The "muh exploitation" and "muh alienation" memes

Marx said that workers are exploited even if paid at value.
You only get the result of workers in the ML countries making less than their capitalist "counterparts" by cherrypicking capitalist examples, that is, by only looking at workers in the richest capitalist countries instead of taking a more representative average. The question is what being a worker in 1950s Russia would have been like if the country's political trajectory during the 50 years before had been different, and the living standards of, say, Britain, were not on the cards. Pretty sure your claim that workers in co-ops make less on average is empirically false. Did you misread some report about how co-ops deal with bad times, perhaps? (In that case, they tend more towards lowering salaries than firing people compared to what other firms do, but that is only a temporary measure.)
increases productivity because of reduction in training time as well as reduction of time wasted in changing from one task to another. This doesn't imply that a separation of working from ownership increases productivity.
These "additional" issues you mention are part of the package of the Marxist concept of alienation.

It's not like I'm pissed at you or anything, I'm just not into tedious arguments with dickheads who aren't interested in actually arguing. Here's a cool paper I read the other day about the actual empirical support for the LTV. Marx's theories really are worth looking into even if you're a more into classical-style economics. There's plenty of ideas that can be transferred between the two. This is when I'm bowing of this convo tho, see ya fam.

The alleged economic benefit of exploitation you cite is worthless when your quality and direction of your life is lorded over by an owner/unaccountable manager, the work itself is drudgery, and everything requires debt to purchase. Your point about co-ops ignores the fact that coops don’t conpete with big businesses because that isn’t the point abolishing private business in favor of mutualized enterprise, and converting large corporations into coops while leaving their infrastructure intact.

well to be fair I can only say this about his testable theories, such as "the rate of profit will continually fall and employees will earn less until there is a socialist revolution", and "the rich will get richer while the poor will get poorer under capitalism", both trivially false, even in 21st century USA

another big one is the transformation problem, which isn't actually an empirical issue

Exploitation isn't "bad", it's unfavorable to workers that - in return for their labor - do not get returned the same value as they've created. Mind you: value is not the same as money

That's because of various reasons. Capitalism developed out of the old trade and banking networks. Capitalist countries were wealthier to begin with. By the 18th century western powers were already eclipsing the east in terms of wealth (per capita).
Then there's imperialism; which let's you facilitate a transfer of wealth from third countries to the mother country.
Lastly, many capitalist countries are rich in natural wealth. Both in terms of fertile soils, raw materials and energy resources. E.g. gulf countries, England, Germany, United States, etc.

Marx never argued against this. He didn't deny that productive forces grew under capitalism.
Capitalism isn't evil. In fact, it works. Yet it has structural problems however that become evident in the long run. Besides exploitation there's the declining rate of profit, which is sort of destined to run capitalism into the ground.

If you can't even be bothered to read the material you're supposedly refuting, why bother debating it?
Now are you willing to actually have an intellectually honest discussion about theory, or are you just here to smugshitpost?

your quality and direction of life are made up mostly by YOU–don't like your manager? get another job. I've never had a worse than mediocre yet friendly manager (despite having worked in fast food AND finance), and I find it almost hysterical that you would claim the CEO/board of directors of your company decides the quality and direction of your LIFE. It's perfectly possible to have a healthy relationship with your coworkers and managers. It's not as if transitioning to communism will make everyone like each other more.
First of all, how much you enjoy your job is dependent mostly on YOUR attitude, and the way you interact with people on a daily basis. Second of all, your ability to choose a fun and fulfilling job is limited mostly by your material wealth, something which capitalist workers accumulate more rapidly than their socialist counterparts.
large and unsustainable personal debt is an issue, again at the level of the individual. The market lowers prices and increases consumer surplus faster than central planning, anyway.

Actually that's exactly what it implies, since the labor that capitalists do IS different from the labor that their employees do.

Okay, I'll take you up on exploitation.

The 'marxist imperative' is just to improve life for the working class, which makes up the vast majority of the population. We want our lives and the lives of our countrymen to be better.

Exploitation:
While its true that in a sense the worker isn't being paid his 'fair share', its more nuanced than that. What's actually happening is that the worker's time (labour power) is bought with enough money for subsistence. However the amount of products one worker can produce is variable; depending on the techniques in place and the policies of management the worker can be made to produce more or less. By making the worker work faster by looking over his shoulder, by getting him to do unpaid overtime and so on, he is exploited in the sense of doing work that is not compensated, and in the sense of wearing him out to the point of illness.

