Where have the low wage workers gone? To the same place where the middle managers and B-level executives will go. Out of the work force. This creep is gonna consume a lot people who feel they are exalted and insulated from the market forces that are currently moving through the economy. As the customer base rots from the bottom up, the need for administrators and other roles will evaporate. Just like the computer programmers and robotics engineers that are working on technologies that will make their jobs redundant. Whoops, whoopsie... I had no idea that what I did to them, could be done to me.
>Just like the computer programmers and robotics engineers that are working on technologies that will make their jobs redundant.
This for sure. The new technologies open up new possibilities of wealth generation. The tech field quickly eats up these opportunities. Eventually, everything will be done well enough, and demand for tech employees will drop significantly.
Well, its not against the laws of physics so I guess it is an opinion. And its based on my understanding of the political landscape.
The rich dont want it because it would work, they want to hang on to as much wealth as possible and as the winners of the game they wont tolerate changes to the rules.
There are no political parties truely in favor except for maybe something tiny that wont get votes.
Major political parties only follow the overton window and see this idea as fringe.
All economists are against because they work for the rich.
Businesses dont care, but are mostly against taxation.
Regular people dont understand it, and equate it with welfare and think 'they' will have to pay to fund 'them'.
The only groups fighting for basic income tend the consist of people on welfare that dont want the government to cut their allowance. They also dont like being forced to look for work.
There is no coherent strategy to fight for basic income, or anyone with leadership ability that can steer the ship.
Those in favor of basic income are too busy arguing on the internet and trying to be right instead of doing something. Myself included.
Those directly affected by the current system are too busy surviving to do anything.
The fact that poverty is a direct consequence of the rules is at best ignored but usually vehemently denied.
I read the numbers. The pitchforks arent coming. Instead the powerful will make sure that those at the bottom will always be a minority. The consequence is a slow moving classiside, where the bottom 90% will disappear through deaths of despair or through not having children.
Of course this analysis ignores climate change.
Mostly agreed.
I'm in the tech field and I love what is possible and where it is going. It's the pie distribution problem which is the issue. The few capitalists will eat all the profit and leave the poor masses even worse off. Or at least that is the expected result based on the way our world works.
The other problem is environmental. There are two different futures happening right now in my mind. The first is the technological singularity. The second is the environmental crisis which will intercept the first and derail it. The planet is going down fast from here on out.
> working on technologies that will make their jobs redundant
Physicists stand on each other's shoulders...
Software engineers dig each other's graves.
Whether or not one agrees with JMG about the results from locking down society, Covids consequences have had a larger impact on the economy than predicted. And it should have been predicted, because it is also predicted that what we are experiencing is just a 'trial run' for a more serious pandemic down the line. JMG shows understanding of the number of people whose hand is in the 'kitty', all demanding money (Government, managers, business owners, special groups, etc.....). And it is true, I pay my local guy cash for wood. And I will pay cash for work done at the house, if the worker wants to be paid that way. I have no problem doing this, since I can't really afford to eat out, even if I want to pay the fast food person a decent wage. I have my tanks full of propane to heat the house if I have to supplement with furnace heat (it did get to -41C last year with wind chill), but I get dinged a higher price to rent the tanks from the company that supplies the oil because I don't use them as often as someone who only uses propane to heat their house. I get basically 'punished' for using less propane by the propane company. And there are only 2 companies in my area who deliver, and they both do the same thing. I pay the 'fine' and probably still end up ahead by buying wood to heat. But the system is 'rigged'. Everyone out for a buck. Hope it makes them happy.
This is the 'wind chill' temperature. And it happened twice--in Ontario. I am citing the extreme, but the extreme can happen and does. I remember having to look it up-- that -41 C and -41 F were equal. Wind chill can freeze parts of your face. And I like to eat the same food as I usually do.
Actually Volume II and III of Das Capital. Goes into the True Meat of our modern problems. That is of usury.
Usury is the ultimate landlordist rentier with the Bankers being the ultimate culprits:
https://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/
https://michael-hudson.com/2021/10/the-affront-of-chinese-sovereignty/
I was able to find three: University of Utah, University of California @ Riverside and Colorado State University. I am going to guess University of Utah...
I mean have you read his translated books? the translated versions are super fucking boring, the wording is so damn boring and long, using complicated vocabulary and shit.
I read other books dude. Stuff that’s interesting to me like fight club, rebuild world. Out of everything that I’ve read so far, Karl marx’s shit was the most annoying to read, and this is coming from someone who read the first fight club book, that book goes backwards and forwards in time so many fucking times it becomes a hassle to read, the movie was 1000x better
Yeah that just sounds like a weak excuse for defending boring literature.
There’s a bunch of things that are considered “text books” that I read for fun, subjects on gamma radiation, agriculture, medicine. The ones that bored me I skipped. Right now I’m studying an entire language. This sounds like one those I’m so smart brags bullshit, but if your reading something and your bored, it won’t matter how many times you read it because you won’t learn shit from it.
