Capitalism could just collapse permanently leading to communism without direct intent

Tell me how you feel about this article

therealmovement.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/if-we-dont-drive-our-own-wages-to-zero-capital-can-do-it-for-us/
On twitter @housetrotter made this extremely pertinent observation:

We make jokes about “after the revolution,” but the fact is I don’t know how we get to revolution and it scares the shit out of me.

Here is the problem:

This statement:

Capitalism
???
Communism
Practically translates into this statement:

Capitalism
Wages go to zero
Communism
And this statement:

Capitalism (Jobs, jobs, jobs!)
100% unemployment
Communism
It’s real easy to figure out how we get to communism when capitalism does all the dirty work. It’s that middle part, when wages go to zero and unemployment goes to 100%, that bothers people, I guess. People have a really hard time imagining a future where no one has a job or wages.

Fine. If we can’t figure out how to drive our own wages to zero, capital can do it for us.


The problem with this is that that’s also the definition of communism. People know, of course, that under communism no one has a job or wages, but they just can’t see how to get there without a huge bother. So, they try to figure out a way to get to communism in such a way that everyone will still have a job and good wages. They keep running into this brick wall and become despondent.

No need to be despondent: capitalism is going to take all of your jobs and all of your wages and leave you with nothing. If you can’t figure out how to discard your own jobs and wages, capitalism will do it for you. Getting rid of your jobs and wages is all capitalism does. Capitalism is very good at it. Of course, you probably won’t like how capitalism does this — but it gets the job done.

If we do not figure out how to get rid of our own jobs and wages, more people will turn to fascists like Trump who promises to create jobs. And Trump will do this by expelling migrants, pumping more fossil fuels into the atmosphere and stripping labor of it protections. All because you want to cling to jobs and wages. There is no way to create jobs without expelling migrants, pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere and stripping labor of its protections. If you don’t want to expel migrants, pump fossil fuels into the atmosphere and strip labor of its protections, stop demanding jobs. Demand less jobs and lower wages, instead.

Counter-intuitive, I know, but you have no choice if you want to get to communism.

It’s almost as if jobs only serve capital and wages only serve to constrict subsistence. How could that be? How could it be that jobs and wages only serve capital, not wage labor. I mean, isn’t it called “wage” labor? Doesn’t that mean it serve the wage worker? Why would they name it that if it served capital. Capitalism is so bizarre. Who would have imagined wage labor serves capital, not workers? Seems just wrong that that happens.

If there was any justice in the world, wage labor would make workers rich, not non-workers. Who could have imagined its the exact opposite? Who could have imagined that the more we work, the poorer we get and this because our own labor impoverishes us?

If our own labor impoverishes us, is it just possible that less labor might slow or even reverse our impoverishment?

Nah! That’s silly.

How can you end poverty by working less? How could you increase your subsistence by lowering your wages? Everybody knows two dollars buy more groceries than one dollar; which is why six times higher wages today means we have lower real income than in 1970 … wait, wha…? That’s not right. Our wages have gone up for fifty years, but our real income has dropped? How did that happen?

More people working more hours and earning more dollars equals a lower standard of living than in 1970, when productivity has increased at least four-fold over that period?

Could this possibly be because more people working more hours doesn’t raise the standard of living, but lowers it? Could it be that we only think more work means more income because, like imbeciles, we look at the pretty pieces of paper we are paid? But when we actually look at what we can afford with those pretty pieces of paper, we actually make less than a minimum wage worker in 1970.

Other urls found in this thread:

therealmovement.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/towards-a-hypothesis-of-the-final-collapse-of-capitalism/
ftmdaily.com/preparing-for-the-collapse-of-the-petrodollar-system/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

More people working more hours with greater productivity only creates more poverty — you won’t find that in Piketty. The capitalists are reducing your real wages to zero, while the amount of pretty pieces of paper in your wallet increases.

Everybody is wondering why the poverty level is rising and no one looks at the real culprit: labor. And this is because no one can imagine that more labor actually creates more poverty — it just can’t be true. And it certainly can’t be true that working less eliminates poverty, can it? Can our precious, wholesome labor actually be the cause of our poverty?

But if we work less, won’t we get fewer of those pretty pieces of paper? How can there be less poverty if there are fewer pretty pieces of paper in our wallet?

Because working less is deflationary, of course. When we work less, prices fall and our real income rises even though we have fewer pretty pieces of paper in our wallets. Getting more pretty pieces of paper in your wallet since 1970 did not mean you can afford more things, so why do you think fewer pieces of paper means you can afford less? Are you really as dull-witted as Keynes said you were? He said you could not figure out how inflation was being used to rob you. He said you were too dull-witted to even understand how the scam works. And here you are proving him right by clinging to pretty pieces of paper when your real income is collapsing.

If your real income can fall even as the pretty paper in your wallet increases, your real income can fall even as your labor increases. The increasing amount of pretty paper in your wallet conceals the fact that the more labor you contribute the poorer you become. No matter how hard you work, you never get ahead. And you can’t explain why you never get ahead because you keep looking at the pretty pieces of paper in your wallet. The paper distracts your attention from the fact that your labor is making you poorer. As total hours of labor increase, poverty increases with it. This is true even if you work yourself to an early grave.
By working yourself to an early grave you can, of course, increase your individual wages in the short run, but you will only reduce them in the long run. To understand why this is true imagine what happens if everyone tries to work more hours. They will only force down wages through increased competition for jobs. On the other hand, less labor per worker reduces competition, making possible a general rise in wages and the capacity for organizing. Increased organization facilitates the additional pressure for wages to rise.