Ironically, marx developed his theories as the result of studying the effects of the industrial revolution on the economy, and the transition from handicraft to the factory system. Like the other classical economists he gave the division of labour and the forces of production unleashed by the factories centre stage. Socialists don't want to abolish social production and go back to production by individuals with hand tools, we want to keep social production but socialize the gains made from it.

The roles of 'manager' and 'entrepreneur' are completely seperate. Large, mature industries do not even have entrepreneurs; they have long turned into rentier capitalists.

Finally, all other things being equal, co-op workers do earn more than capitalist employees, not sure where you're getting your data.

mate dont come here to be smug. ask questions but be respectful, it shouldnt be hard if youre over 18.

is pic related cherrypicking?
even converting to GNP there is a significant and obvious advantage to the more capitalist countries

well I can't find any definitive data on it, I will say that even if it IS better, it is perfectly feasible in capitalist economies and the difference isn't really an argument against capitalism

well, which is it? I have a really hard time sorting through the VERY provincial language of Marxism
well I can't find any definitive data on it, I will say that even if it IS better, it is perfectly feasible in capitalist economies and the difference isn't really an argument against capitalism

OP, don't you think it's a bit of a problem that you define the fundamental building blocks, terms like alienation, in a different way than how Marx used them, when you claim to paraphrase Marx and then criticize him for that? You brush it off like it's some autistic hair-splitting, just a formality, but you fundamentally talk about the wrong opinions of some fictional person you are merely giving the same name.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

Kind of interesting that you used the year 1990.

Something very interesting happens to the GDP of those ML countries as they liberalize in the next few years, and it isn't good.

Why all the sages? Wouldn't you be excited to integrate new knowledge and test your own?

pic related, the trendline is meaningless but it's obviously not going down
pic related

look is it that hard to accept that the inefficiencies of the Soviet and Chinese systems really WERE bad? Why do you think the NEP was implemented?

feel free to correct my understanding of the terms as these posters tried to do (but ultimately arrived at the same definition I had conceptualized)

drastic and sudden political change and corruption being bad isn't really a criticism of capitalism, but since you mentioned it, pic related again. hmm…..

How about the median wage and provision of social services? GDP per capita indicates the amount of stuff produced but if its poorly distributed the workers won't see a benefit.

You are confusing the activity of management with ownership.

Yes. There is no African country in it. Also, if you want to know how workers are doing, such a per-head measure is misleading when one place has a far less egalitarian distribution of income than another, and the highest incomes usually among non-workers.
*record scratch* So you admit you were just making shit up in your original post because it fits nicely with what you like to believe?

a capitalist doesn't mean you're a manager middleman.

subsistence wages haven't been true for at least 100 years m80
first of all, work in capitalist countries is compensated much more than in socialist countries, second of all, there are such things as regulations.
I know, I was just including all possible definitions for "the capitalist/your boss"
Who is Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? pic related. Entrepreneurship (and technology/science, though the three are sometimes indistinguishable) is the driving force of economic growth.

Source? I can't find anything definitive or ceteris paribus

How about it? I can't find anything for that from 5 minutes on google search/scholar

No, I don't think it is. All the countries in the picture are composed of similar people, apples to apples. It would be interesting to compare socialist to capitalist african nations, but to be honest I'm more interested in how applicable communism/capitalism are for relatively high-IQ societies, who are the actually productive ones. Again all the same feel free to provide your own data

No, I remember distinctly a study to the effect of "among firms producing similar products, co-op workers earn less" in the US, small sample size, and I can't be assed to search for it for more than 5-10 minutes. Again, feel free to be the first commie in this thread to present quantitative evidence…

I know, I am including both small businesses where the manager IS the owner and capitalist, as well as larger ones where the capitalists are rich Jew investors.

What's the source of the second image?
I have included a paper that tells a different story, and supports a post-war fall in rate of profit with new (inflation adjusted) data.