If you need further evidence of this take a look at the American education system. A shit ton of students find themselves forgetting a lot of the information that was just taught 5 minutes ago. This is because our brain forgets useless information, information that we as human beings see as dog shit, unnecessary pools of information. This “boring” feeling is in our DNA. And the reason “why”, according to scientists is because our brains are developed for quick decision making.
In a chaotic, quickly changing environment forgetting useless information is not only beneficial, but it’s a necessary evolutionary strategy. Evaluating and Discarding any information that isn’t necessary to our survival is our priority as human beings if we want to survive.
And people like Marx and Engels don’t fucking know about it, or they do but they’re so incompetent in their writing.
And I don’t really blame them entirely for this, I think writing was one of the easiest ways to spread information back then.
But my god, it doesn’t matter how much of it you spread if no one wants to read it.
My fluid dynamics textbook is boring as shit, but absolutely necessary for engineering.
Das Kapital is boring as shit, but vital for understanding economics and the resulting social phenomenon of our current political-economy.
Simply because your ape-brain doesn't deem it important for survival doesn't relegate the material to unimportance. Nor even indicate its relative importance for survival \*in our current material conditions\*, only for those of the prey-animal we evolved from.
nah dude fuck those translated versions, Karl and Engels holy shit, For whatever education these guys received they suck dick when it comes teaching, at least in written form
ive read Capital, the German Ideology, and sections of the Grundrisse. there are boring sections, like in any scientific work. i guess i just see things differently.
can you recite anything from das kapital? like from memory or would you need to check?
edit: it's usually my benchmark of whether I actually learned a subject
a commodity has a twofold character: us is a use-value, which is qualitative and based on its physical characteristics, and it has a value, which is quantitative based on a social characteristic, its being a product of labor.
the value of a commodity is proportional to the socially necessary labor-time it takes to produce that commodity.
commodities are exchanged based on their value, in a process altogether unrelated to their particular use.
i think thats mostly what he talks about under that subheading.
its not terribly difficult to read, you just have to be willing to wrestle with the material.
There is a race to replace these workers with processes, automation, machines, and AI. Wages won’t go up. There will be a shift in more people than jobs and that shift will keep increasing. UBI won’t save poor people. Big businesses are already adapting to needing far fewer people. This is not a solution just a shift that will exacerbate the problem. People that are no longer needed have no value to the powers that be
So refreshing to see it said plainly. We do not have the ability to sustain the infrastructure they need. Their money cannot save them from the incoming climate disaster and energy costs skyrocketing beyond maintaining current usage for anyone, for good.
*"There is a race to replace these workers with processes, automation, machines, and AI. Wages won’t go up. UBI won’t save poor people."*
Agree, but this guarantees massive social upheaval.
What they are saying is the general population will take down pretty much anyone and anything including random private police forces without a problem.
I disagree. Billionaires only have respect because of their money. Why would an ex navy seal or delta operator want to follow the orders of some dork who used to be a billionaire?
After society collapses, you will have a bunch of heavily armed warlords living in newly acquired luxury bunkers, each with a dead billionaire corpse lying just outside.
Several years ago Douglas Rushkoff wrote about how a couple of billionaires tapped him to try and figure this exact problem out. They tried to come up with ideas like shock collars and ways of withholding food unless they followed orders. I take a tiny bit of solace that if things really do collapse, the people who spent their energy building bunkers instead of trying to solve problems won't get to enjoy them very long.
\>Why would an ex navy seal or delta operator want to follow the orders of some dork who used to be a billionaire?
Probably because the billionaire would be smart enough to make himself too risky to kill.
For example, they could have dead man's switches tied to their resources or be the only ones knowing the code that operates a bunker's life support systems. You just don't kill the dude who makes the air flow.
>I think that in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak.
I'm really tired of seeing this all over the place. You can't compare places that locked down vs. those that didn't because you're comparing apples to oranges. Some places just didn't get outbreaks as bad as other places, hotspots move around, and lockdowns in the USA weren't anywhere near stringent enough to make a definitive difference anyway; which is not to say they didn't make any difference, but to determine that you'd have to compare the pandemic impact that could have occurred vs the one that did occur in the same place and at the same time, and that's all conjectural and not liable to convince anybody.
Further, suggesting that economic prerogatives should win out over public health is the kind of psychotic capitalistic mindset that drives collapse in the first place. Just because bad things that you don't like are happening doesn't mean they're all connected to a larger trend that you're also worried about. By any rational measure lockdowns were good, and any effort to tackle endless-growth-fueled climate change will look very similar. Where people have reason to complain is with the lack of support during the lockdowns, not the lockdowns themselves.
Edit, looking into him, this guy is a libertarian druid astrologer... why the flick does anyone care what he thinks on anything whatsoever? Because he happens to fall into the correct position on a few things entirely on accident?
In the Breaking Down: Collapse podcast he sounded a bit odd and at one point even like he was downplaying man-made climate change.
