> And the Communist regime in Poland, which had been installed by Stalin at the end of the Second World War, had reasons to be concerned about Milosz.
It's amazing how heavy-handed and propagandistic Americans sound in a liberal magazine like the New Yorker when they try to portray Poland as being heavy-handed and propagandistic. Imagine if this sentence was written:
"And the Capitalist regime in Italy, which had been installed by Truman at the end of the Second World War, had reasons to be concerned"
And why wouldn't one write that about Italy...it was more of a satellite state of the USA than Poland ever was of the USSR.
> The problem with Marx is not that his analysis is nonsensical, as Mr Gauke maintains, but that his solution was far worse than the disease.
What solution did Marx propose? In the afterword of Capital, Marx notes "The Paris Revue Positiviste reproaches me in that...[I] — imagine! — confine myself to the mere critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing recipes (Comtist ones?) for the cook-shops of the future".
Also Marx wasn't worried that CEOs were paid well as The Economist and "shareholder advocates" seems to be. At least that would be paid to someone who showed up for work. Marx was more concerned in noting the dividend checks that went out quarterly, if joint-stock company dividend checks went out quarterly in those days.
The Economist is being indirect in stating Marx's concerns. I'd guess more out of ignorance than malice. Even the first chapter of Capital is famously a hard slog to get through. I doubt the young Economist author made it through Anti-Dühring.
More importantly, Marx thought the various contradictions of capitalist production would lead to economic crises that the world saw in the 1930s (outside the USSR, whose economy was booming at the time). Eventually, the companies which are too big to fail really would fail. Capitalism's taxpayer bailouts of big business that worked in 2008 will in some future crisis not work, according to Marxian thought.
He also noted how various world economies and societies were swept aside by new ones over the past ten millennia - hunter-gatherer bands for slave societies, slave societies for feudal societies, feudal societies for capitalist societies. In the red flags and worker's councils of the Paris Commune, he saw the hazy, nascent harbinger of the social relations and forces of production of those cook-shops of the future.
There is an idea that the dominant form of production in our age is done in a manner that causes alienation on a number of fronts for those who do the producing.
Part of this is commodity fetishism, where people can see commodities, but not the social relations surrounding the production of commodities.
This sounds like the taking of this to the next level - where the social aspect of exchanging currencies for commodities becomes more and more hidden. You press some buttons on a website, and two days later a box shows up in an Amazon locker or on your front porch. Not only is the social aspect of the production of the commodity hidden, the social aspect of the exchange of currency for that commodity is now hidden as well.
> The CPGB’s loyalty to Moscow also triggered its morally darkest moments – the switches of line dictated by the Communist International (Comintern) in the 1920s and 1930s; the U-turn following the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, which arguably did more damage to the party than any other event in its history
The USSR signed the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because England signed the Nazi-UK pact of 1938 in Munich. Molotov wanted and would have preferred a pact with the UK and the west, and had made such diplomatic offers and was rebuffed. Finally for the Soviet Union's survival Molotov signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 while kicking industrial production into overdrive at home. If the "Nazi-Soviet pact" is a "morally darkest moment", what was Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time"?
> China has the right to take care of its national security, sure. But not at the expense of the right to self-determination of other nations.
How about the self-determination of the Meskwaki and Sioux nations? Do they have a say whether an oil pipeline gets run through their nations? The Meskwaki and Sioux are getting water cannons, pepper spray, dogs sicced on them. Americans talking about the "right to self-determination of other nations" is a farce.
They should ask for lessons from the clubs that Israel's government creates to curb pro-Palestinian speech. They even got Congress to pass laws to curb Palestinian criticisms of Israel on campus ( https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/opinion/will-campus-criti... ). That's a high bar for China to hop over.
Then why does Voice of America have a Russian language TV and radio broadcast? All it does is spread disinformation about Russia.
There's no proof Russia hacked into these computers. The US hacks into foreign computers all the time - the US created Stuxnet, perhaps with the Israelis. Thomas Reed from the NSC said the CIA got software into a Russian pipeline (in the 1980s!) that blew it up. Never mind spying, they bragged about explosions that disrupted oil pipelines in the 1980s and could have killed people.
I think most people on this board are under the age of 50, and an international audience, and the "wild allegations" are not what I said, but that this is all "standard Russian propaganda". The Democrats have more-or-less been saying that Trump and his cabinet are all Russian agents, and it's making the Democrats look a little loony. They'd be better off pointing out Trump's errors, which are often bad enough.
If money was distributed in the USA for something that is actually competitive, like athletics, then people of African descent would rule the country, as they seem to dominate this arena, even in venues like golf.
If you look at the wealthiest people in the US, they are people like the Koch brothers, who inherited their wealth, or the Walton heirs, who inherited their wealth, or the Mars children, who inherited their wealth, and so on.