That was in the midst of liberalization. Regardless, the imperialism argument still holds. It's a lot easier to maintain a high standard of living when you can appropriate wealth from other countries, and then distribute it through social welfare. (Socialized healthcare, housing subsidies, child benefits, etc.)
Also notice that even before WW2 those countries were behind per capita income. Those with a head start (Like the UK, Germany, France, US, etc.) where in a better position to begin with.

bro youre insulting us for not giving evidence when you cant be assed to learn anything.

Right, do you know why those regulations and higher than subsistence pay came about? The agitation of socialists, social democrats (and some sympathetic liberals), and the trade unions. By political organization to advance the interests of the working class.

They would not have come about on their own under the economic forces of capitalism, and we are now seeing a reverse of those gains since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_21st_century

Would love to provide a pdf but I don't have it on me.

Ultimately I hope your insistence on empirical evidence is genuine and not affected, because whatever you think of socialism, capitalism really does fuck the worker over.

here it is again sourced in the image

interesting read but the data there is only from 1963 on, the exact same trend can be found in my graph but it appears to be part of a larger cycle or random process

Bullshit. Not to be pejorative but the idea that the wealth of, for example, Hungary, was "stolen" from Africa or something seems unsupportable.

Not true with all the countries in the mostly Eastern European graph I used. Also, doesn't Marx predict that the more developed a country is, the slower it will grow under capitalism?

I just counted and 6 out of the 8 sourced facts in this thread were posted by me. If by "learn" you mean, "accept empirically unsupported ideology", I have no interest. Don't bro me you black

no, by "learn" i mean read the people youre trying to debate. you admitted you havent read marx, that would be a good start to the learning process.

there's your problem

…and there's your other problem

While they certainly had some good effects for unionized workers, they were only at the margin. The main reason for wages growing is economic growth and higher skills and tech, pics related.

Even if they were 100% responsible for wage growth in the economy (top fucking kek), they would still belong to the system of capitalism and the free market, in which individuals negotiate for their own wage (including through activities that unions partake in).

wrong, most of the apparent decline is due to new immigration and fringe benefits. third pic related

I seriously disagree. The most prosperous countries on earth (Signapore, the US, etc) are prosperous because of capitalism (as well as their high-IQ and industrious citizens).

literally a made up, unscientific, Marxist spook. Have you ever held a job? Ever read work psychology?

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167201278002

holy shit

yeah, I don't have much time to read for leisure, and would prefer to read relevant and accurate theories as opposed to.. Marx.

I haven't read Marx, but have a workable enough knowledge to debate his basic claims, and to be honest as the thread stands right now all the facts point to my side–I'm not saying that there AREN'T facts that contradict mine and point to Marxism being correct, just that my experience and this thread don't support Marxism.

read althusser lol

holy shit

You're not quite getting it. In Marxism exploitation is basically defined to be the existence of profits, not a psychological state.

feel free to articulate any of his ideas or present empirical evidence that support or point towards his ideas instead of just saying "read x" you zombie

you see pal you talk a lot of shit about "facts" (i.e. random infographs off google) but i bet you don't even know where the data's coming from, why exactly they show the results they do or what methods do they use to study these things

so i'm going to do the same because i'm a fucking illiterate idiot and dump a few articles saying socialism good

articles.latimes.com/1986-06-07/local/me-10010_1_socialist-countries
cam.ac.uk/research/news/imf-loans-“strongly-linked”-to-tuberculosis
link.springer.com/article/10.2307/3342145?no-access=true

you're welcome

Marx is pretty well respected in the economics world unless you're a spooked ancap or a corporate shill.
dude judging by the languagr you talk to us with I don't think anything we say can convince you. Our worldviews are just too opposed with different a priori ideas.

you really like the word empirical dont you

except those are opinions, not statistics that you can't debunk
this is a good thread OP, some real flustered commies in here.

This is absolutely not true. Marxist thought is studied only in a few heterodox departments like UMass and the New School to name a few, and they are mostly ridiculed by mainstream economists. Now, you can dismiss the entire field as corporate shills, but this would be a bit of a disingenuous definition of "the economics world". The English, Anthropoloy, Sociology, etc. departments are not the economics world.