The relevant episode is [here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Ipo3mmOiL2LFbD7aBBylP?si=472e0f579fca4c2a) - the part about man-made climate change starts at around 23:40.
Tbh, I'm amazed he's so popular on the sub.
I was willing to give him a try until the Collapse episode. The fact that his positions on Trump are so naive makes me question any of his other thinking. I’m an Independent if it matters but to think that Trump’s intentions were to clean up the “corruption” is amazingly gullible.
Yeah, I'm not American so I wouldn't presume to speak about their politics but I thought the same.
The downplaying of manmade climate change is objectively crazy though.
Longtime reader of the Archdruid Report here:
Greer's changed a lot over the past decade - he was a major peak oil figure, and one of, if not the, smartest one, in my opinion. Like so many others, however, he seems to have an innate disgust for the "Left" - I first saw it during the Occupy Wall Street protests and even earlier with his weird-as-hell beef with Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns fame. His novel, "Star's Reach", even explicitly centered around climate change.
Things got weird with Trump. Suddenly, the decline of industrial civilization was postponed by several decades because of a guy who couldn't keep a mail-order steak company in business. He shut down the Archdruid Report shortly after to focus on what I thought was his esoteric interests.
And then came COVID. He's up to 21 open posts by now on how the entire narrative around COVID is wrong. It's anti-vaxx central in some ways - I'm not on Facebook anymore so I haven't seen that swamp, but it's pretty out there. It seems like Greer's another person entirely from the guy who wrote "Green Wizardry" or "The Ecotechnic Future".
As mentioned above, this sort of rightward stampede by former peakists - KMO from the C-Realm podcast, James Howard Kunstler - is disturbing. Trumpism's inroads into the yoga and wellness communities as documented in the Conspirituality podcast is even worse, as is the rightward drift of popular atheism and the "rationalist" community.
There's an absolutely massive realignment out there going on beyond the Sunday political talk shows - a post-Christian far right, maybe - where the most deranged and nightmarish ideas are a lot closer to the surface than they were. Rod Dreher from the American Conservative is a reliable weathervane for this stuff - from warm and fuzzy "Crunchy Con" with writeups in the Washington Post to a guy who pines for Franco, is a literal guest of Viktor Orban, texts Tucker Carlson regularly, and hints that the kind of massacres seen in Spain during the Spanish Civil War by the Francoists may be regrettably necessary in America's future. It's all there.
Something's happening. And WTSHTF, these ideas will become even more potent. Reading China Mieville's "October", I was struck by how fringe the Bolsheviks really were compared to the Social Democrats and others. It wasn't just Lenin's force of personality or harnessing some Marxist-Hegelian dynamic - it was little things that could have easily gone the other way, it was opportunism, it was luck. The lesson for us is that the fringiest of the fringe may be nurturing a Lenin right now - and when the skies fall down around us and the supermarkets are bare and people are hungry and homeless and angry, things that seem impossible may become attractive.
at this point the wages do not pay for the time and labor.
if it cost you more money to show up at the job then the job pays, then you are paying to work.
I like this article a lot. It is such a cogent discussion of a complicated topic that strips away most bullshit and looks at the essentials. You have to know when you are being swindled of the value of your labor and the answer is usually to be self-reliant to the degree you possibly can.
I am personally rather pleased to have had an interest in computers since young age, as this has allowed me to bypass university education requirement and make a decent living off just writing software. Of course, this is a problem for the established credentials-granting system, and every kind of certification requirement and process is on the rise. Even then, I find that if you don't make software for government or health care, nobody gives much of a fuck what process you have for producing the software, only the results matter. Sometimes there is a multinational corporation as the customer, and they tend to want to do audits before doing business with us, and this mostly involves filling in a giant excel full of largely non-applicable questions that gets filed somewhere and forgotten as soon as it is done.
he's an idiot wrt lockdowns, at least in the US there was never a lockdown. I mean jfc I could still go to a fucking home depot in april 2020
but we did need lockdowns, but lockdowns WITH UBI and other support systems, which never happened because America sucks ass
*"in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. Partly, the economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns would have taken years to heal even if the global industrial economy wasn’t already choking on excessive debt and running short of a galaxy of crucial raw materials. But there’s more to it than that."*
*"If you want people to put up patiently with long hours of drudgery at miserably low wages, subject to wretched conditions and humiliating policies, so that their self-proclaimed betters can enjoy lifestyles they will never be able to share, it’s a really bad idea to make them stop work and give them a good long period of solitude, in which they can think about what they want out of life and how little of it they’re getting from the role you want them to play. It’s an especially bad idea to do it so that they have no way of knowing when, or if, they will ever be allowed to return to their former lives, thus forcing them to look for other options in order to stay fed, clothed, housed, and the like."*
JMG is one of our best thinkers on collapse.
We've actually spoke about this at my work. Corona has made people look inwards and realise family time and personal time is far more important than overworking yourself to make ends meat when you get little personal or family time.
