Is this faggot and his big idea even relevant in the 21st century first world? Honestly...

In fact the US hit record levels of industrial production last year. It just doesn't matter for the proles because technology has eliminated 80% of industrial jobs.

Which is directly in line with the consequence of the tendency of profit to fall that Marx described nearly 150 years ago

You can not choose any group of people (even if those happen to live in the same country) and look at them as one seperate economy. We live in global capitalism, and most workers has some role in production, from those in the iron mines and the assembely line to the salesmen and those involved in the development of new commodities.

Shitpost flag but w/a

It's based on physical goods produced in industries. Now what would happen if they went away? You'd fucking starve to death, of some illness, of dehydration, there are a million options. Our modern world makes it so you can get that shit from a store, nice and easy. You just need to open your eyes and see it. They're pretty about it, really.

Marx's analysis is one that examines the how people live produce and reproduce their own conditions of living.

Central to his whole argument is the need for increased exploitation, and the global nature of capitalism. The fact that people's sneakers are now bieng produced on the other side of the planet really does the opposite of 'debunk' his analysis.

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Didn't you know, back in Marx's time they didn't have shops, restaurants or markets. City dwellers went straight to the farms to get fed and directly to the factories to get clothed.

This is like that fallacy where bankers are not considered to have "real" jobs or work in the "real" economy. Sure they have abused their leverage and work with abstractions, but they are (over-glorified) bureaucrats and nonetheless they are necessary in a capitalist economy in moving liquid capital in order to sustain and generate new enterprises whilst goods and infrastructure are being made and developed (there are businesses that run losses in certain periods but make up for it in other periods even today).

In the same vein, "service" jobs ie flipping burgers and retail, are an extension of manufacturing and agriculture, and it is in our interests to seize these as well as they are an essential part of the means of production.

OP is failing to see the whole rather than the sum of its parts.

Global capitalism divides the world up, and there's nothing you can do about it.
You now live in the designated burger flipping country. Have fun.

Sure, lay down and die - cuck.

This doesn't contradict Marx at all and was already observed by himself during his own lifetime.

This wasn't designed to debunk Marx. I'm just genuinely curious as to how the revolutionary socialists think the revolution will manifest.

OP here and you are correct. I can understand seizing a factory for example, but only in a market sense. You seize the factory and split all produce between those who worked on it, those who worked on it are better off. This I can understand and accept. I just don't see how it transfers to the service economy either at the low end (call centre) or high end (actuary). Especially the latter as the high-end service industry is more about the individual and their skills and experience than the tools at thier disposal. How do you collectivist this experience?

It won't, revolution is futile in the first world as there's no way out economy could become self-sufficient.

So should short term goals on the left not include self-sufficiency? Cause awaiting a global revolution seems doomed.

The means of production haven't gone away, the system has just been globalized. Service economies are, essentially, economies based around the global capitalist class, the massive bureaucracy that carries out its bidding, and the various industries that provide services to the two former groups.

A service economy isn't self-sustaining and hasn't transcended the old capitalist relations. It's simply moved them around geographically.

It's not enough to simply seize the means of production, commodity relations must also be abolished. The "service" industry can be socialised via vertical and horizontal integration in the same manner as the rest of the economy. That its means of production often consists of the kind of crap you'd find in a typical home isn't really relevant.

That said, vast qualities of the so called service industry are pointless busy work that would be eliminated in a communist society. You can do your own shopping and walk your own fucking dog.

Absolutely agree with this sentiment. But it begs the question, how many useful jobs are there today?

Self-sufficiency is impossible. Even the DPRK has some kind of foreign trade and exchange with different nations. The USSR did too, and it controlled over a sixth of the earth's surface. As illustrated by Cuba, economic embargo combined with a lack of large-scale industrial capacity will result in the nation being left behind in many ways, leading to a kind of ascetic socialism; rice and beans every night.

Small-scale communes were tried many times over the last 200 years and were all failures, with the possible exception of the Kibbutz – which led to the modern state of Israel. The Tarnac 9 – the Invisible Committee – and Tiqqun hypothesized a kind of fluid, mobile resistance to capitalism based upon direct action. The odds are stacked against them to say the least, and they have accomplished precisely nothing.

In short, everything that could constitute a kind of self-sufficient resistance or revolutionary action against capitalism has failed. Socialism, in the grand sense, is only possible once it finally displaces capitalism as the dominant mode of production and hence transforms human social relations.

The left once had the kind of organization that made a rolling, international social revolution possible. It has since been destroyed, utterly, by the ravages of the Cold War – Stalinism and Western anti-communism.

The goods just don't fly into the consumers lap do they? That's like saying logistics is a wasteful part of the economy because truckers and warehouse workers are parasites as they don't actually make the goods.

It would be absurd for the farmer to slaughter the cow, butcher the carcass, make the patty and grill you the burger (let alone prepare the other ingredients) and hand you the finished product.

When you buy a pair of jeans at your local shop, you are paying for the entire chain of events that bring those jeans to you, and the store is not automated (yet) and the staff are essential in providing the service.

It's more nuanced though with the examples you gave having said that:

That's capitalistic waste to inflate demand and increase consumption in a market based economy.

It would be redundant in socialist or planned economies, there would be no seizing of these unless of course the society involved retained internal-markets with decentralised enterprises working antagonistically in order to maximise profits (this is still capitalism albeit with workers exploiting themselves instead of shareholders) or if said society wished to extract capital from other capitalist societies (this can work in an internal economy that functions without capital but otherwise engages in international capitalist markets) , otherwise they'd be liquidated.

In a planned economy you have administrators and bureaucrats accounting for tolerances in error and preparing for less than desirable outcomes in production, yields and output to maximise production and mitigate harm from shortfalls in goods, their motivation is to minimise harm and apply countermeasures.

In a capitalistic mode of production, they mitigate risk for those enterprises or individuals who can afford their (intentionally scarce) services but with the goal of maximising their own profit which entails less than maximal availability of their service (eg 70% of medical insurance coverage may yield more profit than 100%) and paying out as little as possible as less often as possible.

So as long as enterprises are vulnerable to liabilities and work within a capitalistic economy, the actuary sector is essential in diminishing the effects of potential risks, even if said sector exhibits dubious and questionable behaviour.

Do you understand the parallels?

Progressive politics has been co-opted by the labor unions which are sworn allegiants to the Soviet Union. How is this not obvious?