I was replying to this user >>2270327 who appears to believe the "self-help" ideology (basic psychological facts) I express here is incorrect because Marx said so. Anyway we're going nowhere fast with the SAGE! guy–feel free to ignore the rhetorical content of my responses to him as unscientific and rhetorical in nature.

good job completely failing to either refute any of my points or provide evidence that supports your 19th century religion then.

kek yeah all the tables of evidence I produce are just random and totally irrelevant… talk about confirmation bias

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAH
Marx is a fucking punchline in the economic world

sorry i forgot the graph

okay, explain this to me then; why isnt haiti a better quality of life than cuba despite it being capitalist while cuba is socialist?

Don't try to tell me what's what in the economics world, I work in finance. Anyway, most economists are crackpots who blindly cling to neoclassical theory (see: "Debunking Economics…", Keen 2011). Marx DID contribute some things, but they were independent of his revolutionary message.

A priorisms are practically useless, that's why I am trying to elicit EMPIRICAL debate, the only objective method. Do you notice how I'm practically the only one supporting my claims with evidence? Do your theories match the evidence, all of it?

You could easily convince me of communism if, for example, there was a large body of empirical evidence that communist workers earned more, there was less corruption, etc, but the evidence is just the opposite of that. Communism (even ignoring the ideologically unnecessary yet strangely recurring genocides) HAS failed by those measures.

yes, and I really don't like a priorisms and religion, thanks for noticing.

source? :^)

Real Communism has never been tried.

If you don't understand Marx's theories, how can you accurately apply data to them?

But it was when the french ruled it
then it got bix nood'd

No one understands Marxist theories, least of all Marxists. Even in modern heterodox Marxist circles there are several different competing versions of Marx's theory, like value-form, Roemer's formulation in neoclassical language, TSSI, orthodox labor-theory style analysis, etc. and they all think the others are retarded.

well the main reasons are that Haiti is populated by black people and is not very economically free

Cuba's quality of life is a topic of debate. Michael Moore's dreamy "documentary" was clearly staged by the Cuban government, healthcare is not that good. That being said, it does seem to be better than Haiti, for which I would point to the Autism Level discrepancy.

How do you explain the differences in the GDP/c comparisons here:

"Real communism" is a fictional post-scarcity stage of society. You know exactly what I mean–the USSR, Vietnam, Cuba, and China tried as hard as they could to follow Marxist doctrine, and look what fucking happened. There's no way you can convince me that the USSR and China were somehow not MList.

hmmmm

I do, don't I? If I appear not to, feel free to correct me

Why are right-wingers and porky apologists incapable of arguing in good faith?

countries that were third world shitholes became developped enough to threateb the US? scary ik.

i dont know what i expected to be honest.
99.8% literacy vs literal mud cakes is not a debate i think you wanna have friendo

i have a feeling everytime something goes wrong, its socialism and when it works its capitalism with you people.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

The imperialism argument holds for powers such as the UK. The "less developed" argument holds for countries like Hungary, who were also recovering from the splitting of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

In essence? Yes. It will slow down eventually, which is exactly what we're seeing at the moment.
The United States is an interesting case as the the PDF I posted also mentioned. Though reason have been provided why the US rate of profit rose as it did after and during WW2. Mind though, that the falling rate of profit is a global phenomenon. Thus you cannot limit analysis to one economy.

It does fuck over workers in Asia and Latin America. Singapore has a highly-educated population of service workers, while the US has the benefit of its dominant economic position and it's status of managing the world's number one reserve currency. The petrodollar system let's the US run astronomical trade deficits. The fact that the US imports more than it exports is favorable. Not that I disagree that the dominant powers have been able to enrich themselves through capitalism.

He never made this argument though.

The problem is that you're critiquing theories that you've not actually read.

You really don't. You don't even have elementary knowledge of his theories as this thread shows. I'd recommend reading Wage, Labor & Capital to get a more in-depth idea of what his theories are about. It's short and concise.

...

I think even mainstream economists agree that Marxism-Leninism was moderately effective in industrializing a country and in military buildup, but relatively less effective in the long term.

okay lets try this one last time

what exactly are you trying to debate? marxs theories, their applications in the real world or capitalism? youre not really being clear as to what you want from us since everything we throw at you, you just kinda ignore.

well for WHATEVER reason, Cubans have higher intelligence and conscientiousness than Haitians.

All of the recent development in China and Vietnam can be attributed to capitalism.

As for pre-capitalist China and the USSR, yes it actually is mainstream that you can grow the economy with slave labor and brutal dictatorship, but not worth the human cost.