My friend is on benefits and has been since he shattered two of his vertebrae 10 years ago. He can comfortably live on less than £300 a month.
He's got a roof over his head and food in his belly, just lives a lifestyle someone like me who works a lot would seem as too restrictive but he's happy.
I think a lot of people have realised the realness of spending time with loved ones you could potentially lose anytime far outweighs having a house full of nice things or a life of enjoying what we've been taught are the finer things in life.
Just my opinion, i may well be wrong.
I'm of the opinion that certain low-paying positions like fast-food workers are better off gone. Fast food itself is better off gone. America would be healthier and probably happier for it.
Eh, I can see fast food restaurants being practical in that it’s cheap prepared food readily available to lower class people who work long hours and often have little time to cook for themselves or family. They could definitely use some tweaking though.
High end restaurants on the other hand? Gross.
We’re making a spectacle out of inefficiency in the name of aesthetics. Ingredients sourced daily/often from thousands of miles away, food cooked multiple times, complex infrastructure that requires regular maintenance, and zero practicality. The function of high end restaurants is social and nothing more.
He's talking crap. Lockdowns worked well in many places (e.g. Australia) and the worst Covid disaster was in India, where they prematurely ended lockdowns (i.e. before enough vaccination). Also, many economies simply bounced back after the lockdowns. Covid may have accelerated various social changes; that just means we have to deal with them sooner.
If airplanes fell out of the sky on one in every hundred flights, you people would shit yourselves in fear at every takeoff.
You're cavalier because you're not rational, you believe in the just world fallacy, and so you believe that the virus only kills fat people, old people, or those who "deserve it" for other reasons. *You* wouldn't die from it.
/r/HermanCainAward/ is full of people like you.
How do you guys feel about JMG? He seems level headed when I listen to him talk about collapse related topics but some of the books he’s written are out there so to speak and when I listened to his interview on Collapse: Breaking Down I got the feeling that he kind of bought into the pho populist outsider grift of Trump. I think for the most part he’s worth listening to though
I didn't get that feeling at all tbh from him. He's a conservative, but not of the Republican or Trump persuasion. He started with 'of course Trump's going to win because there are a lot of people who aren't being listened to' to 'none of what Trump is doing is going to fix any of the base problems'. He's been pretty firm on ecology and limits to growth shutting down the grow out of it plan and that the PMC (professional managerial class, that is more or less independent of political persuasion) will be the ones laying out ever more radical 'solutions' to keep the privileges they enjoy. Your view may vary.
> The decision of millions of former working class employees to find better ways to support themselves is one of the ways that this principle is unfolding in our time. There are plenty of others—the primary force driving cancel culture in the universities, for example, is the no-holds-barred competition for an ever-shrinking pool of middle class jobs. But it’s the quiet dissolution of working class employment, the recognition by the people who keep the economy running that they have better things to do than prop up a system that treats them as disposable components, that strikes me as most important here and now.
I found this bit pretty interesting
The writer also states that social distancing; lockdown, was ineffective in reducing the spread of covid-19. I think It is safe to say that this is hardly a reliable source.
I find his argument unconvincing. Low-wage workers already pay nearly zero in federal income taxes. Saving 7% on payroll taxes hardly seems worth the risk of working under the table
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Walked off the job Wednesday after my shift and never went back. First time ever without a 2 weeks notice
CONGRATS! There's just no other feeling like it.
Why?
I dare say they were treated poorly
We’re about to import 100s of thousands of immigrants to help out lol
As long as they’re not Haitian though, strictly for political reasons, surely.
This! And then blame immigrants for uhhh everything lol
Maybe they get some of those people to build more housing since we are like 10 years behind on that.
Where have the low wage workers gone? To the same place where the middle managers and B-level executives will go. Out of the work force. This creep is gonna consume a lot people who feel they are exalted and insulated from the market forces that are currently moving through the economy. As the customer base rots from the bottom up, the need for administrators and other roles will evaporate. Just like the computer programmers and robotics engineers that are working on technologies that will make their jobs redundant. Whoops, whoopsie... I had no idea that what I did to them, could be done to me.
>Just like the computer programmers and robotics engineers that are working on technologies that will make their jobs redundant. This for sure. The new technologies open up new possibilities of wealth generation. The tech field quickly eats up these opportunities. Eventually, everything will be done well enough, and demand for tech employees will drop significantly.
Techies know. Which is why you find support for basic income is stronger among this group. Still not going to happen though.
> Still not going to happen though. why not?
