction.
Of course being human in 2018 seems ok to white American heterosexual makes of the upper middle class (or higher), but that is a small percentage of humanity.
The hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon don't seem anxious to enter Brazilian wage slavery. Why should they, mining interests are currently massacring them.
First of all, this finding can be incorrect. It can be misdated, they may have made a mistake about the grain being processed into bread.
Even if they are 100% right, it doesn't really upend anything majorly. It just means what it says - hunter-gatherers turned the grains they gathered into bread 5000 years earlier than we thought. Any how, the Natufians and Chinese are thought to be the first two cultures to become agricultural.
What you're talking about is 20/20 hindsight. You're living in a world with self-driving cars and Mars space probes and croissants and corn and looking back with that lens. There were innumerable barriers entering into agriculture (and not only barriers, but most hunter-gatherer bands preferred roaming around their territory as opposed to remaining in one place all the time and doing the same thing every day).
We did not have corn and wheat and domesticated animals and oxen and crop rotation. Infectious diseases were as much a problem as when the New World's indigenous societies encountered Europeans.
Anthropologists say the Neolithic revolution was dramatic because it was dramatic. It was a complete transformation of society - more socially transformative than anything that has happened in the past 30000 years.
> Netanyahu...proved Iranian...intent to resume bomb production
Israel has dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear bombs. Why should Iran not have nuclear bombs as well? The US and US industry was pushing for Iran to turn more towards nuclear production in the 1970s.
Iran also has made offers for a nuclear-free Middle East agreement - offers Israel has always rejected. What is the line - Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East are not allowed to have nuclear bombs, but Jewish ones can?
Some people might say Iran has theocratic and undemocratic elements. But the US and Israel had little problem with the Shah's lack of democracy. Also the US and England backed the conservative, fundamentalist mullahs in Iran from the 1950s to the 1970s against democratic republicans like Mossadegh. The US only turned against conservative fundamentalist mullahs in Iran at the very end of the 1970s who wanted US (and USSR) interference with Iran's internal affairs ended.
> The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact - the green light for Hitler's invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II
How about the earlier Munich Pact where France and England handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler? In my eyes, that was the "green light" for Hitler's imperial ambitions.
Speaking of the Munich Pact - Stalin wanted to move Soviet troops through Poland to defend Czechoslovakia, but Poland refused passage. So if you're going to say the Ribbentrop Pact green lighted the invasion of Poland, you could say Poland green lighted the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ultimately led to its own invasion.
The Soviet Union wanted self-defense pacts with England, which were not given. The Soviet Union had a very weak one with France in 1935, which former UK PM David Lloyd George said justified Hitler's Rhineland militarization.
Any how - Japan and the USSR staying at peace had an effect on WWII. From the time of the Pacific lend-lease, Russian flagged ships sailed from Vladivostok to Seattle and back, carrying needed supplies, unmolested by German submarines.
The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed two months before Operation Barbarossa. Stalin went to the train station to see Foreign Minister Matsuoka off, which is something he never did. Obviously he saw it as crucial. So too did the Japanese probably, as it saw the western powers encircling it in 1941.
The EU has sanctions on Venezuela and the US keeps piling on sanctions and newspaper reports say Trump is contemplating an invasion. Obviously these external pressures will have a negative effect on the Venezuelan economy.
One reason for so much pressure is oil prices are rising and external forces want things changed before that happens. Thus the talk of US invasion.
This is in contrast to the US-backed military overthrow of the Honduran government, which has been slaughtering its political opposition. In fact, these are many of the immigrants on the US border being discussed. The western governments back the military and post-coup governments on that case, which has been much more bloody.
You this have an enterprise from the beginning set up like this. The startup is the beginning of the organization which perpetuates "inequality", it is its main purpose to do so. Thus it will not have a role in its destruction, other than in a dialectical sense.