You're right, I would never debate the merits of capitalism vs communism using only two countries, whose populations are extremely dissimilar. Anyway you still haven't explained the larger case study graph that actually does compare countries with similar demography and economic development

yes okay, and why was that? was it because of the nature of marxism leninism, or what marx said? youre summing up all of communism here as being MLs, which is about as fair as me summing up all of capitalism as being industrial revolution tier stuff. Communism is a broad term, and most of us recognize the faults of the past. however marxs criticisms of capitalism remain true, as we can see today.

again, the education system in cuba is superior to haiti, as well as cuban standard of life being higher. but, you know, niggers amirite?
how are they dissimilar? theyre literally neighbours, unless youre talking about race.
sorry ive been skimming this thread, what were they?

Well, it's a lot easier to industrialize or build up one's military along a known template, previously outlined by England or Germany or the United States, than it is to attempt to run a Marxist-Leninist economy once this step has been accomplished. China's move towards a market economy in the form of Deng Xiaoping Theory is indicative, here, though Deng Xiaoping Theory maintains a great degree of State control over the economy.

Could've fooled most Marxists, seeing as revisions seem to be being made constantly to his theory. Hardly anyone has even written down a Marxian model in the first place.

It appears people somehow already knew that before you admitting it.
You make several logical mistakes. You use different definitions for the straw Marxism that you criticize. You get told that you are doing that. Repeatedly. You commit a fallacy called equivocation, then you do argument by repetition (in case you didn't know that, this is not a proper argument). You then get mad at people being picky about the quality of the data you use to "support" your argument. If the data is bad/cherry-picked, your argument can't be good, so you reject the idea your data could be bad. This is a logical fallacy called argumentum ad consequentiam (appeal to consequences). However, even if you find good data, you still don't have a proper argument if you don't link that to actual positions of Marx, whom you refuse to read. Data of the trajectory of Neptune, no matter the quality of it, won't work to disprove Marx. That would be a non sequitur. Likewise, though slightly more subtle, actual economic data which may be good and work well to disprove a particular economic theory, doesn't become data disproving Marx if the debunked theory in question isn't one by Marx to begin with.

WTF i love Castro now

i might also add before going further that capitalism will outcompete socialism in a head to head because of its nature, so ill give you that one.
because marxism, once again is not a monolith, its a style of thinking. if you want what marx said directly it would be wise to, and this is the last time im saying this, read marx.

You keep claiming that Marxists don't have any evidence for their claims, and yet you've repeatedly made the claim that high-IQ societies are more economically successful due to their I.Q. Do you have any evidence that there's a causative link here or are you just pulling this out of your ass. Also, you should really read the pdf from , it effectively refutes your claim that Marxian economics isn't scientific, as well as the pseudo-Sraffian ideas you've put forward here.

Wrong, it means that he is being made to produce more than he is compensated for. If you produce $100 in value for your boss and he pays you $50, you're being exploited. Objectively.

[citation needed]

The only numbers I've seen have been Cold War statistics, and those were skewed because they only compared conditions in advanced imperialist Western states to that of USSR/PRC-aligned states, instead of the entirety of the capitalist would against the entirety of the socialist world.

The point of socialism isn't to abolish social labor, it's merely to make social labor be for social benefit rather than private benefit.

That's not how that works. This is one of the dumbest memes out there. The only thing you're incentivized to do under capitalism is reproduce capital. Most real breakthrough innovations come out of government research projects and what innovation does come out of capitalism was almost always the result of the work of innumerable faceless waged employees, not the blowhard who takes all the credit.

No, the point is that you have no real stake in what you're doing. Your labor is entirely for the benefit of others and you cannot see yourself in your labor. Many people don't even see their jobs as a part of their "real" lives. This is why the period after most people get off work is called "happy hour". Contrast this with past socio-economic systems where one's occuptaion was an intrinsic part of their identity and saw themselves in their work.

You can deny the real relations of production if you want, but this is merely deluding yourself. Pretending you have a stake in the affairs of the ruling class is the heart of slave ideology.