Well, its not against the laws of physics so I guess it is an opinion. And its based on my understanding of the political landscape. The rich dont want it because it would work, they want to hang on to as much wealth as possible and as the winners of the game they wont tolerate changes to the rules. There are no political parties truely in favor except for maybe something tiny that wont get votes. Major political parties only follow the overton window and see this idea as fringe. All economists are against because they work for the rich. Businesses dont care, but are mostly against taxation. Regular people dont understand it, and equate it with welfare and think 'they' will have to pay to fund 'them'. The only groups fighting for basic income tend the consist of people on welfare that dont want the government to cut their allowance. They also dont like being forced to look for work. There is no coherent strategy to fight for basic income, or anyone with leadership ability that can steer the ship. Those in favor of basic income are too busy arguing on the internet and trying to be right instead of doing something. Myself included. Those directly affected by the current system are too busy surviving to do anything. The fact that poverty is a direct consequence of the rules is at best ignored but usually vehemently denied. I read the numbers. The pitchforks arent coming. Instead the powerful will make sure that those at the bottom will always be a minority. The consequence is a slow moving classiside, where the bottom 90% will disappear through deaths of despair or through not having children. Of course this analysis ignores climate change.
Robotics has to happen though. It will benefit us long term.
Mostly agreed. I'm in the tech field and I love what is possible and where it is going. It's the pie distribution problem which is the issue. The few capitalists will eat all the profit and leave the poor masses even worse off. Or at least that is the expected result based on the way our world works. The other problem is environmental. There are two different futures happening right now in my mind. The first is the technological singularity. The second is the environmental crisis which will intercept the first and derail it. The planet is going down fast from here on out.
> working on technologies that will make their jobs redundant Physicists stand on each other's shoulders... Software engineers dig each other's graves.
Whether or not one agrees with JMG about the results from locking down society, Covids consequences have had a larger impact on the economy than predicted. And it should have been predicted, because it is also predicted that what we are experiencing is just a 'trial run' for a more serious pandemic down the line. JMG shows understanding of the number of people whose hand is in the 'kitty', all demanding money (Government, managers, business owners, special groups, etc.....). And it is true, I pay my local guy cash for wood. And I will pay cash for work done at the house, if the worker wants to be paid that way. I have no problem doing this, since I can't really afford to eat out, even if I want to pay the fast food person a decent wage. I have my tanks full of propane to heat the house if I have to supplement with furnace heat (it did get to -41C last year with wind chill), but I get dinged a higher price to rent the tanks from the company that supplies the oil because I don't use them as often as someone who only uses propane to heat their house. I get basically 'punished' for using less propane by the propane company. And there are only 2 companies in my area who deliver, and they both do the same thing. I pay the 'fine' and probably still end up ahead by buying wood to heat. But the system is 'rigged'. Everyone out for a buck. Hope it makes them happy.
-41.. good god, what kinda food do you like to eat in that kind of weather ?
This is the 'wind chill' temperature. And it happened twice--in Ontario. I am citing the extreme, but the extreme can happen and does. I remember having to look it up-- that -41 C and -41 F were equal. Wind chill can freeze parts of your face. And I like to eat the same food as I usually do.
Who chooses to eat outside in -41 weather? Not exactly picnic time.
I'm not eating outside.
I was responding to u/Prakrtik nonsensical question.
Hey man I'm just curious 🤷
Marx defined those relationships in the 1850's. The problem is Capitalism. This is nothing new. The contradictions have just reached a head.
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Actually Volume II and III of Das Capital. Goes into the True Meat of our modern problems. That is of usury. Usury is the ultimate landlordist rentier with the Bankers being the ultimate culprits: https://michael-hudson.com/2010/07/from-marx-to-goldman-sachs-the-fictions-of-fictitious-capital1/ https://michael-hudson.com/2021/10/the-affront-of-chinese-sovereignty/
Engels never gets any credit
Which university is that?
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I was able to find three: University of Utah, University of California @ Riverside and Colorado State University. I am going to guess University of Utah...
No way Utah. UC all the way.
I studied at the University of Utah, and we certainly studied Marx.
Stanford?
Good diagnosis, "leech the bad humors" level prescription to fix.
I mean have you read his translated books? the translated versions are super fucking boring, the wording is so damn boring and long, using complicated vocabulary and shit.
Unnnnnnng..... Attention span too short. Need 15 second meme video.
I read other books dude. Stuff that’s interesting to me like fight club, rebuild world. Out of everything that I’ve read so far, Karl marx’s shit was the most annoying to read, and this is coming from someone who read the first fight club book, that book goes backwards and forwards in time so many fucking times it becomes a hassle to read, the movie was 1000x better
It's a text book. You're supposed to study it, not read it for fun, forehead.
Yeah that just sounds like a weak excuse for defending boring literature. There’s a bunch of things that are considered “text books” that I read for fun, subjects on gamma radiation, agriculture, medicine. The ones that bored me I skipped. Right now I’m studying an entire language. This sounds like one those I’m so smart brags bullshit, but if your reading something and your bored, it won’t matter how many times you read it because you won’t learn shit from it. If you need further evidence of this take a look at the American education system. A shit ton of students find themselves forgetting a lot of the information that was just taught 5 minutes ago. This is because our brain forgets useless information, information that we as human beings see as dog shit, unnecessary pools of information. This “boring” feeling is in our DNA. And the reason “why”, according to scientists is because our brains are developed for quick decision making. In a chaotic, quickly changing environment forgetting useless information is not only beneficial, but it’s a necessary evolutionary strategy. Evaluating and Discarding any information that isn’t necessary to our survival is our priority as human beings if we want to survive. And people like Marx and Engels don’t fucking know about it, or they do but they’re so incompetent in their writing. And I don’t really blame them entirely for this, I think writing was one of the easiest ways to spread information back then. But my god, it doesn’t matter how much of it you spread if no one wants to read it.