You could also look at others. Bill Gates was born with a million dollar trust fund - his great-grandfather ran National City Bank, his mother was on United Way’s executive committee with the CEO of IBM, his father ran a law firm, he went to Lakeside high school (current annual fee: $33,000) which had teletypes and access to a GE mainframe in the late 1960s. Warren Buffett is also "self-made". His grandfather owned a chain of grocery stores, his father was a congressman, he went to UPenn and Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg's parents are professionals, he went to high school at Phillips Exeter (current tuition $36,000, more if boarding there).
The first group did absolutely nothing. They're not really being "rewarded" as the article says. They can just jet from Aspen to Monte Carlo their whole lives, expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. You can watch the documentary "Born Rich" which was made by one of these people (it's sometimes on Youtube) and is about these people. The second group - 1%ers who made it into the 0.1%, I suppose transitioned from one class to another, and had a hand in codifying how a large number of people worked. Even doing some of the initial stuff themselves - porting BASIC to yet another platform, selling a CPM ripoff to mom's friend on United Way's board, starting yet another social network (and being sued for stealing it), beating the S&P 500 year after year.
This is all helped by a massive mechanism of basically all of society tilted to let this class of what I consider parasites to expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who work. It's a social relationship - workers work and create wealth, and heirs expropriate our surplus labor time and the wealth we create during it. And use it as a cudgel against us not just in the world of business, and not just in the governments they created and maintained, and the schools those governments run, or the media they created and maintain and to a large extent monopolize, but also other social organizations as well like churches. Through the corporate owned news I learn Trump, an heir and businessman now running the government, this week signed a document which would allow churches to be more involved in selecting who is and is not in government. All goes into each other - you organize the wretched of the earth at the bottom of society to believe in some superstitious fantasies in order to select certain leaders who will be even more vehemently against their economic interests. One part of society flows into another, but it all flows back to the center, which is what we all wake up and do most days - work and production, and the relationship between the worker and those who are parasites on worker's labors and who have the upper hand at the moment.
Of course, several centuries ago it was the royal families who had the upper hand on the poor and the workers and the merchants, so these things seem to shift around as history marches on.
The US government bankrolls the self-described "National Endowment for Democracy", which openly boasts ( http://www.ned.org/region/central-and-eastern-europe/ ) of meddling in Russian and other elections. Macron and his supporters talk the same way.
If the US and France are going to meddle in Russia's elections and affairs, what is the big surprise if Russia does the same?
Insofar as who benefits from "isolationism" and breaking up western [military] alliances, the answer is me, an American worker and taxpayer. I gain nothing with my tax money going to kill or rape some Vietnamese farmer, or overthrow an elected government in Ukraine.
Trump has a lot of negatives, but that does not apply to whatever notions he has of not getting the US involved overseas militarily more than he already as.
> What I want to know, how to turn your motivation back right away, without changing a job or taking a vacation.
Sometimes vacations are very demotivating. If the work situation is bad, it is nice to get away for a week, but then after a week you're right back in it again, and it can seem worse than before, in contrast to your pleasant vacation.
> Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market?
So a visa only available to workers with a certain skill set that chained them to companies is the free market?
> It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.
Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless.
That the word free is attached to it is part of the propaganda element, what's the alternative, an unfree market?
And the word market is the meaningless. How is a market selling radishes in the USA for dollars today different than a market selling radishes in the USSR for rubles in 1951? They're the same thing. What's different is production, namely who controlled it - in the USA, production is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by heirs who do not work and who spend their days jetting to things like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas - in the USSR production was not controlled by that class.
Reminds me of one of Peter Norvig's "Plot Synopses for Episodes of a Gilligan’s Island Remake Starring Members of the Bush Administration" for McSweeney's Internet Tendency
"The professor’s experiments conclusively show that climate change is causing the island to sink into the sea. Gilligan erases his papers and tries to stop him from talking, thinking that will make the problem go away."
Prior to World War II, the FBI began keeping a list of people to be rounded up "in the event of a national emergency" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Index ). Some people on this index were put in concentration camps during World War II, notably people of Japanese heritage (and as Cygnus co-founder John Gilmore notes, some of these people were identified, via a legal fiction, by them filling out that they were of Japanese heritage on census forms http://www.toad.com/gnu/census.html)
World War II did not end the list, it grew. Finally, Watergate, the death of Hoover and exposure of programs like COINTELPRO led to the Church Committee and the supposed disabling of the list.
Since then, all information has been that the only thing that has changed is that the list is not officially for the detention of American citizens. Some of the people involved in Iran-Contra in the 1980s were also maneuvering for a US military invasion of Nicaragua, which they thought might necessitate putting anti-war protesters into concentration camps( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84 ). Of course, that plan was so far out that the plan might be more nutty than scary, but then again, these are people who secretly broke the US's own arms embargo against Iran to sell Iran weapons, the money from which they used to fund a war against Nicaragua which Congress had banned.