But rising wages is a problem right? I mean, we want communism and that means wages must go to zero. How can an increase in wages lead to communism, where wages are zero?

Simple: the rise in wages adds pressure to profits and forces the capitalists to employ less labor in production. In this case, however, they cannot get away with cutting wages. Instead, they have to replace living labor with machines. The capitalists response to fewer hours of labor is always and everywhere to introduce more and better machines to squeeze more profits out of the workers in less time.

When you reduce hours of labor, wages fall to zero because less labor is employed, not because individuals hourly wages are slashed. Wages in aggregate fall to zero, but the living standard of each worker improves. Fewer hours of labor means less pretty paper in your wallet, but each piece of pretty paper has a higher purchasing power.

In any case, if communists cannot sell an obviously simple strategy like fewer hours of labor to the working class, it will be okay: capitalism will make them an offer they don’t refuse.

To summarize then:

1. Capitalism
2. Fewer hours of labor until wages and employment reach zero
3. Communism

1. Capitalism
2. Kill everyone on the planet
3. Communism

the guys premise, you can find it in his articles, therealmovement.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/towards-a-hypothesis-of-the-final-collapse-of-capitalism/ , is that trade via exchange value collapsed with the introduction of fiat currency, and due to the falling rate of profit, capitalism has only been maintainded by labor power selling below it's value, AKA zero, because fiat currency does not represent SNLT

Capitalism will already kill everyone on the planet

any marxians here have a take on this idea?

So what do we need communism for?

...

what

he's saying it's not a commodity so it doesn't represent snlt and exchange value

socially necessary labor time, measured by one commodities value relative to every other commodity

right but how doesnt paper money represent value/snlt?

but there are plenty of ways to create jobs without expelling migrants, using oil/coal or removing labor protections. there is a ton of needed labor that doesn't get done. automation has been happening for a very long time but the US with competent center left management maintains 5% unemployment. middle and upper middle class jobs get automated and replaced with basic service positions which means the interests of the existing working class and former upper middle class become intertwined

For all you know it has already happened.

aesthetics

TL;DR of the OP: It is an interesting theoretical perspective based on the principles of wages, competition and inflation. But not feasible and even harder to pull off than a regular revolution.

I find the idea witty, because, it essentially is doing reverse competition. From a purely theoretical standpoint, this could work. The problem is that it has the same hurdles as our current pathway to communism. Every single prole has to agree with the plan, and not just in a single country either, but over almost the entire world. Otherwise porky just imports immigrants who want easy money. Or if full-automation becomes feasible. Which means we become obsolete. So we might as well just seize the MoP and establish communism in a single step instead.

Forgot to mention that this doesn't account for unemployment. Which means there would be a lot of people without money. So it is nothing more than a thought experiment, not something to be taken seriously.

Pure ideology. To say that the current system is fiat would be to ignore the petrodollar.

Why do people insist economic system as natural phenomena rather than realpolitik? It's like people haven't read advanced economics.

Capitalism

means of production are centralized into one vast conglomerate to exploit economies of scale

conglomerate is taken over by the state

Communism

State capitalism. Then you break the cycle of capital and move towards production for use and reform into socialism. Then shrink the state as you hand over functions to local governments and councils, and so forth. Communism.

According to Marx
representative, as the medium of circulation, is money.

The money commodity in Marxian theory serves is money because it is best suited for measuring the relative labor values of commodities. As a consequence of history and economic practicality, gold took on this role for most of human history. However, circulating pure gold is relatively slow compared to fiat. It is much easier to use and create 100 dollar bills than it is to use 100 dollars worth of gold. Fiat currency thereby serves as a token(or a representative) of a certain quantity of the money commodity, and therefore a certain amount of SNLT.

Since the end of the gold standard, there has been no official money commodity. If the government decided to, it could simply "print" money to buy up debts (this is essentially what Bernanke did during the bailout). The creation of one dollar does not represent a meaningful investment of labor. Not even the creation of a paper dollar requires a proportional amount of labor. One can simply loan out some quantity of dollars and later cancel the debt owed to create money, not even needing a computer terminal to do so. Billions can be created or destroyed with a few drops of ink and a piece of paper.

Dollar entities therefore do not map to any exchange of value in this situation. It is the canceling of one arbitrary number with another arbitrary number.

Under Marxian theory, exchange of commodities is exchange of equal quantities of labor time. The fact that exchange is occurring in the absence of a measure of labor time therefore indicates that Marx's theory is wrong . SNLT is irrelevant, currency does not need to represent SNLT, exchange can happen without SNLT backed currency, ergo Marx is wrong.

Jehu proposes an alternate explanation for this apparent contradiction in his other articles.

I have never heard of a Marxist take on the petrodollar. Could you explain?

There is none. Real politics are such that US dollars are tied to oil. People talking about fiat currency as if it's a real thing are either ignorant or disingenuous.
ftmdaily.com/preparing-for-the-collapse-of-the-petrodollar-system/

What do Arab countries gain out of trying to abandon the petrodollar? If you play along you get US military protection, arms, access to US markets, and supplies of the world reserve currency. If not you get bombed.

Ba'athism, being some sort of Nazbol, isn't just going to be content being a victim of American capitalist imperialism.

Ghaddafi, Saddam, Assad. All of them Ba'athists. Shit's like clockwork.

TLDR, but I guess it forgets "Destroy Produtction through War" part of Capitalism.

It depends on the instrument you use to measure. The unemployment rate IS 100%, measured by this individual.

Getting rid of the USD's reserve currency status would create a global economic disaster.

So, uphold Ba'athist anti-imperialism to destroy American economic hegemony?