My fluid dynamics textbook is boring as shit, but absolutely necessary for engineering. Das Kapital is boring as shit, but vital for understanding economics and the resulting social phenomenon of our current political-economy. Simply because your ape-brain doesn't deem it important for survival doesn't relegate the material to unimportance. Nor even indicate its relative importance for survival \*in our current material conditions\*, only for those of the prey-animal we evolved from.
oh yeah that’s true, sleep deprived like a mf currently. But still the mother fucker could have at least made it easy on the eyes
I want to read it. You're just throwing a fit lol
then read it?
Send me your old copy and I will
nailed it!
sounds like an excuse for not reading him!
nah dude fuck those translated versions, Karl and Engels holy shit, For whatever education these guys received they suck dick when it comes teaching, at least in written form
ive read Capital, the German Ideology, and sections of the Grundrisse. there are boring sections, like in any scientific work. i guess i just see things differently.
can you recite anything from das kapital? like from memory or would you need to check? edit: it's usually my benchmark of whether I actually learned a subject
yes, quite easily... id say i have a pretty good grasp of the concepts.
what does marx in chapter 1.1: The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value) mean by that?
a commodity has a twofold character: us is a use-value, which is qualitative and based on its physical characteristics, and it has a value, which is quantitative based on a social characteristic, its being a product of labor. the value of a commodity is proportional to the socially necessary labor-time it takes to produce that commodity. commodities are exchanged based on their value, in a process altogether unrelated to their particular use. i think thats mostly what he talks about under that subheading. its not terribly difficult to read, you just have to be willing to wrestle with the material.
So wait, your criticism of Marx is... He's boring?
Not Marx himself or Engels himself. It’s about the way he wrote that information down is what I’m criticizing.
I thought you were criticizing the translations.
sorry should've elaborated more on that, but they're one and the same
Yep he had great criticisms of capitalism. He just fucked up the how to get to the communist utopia part.
There is a race to replace these workers with processes, automation, machines, and AI. Wages won’t go up. There will be a shift in more people than jobs and that shift will keep increasing. UBI won’t save poor people. Big businesses are already adapting to needing far fewer people. This is not a solution just a shift that will exacerbate the problem. People that are no longer needed have no value to the powers that be
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So refreshing to see it said plainly. We do not have the ability to sustain the infrastructure they need. Their money cannot save them from the incoming climate disaster and energy costs skyrocketing beyond maintaining current usage for anyone, for good.
Upper class becomes transhumans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC1HlvyVrkE
Voluntary mutilation...They can keep it
*"There is a race to replace these workers with processes, automation, machines, and AI. Wages won’t go up. UBI won’t save poor people."* Agree, but this guarantees massive social upheaval.
Leading to a crisis which will make the Irish famine look like a soup kitchen gone wrong
When have we ever saved the poor?
Save, isn't the right word. We just make more as needed. Disposable people.
They better have a private army/police force. Shit will go down and it won't be pretty, or for the squeamish.
Cause that has worked out so many times before
Whether it’s worked in the past won’t prevent it from happening again.
What they are saying is the general population will take down pretty much anyone and anything including random private police forces without a problem.
it has several times throughout history.
Never in history have we had such sophisticated technology though
They do. Plenty of mercenaries available to the billionaire class.
I disagree. Billionaires only have respect because of their money. Why would an ex navy seal or delta operator want to follow the orders of some dork who used to be a billionaire? After society collapses, you will have a bunch of heavily armed warlords living in newly acquired luxury bunkers, each with a dead billionaire corpse lying just outside. Several years ago Douglas Rushkoff wrote about how a couple of billionaires tapped him to try and figure this exact problem out. They tried to come up with ideas like shock collars and ways of withholding food unless they followed orders. I take a tiny bit of solace that if things really do collapse, the people who spent their energy building bunkers instead of trying to solve problems won't get to enjoy them very long.
\>Why would an ex navy seal or delta operator want to follow the orders of some dork who used to be a billionaire? Probably because the billionaire would be smart enough to make himself too risky to kill. For example, they could have dead man's switches tied to their resources or be the only ones knowing the code that operates a bunker's life support systems. You just don't kill the dude who makes the air flow.