It's kind of like that Utah Data Center ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center ) they're building to store what is probably permanent recordings of our phone calls, SMS messages, e-mails, web browsing history etc. They didn't spend $1.5 billion on it so far to not use it.
The chart starts in 1950 with 63.6%. In that year, one out of three American workers in the private sector were in a union. Today one out of fifteen American workers in the private sector are in a union. In the rust belt, the Wisconsin government has been waging a war against its unions, as it and other states become so-called right to work states.
Insofar as this "increas[ing] the risk of social instability", one reason for this is that more and more money is flowing to capital which doesn't even know where to invest it. The main reason so much capital is idle is due to existing overproduction (which you could also call underconsumption, it's the same thing). Workers/consumers are short-changed, so can buy less, whereas more money goes to capital, to build more products - for people who can't afford them. You can see what the main problem is. Consumer debt can solve this temporarily, but if the cut of the pie stays the same, it just postpones the crisis and makes it worse.
Things are fairly simple - there is an aristocracy of heirs who own rights to expropriate surplus labor time (which they call profits) from those of us who work and create all wealth. They are very well organized in industry, government, and media. They don't want the people who do the work and create the wealth, us (most of us), to be organized and as aware as they are. They say unions breed laziness, but these heirs have never worked a day in their life.
Noam Chomsky was interviewed the other day and he said something like "the only thing the Democrats seem to be complaining about with Trump is that he wants to ease tensions with Russia, which is probably the only sensible thing he is doing".
Schumer is the Democratic leader, the leader of the party that 80 years ago was very well-connected to working Americans - even in the south. Trump is playing him and the Democrats like a fiddle. This is what the Democratic leadership stand for? Infosys and Tata? Taking a more war-like stance against Russia?
One additional point of Trump's cleverness is he did it in such a way that screws the most disliked element, Tata and Infosys, while not harming too much those actual PHDs that Google, Microsoft, Oracle etc. hire.
And people wonder how Hillary lost to Trump. You all should queue up that video Michael Moore made before the election about why Trump was going to win.
> a CEO can somehow ‘earn’ £10m per year, whereas a teacher ‘earns’ £25k per year. That’s only possible if you divorce the word ‘earn’ from any of its actual meaning
It's not even a real argument against a corporation, since corporate raiders and the like also say CEOs are overpaid.
At least CEOs have to get up and go to work every day - what does the word earnings have to do with heirs who get dividend checks every quarter from a company? They are as removed from the process of creating wealth as you can imagine.
Ben Bernanke referred in 2005 to a "global savings glut". The conditions which led to that haven't changed much over the past 12 years.
Gross domestic private investment, fixed nonresidential investment increased 2.8% between 2004 and 2014 (I exclude investment in fixed residential structures as that plummeted by 4.9% in that time frame). Computers and software was the sub-field where investment increased the most, by 6.1% a year ( https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_405.htm ).
Whereas from 1994 to 2004, gross private domestic investment increased at a rate of 5.5% a year. Computers and software investment increased at an average rate of 26.5% a year between 1994 and 2004 (ref: same link).
You have to measure investment against GDP and profit rates as well.
In short, Apple is doing what a lot of people with liquid capital are doing, holding onto it.
I scratch my head when I hear talk of this, because the past century and a half has been a steady march in western economy and politics against rights for the original creators of wealth and content. Negligible rights for the original creators of wealth and content are the economic (and political and social) basis of the USA, and western Europe, and now the world. The only people who've talked like this have been communists, and I suppose anarchists.
I mean this is obvious on the face of it. Who has all the rights in writing at a small startup, the angels and VCs, or the first hire? Before the first hire even comes on board, their first act will be to sign a paper giving away what little rights they had to the content they will be creating.
It's not just you, I've seen the RIAA and MPAA make similar arguments, and I shake my head, because they're making the same arguments Lenin and Stalin made. By that I mean with regards to the words like "creator" and mention of the work done to create the content. Not that I make a judgement either way, but it seems to pass without notice how extremely radical your claim is, as it is economically way to the left of say, Paul Krugman's New York Times columns.
The strange thing is that these old Marxist arguments are trotted out about something that is no longer not exactly a commodity. Because commodities are produced, and basically used once, whereas this content is created, and with the push of a button, at costs approaching free, it can be duplicated and distributed one billion times. So in some senses it is no longer a commodity. So just as it loses the properties of a commodity, these old arguments from 150 years ago about commodities come back.
It's amazing how heavy-handed and propagandistic Americans sound in a liberal magazine like the New Yorker when they try to portray Poland as being heavy-handed and propagandistic. Imagine if this sentence was written:
"And the Capitalist regime in Italy, which had been installed by Truman at the end of the Second World War, had reasons to be concerned"
And why wouldn't one write that about Italy...it was more of a satellite state of the USA than Poland ever was of the USSR.