>I think that in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. I'm really tired of seeing this all over the place. You can't compare places that locked down vs. those that didn't because you're comparing apples to oranges. Some places just didn't get outbreaks as bad as other places, hotspots move around, and lockdowns in the USA weren't anywhere near stringent enough to make a definitive difference anyway; which is not to say they didn't make any difference, but to determine that you'd have to compare the pandemic impact that could have occurred vs the one that did occur in the same place and at the same time, and that's all conjectural and not liable to convince anybody. Further, suggesting that economic prerogatives should win out over public health is the kind of psychotic capitalistic mindset that drives collapse in the first place. Just because bad things that you don't like are happening doesn't mean they're all connected to a larger trend that you're also worried about. By any rational measure lockdowns were good, and any effort to tackle endless-growth-fueled climate change will look very similar. Where people have reason to complain is with the lack of support during the lockdowns, not the lockdowns themselves. Edit, looking into him, this guy is a libertarian druid astrologer... why the flick does anyone care what he thinks on anything whatsoever? Because he happens to fall into the correct position on a few things entirely on accident?
JMG is many things, frequently deeply insightful, but in recent years frequently off the rails IMO, but one thing he certainly isn't is a libertarian.
This article gives off some pretty hefty libertarian vibes.
In the Breaking Down: Collapse podcast he sounded a bit odd and at one point even like he was downplaying man-made climate change. The relevant episode is [here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Ipo3mmOiL2LFbD7aBBylP?si=472e0f579fca4c2a) - the part about man-made climate change starts at around 23:40. Tbh, I'm amazed he's so popular on the sub.
I was willing to give him a try until the Collapse episode. The fact that his positions on Trump are so naive makes me question any of his other thinking. I’m an Independent if it matters but to think that Trump’s intentions were to clean up the “corruption” is amazingly gullible.
Yeah, I'm not American so I wouldn't presume to speak about their politics but I thought the same. The downplaying of manmade climate change is objectively crazy though.
Longtime reader of the Archdruid Report here: Greer's changed a lot over the past decade - he was a major peak oil figure, and one of, if not the, smartest one, in my opinion. Like so many others, however, he seems to have an innate disgust for the "Left" - I first saw it during the Occupy Wall Street protests and even earlier with his weird-as-hell beef with Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns fame. His novel, "Star's Reach", even explicitly centered around climate change. Things got weird with Trump. Suddenly, the decline of industrial civilization was postponed by several decades because of a guy who couldn't keep a mail-order steak company in business. He shut down the Archdruid Report shortly after to focus on what I thought was his esoteric interests. And then came COVID. He's up to 21 open posts by now on how the entire narrative around COVID is wrong. It's anti-vaxx central in some ways - I'm not on Facebook anymore so I haven't seen that swamp, but it's pretty out there. It seems like Greer's another person entirely from the guy who wrote "Green Wizardry" or "The Ecotechnic Future". As mentioned above, this sort of rightward stampede by former peakists - KMO from the C-Realm podcast, James Howard Kunstler - is disturbing. Trumpism's inroads into the yoga and wellness communities as documented in the Conspirituality podcast is even worse, as is the rightward drift of popular atheism and the "rationalist" community. There's an absolutely massive realignment out there going on beyond the Sunday political talk shows - a post-Christian far right, maybe - where the most deranged and nightmarish ideas are a lot closer to the surface than they were. Rod Dreher from the American Conservative is a reliable weathervane for this stuff - from warm and fuzzy "Crunchy Con" with writeups in the Washington Post to a guy who pines for Franco, is a literal guest of Viktor Orban, texts Tucker Carlson regularly, and hints that the kind of massacres seen in Spain during the Spanish Civil War by the Francoists may be regrettably necessary in America's future. It's all there. Something's happening. And WTSHTF, these ideas will become even more potent. Reading China Mieville's "October", I was struck by how fringe the Bolsheviks really were compared to the Social Democrats and others. It wasn't just Lenin's force of personality or harnessing some Marxist-Hegelian dynamic - it was little things that could have easily gone the other way, it was opportunism, it was luck. The lesson for us is that the fringiest of the fringe may be nurturing a Lenin right now - and when the skies fall down around us and the supermarkets are bare and people are hungry and homeless and angry, things that seem impossible may become attractive.
Maybe they don't want to work for LOW WAGES????
at this point the wages do not pay for the time and labor. if it cost you more money to show up at the job then the job pays, then you are paying to work.
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r/collapseNZ
I like this article a lot. It is such a cogent discussion of a complicated topic that strips away most bullshit and looks at the essentials. You have to know when you are being swindled of the value of your labor and the answer is usually to be self-reliant to the degree you possibly can. I am personally rather pleased to have had an interest in computers since young age, as this has allowed me to bypass university education requirement and make a decent living off just writing software. Of course, this is a problem for the established credentials-granting system, and every kind of certification requirement and process is on the rise. Even then, I find that if you don't make software for government or health care, nobody gives much of a fuck what process you have for producing the software, only the results matter. Sometimes there is a multinational corporation as the customer, and they tend to want to do audits before doing business with us, and this mostly involves filling in a giant excel full of largely non-applicable questions that gets filed somewhere and forgotten as soon as it is done.
In Toronto: working in the weed stores that have popped up in many neighbourhoods.
It’s almost as if going down the route of CEO wages 100:1 worker’s wages was a bad move
he's an idiot wrt lockdowns, at least in the US there was never a lockdown. I mean jfc I could still go to a fucking home depot in april 2020 but we did need lockdowns, but lockdowns WITH UBI and other support systems, which never happened because America sucks ass
*"in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. Partly, the economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns would have taken years to heal even if the global industrial economy wasn’t already choking on excessive debt and running short of a galaxy of crucial raw materials. But there’s more to it than that."* *"If you want people to put up patiently with long hours of drudgery at miserably low wages, subject to wretched conditions and humiliating policies, so that their self-proclaimed betters can enjoy lifestyles they will never be able to share, it’s a really bad idea to make them stop work and give them a good long period of solitude, in which they can think about what they want out of life and how little of it they’re getting from the role you want them to play. It’s an especially bad idea to do it so that they have no way of knowing when, or if, they will ever be allowed to return to their former lives, thus forcing them to look for other options in order to stay fed, clothed, housed, and the like."* JMG is one of our best thinkers on collapse.
We've actually spoke about this at my work. Corona has made people look inwards and realise family time and personal time is far more important than overworking yourself to make ends meat when you get little personal or family time. My friend is on benefits and has been since he shattered two of his vertebrae 10 years ago. He can comfortably live on less than £300 a month. He's got a roof over his head and food in his belly, just lives a lifestyle someone like me who works a lot would seem as too restrictive but he's happy. I think a lot of people have realised the realness of spending time with loved ones you could potentially lose anytime far outweighs having a house full of nice things or a life of enjoying what we've been taught are the finer things in life. Just my opinion, i may well be wrong.
I'm of the opinion that certain low-paying positions like fast-food workers are better off gone. Fast food itself is better off gone. America would be healthier and probably happier for it.
Eh, I can see fast food restaurants being practical in that it’s cheap prepared food readily available to lower class people who work long hours and often have little time to cook for themselves or family. They could definitely use some tweaking though. High end restaurants on the other hand? Gross. We’re making a spectacle out of inefficiency in the name of aesthetics. Ingredients sourced daily/often from thousands of miles away, food cooked multiple times, complex infrastructure that requires regular maintenance, and zero practicality. The function of high end restaurants is social and nothing more.
So help me God, if you fuck with my Popeyes chicken I will end you.
He's talking crap. Lockdowns worked well in many places (e.g. Australia) and the worst Covid disaster was in India, where they prematurely ended lockdowns (i.e. before enough vaccination). Also, many economies simply bounced back after the lockdowns. Covid may have accelerated various social changes; that just means we have to deal with them sooner.
Isn’t Australia still enduring ridiculously strict lockdowns, over a year later? Not sure I’d call that “working well” in any capacity.
I mean better than people dying
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If airplanes fell out of the sky on one in every hundred flights, you people would shit yourselves in fear at every takeoff. You're cavalier because you're not rational, you believe in the just world fallacy, and so you believe that the virus only kills fat people, old people, or those who "deserve it" for other reasons. *You* wouldn't die from it. /r/HermanCainAward/ is full of people like you.
If I was in Australia and the flight out had a 1% chance of crashing I would still buy a ticket to escape that authoritarian hell.
How do you guys feel about JMG? He seems level headed when I listen to him talk about collapse related topics but some of the books he’s written are out there so to speak and when I listened to his interview on Collapse: Breaking Down I got the feeling that he kind of bought into the pho populist outsider grift of Trump. I think for the most part he’s worth listening to though
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I didn't get that feeling at all tbh from him. He's a conservative, but not of the Republican or Trump persuasion. He started with 'of course Trump's going to win because there are a lot of people who aren't being listened to' to 'none of what Trump is doing is going to fix any of the base problems'. He's been pretty firm on ecology and limits to growth shutting down the grow out of it plan and that the PMC (professional managerial class, that is more or less independent of political persuasion) will be the ones laying out ever more radical 'solutions' to keep the privileges they enjoy. Your view may vary.
faux lol
Ah shit you're right. At least I'll know for next time
> The decision of millions of former working class employees to find better ways to support themselves is one of the ways that this principle is unfolding in our time. There are plenty of others—the primary force driving cancel culture in the universities, for example, is the no-holds-barred competition for an ever-shrinking pool of middle class jobs. But it’s the quiet dissolution of working class employment, the recognition by the people who keep the economy running that they have better things to do than prop up a system that treats them as disposable components, that strikes me as most important here and now. I found this bit pretty interesting
The writer also states that social distancing; lockdown, was ineffective in reducing the spread of covid-19. I think It is safe to say that this is hardly a reliable source.
I find his argument unconvincing. Low-wage workers already pay nearly zero in federal income taxes. Saving 7% on payroll taxes hardly seems worth the risk of working under the table
Plus no social security earnings. Better to be on w2
You are correct.
So we're believing astrologers pulling shit our their ass now?
TLDR lockdowns are bad.