What good is an ideology that gets continuously out-competed? This leaves absolutely no route to successful creation of socialism since other power centers will out-compete it as we observed with the USSR and USA. The only plausible route to socialism appears to be a Landian fantasy except a super-AI decides to create global Communism instead, and the system is stable because no power center can challenge it. Except, there is no reason why this would be the case…

…and none of the countries other than France on the case study I posted

Nor should you limit the analysis to only after 1963. In any case the US is fairly representative of the developed capitalist world, wouldn't you say?

How do you reconcile this claim with the fact that poverty is vanishing at a faster rate than ever in human history, specifically in 3rd world countries that allow capitalism (Vietnam, China, etc)?

Yeah, we get it, real productive output is based on a lot of things. You still have a huge burden of proof when you claim that capitalism "fucks over" workers, when the correlation is quite the opposite, pics related

burden of proof. I only claim to debunk "alienation" and "exploitation" in this thread. Also again it doesn't seem worth my time seeing as how Marx is economically self-contradictory (the transformation problem and LTV, for example) and way outdated.

read OP

I am asking for DATA, ANY DATA that justifies the very philosophical and a priori assumption that getting rid of "exploitation" and "alienation" is actually worth the cost of doing so.

...

The soviet government was more representative and democratic than many western nations. 99% of all people sent to gulags were released within 5 years. In peacetime a sentence above 5 years was almost unheard of. There are more people in US prisons now than there were in soviet gulags, and the USSR had a higher population than the US back in Stalin's era.

just because it gets out competed, doesnt mean it cant come about. the north during the american civil war qas outcompeted by the south with their slave economy, which if you learned history ideology free youd know they invaded primarily for economic reasons.
once again, if you understood marx, youd know that the internal contradictions of capitalism are to blame for its downfall. to sum it up, the self destructive nature of the system as well as mechanization of labour on the horizon, we will need to see a change in something.

what would the cost of doing so be? not filling your bosses pockets more. i think you also dont understand what marx means by exploitation and alienation.

Clearly not, because the North fucked them up. War is a form of competition.

yeah, nothing to do with their strategic geographical location or higher population. nope, its capitalism wins again, 100% of the reason.

The question is fundamentally incoherent. You've set up a Marxist strawman and you're insisting that people tear it down even though you've been repeatedly told that it's a poorly posed question. Alienation and exploitation are two aspects inherent to intersubjective market relations under capitalism. If you've got alienation, exploitation, and commodity production then you've got capitalism. Marx's critique of capitalism isn't predicated on an a priori assumption that getting rid of exploitation and alienation is valuable in and of itself.

i got 50 bucks hes not going to respond to this, or call us triggered commies.

So would the USSR out-compete the United States militarily if it were in a stronger geographic position? What about if the United States was the USSA competing against the Russian empire?

Wrong on both accounts. There is nothing "bad" or "fair" or "should" in Marxism, there is only the fact that the only way to make profits is through extracting surplus-value from the workers. Which is to say, buying the worker's labor-power in order to produce more than what you're paying him.
You mean, if you were to compare advanced first-world countries while Eastern-European countries that industrialized in that century. It's like comparing the Soviet Union with Honduras. Regardless, this has nothing to do with Marxism, only with the successes or failures of ML states.
Again, there's no "bad" in Marxism, just facts.
It's not just what you produce, it's how you produce it, at what times, at what pace, and what happens to it afterwards.
And what aspects do you think define a fulfilling and prosperous career? You make it seem like not being alienated is somehow opposed to that.
For one, ML production isn't Marxist production, secondly, no one denies the how efficient Capitalism is at generating capital, since that is the purpose of everyone's existence under it.
And you somehow think that has nothing to do with the environment you work in? Most people don't like their jobs, they don't want to be there in the first place which likely creates a feedback loop where their alienation from work causes them to be alienated from the people they work with.

The poverty argument is a huge myth. They repeatedly change the definition of poverty to magically make less people poor, and even when people actually are becoming less poor it's looking at it entirely through a monetary lens. A peasant forced off his farm his family has owned for 100s of years in order to work in the factory in some city now suddenly makes more money, yet it completely ignores the huge downgrade in quality and enjoyment of life. You using China and Vietnam just proves my point that forcing people into sweatshops where they want to kill themselves is considered a global improvement because now they have more money.

thats kind of a false equivalency, it was basically the whole world against one country with a system that was corrupt with revisionists that wanted to liberalize the economy. before you sperg out that : the USSR was corrupt == commulism is a failure LMAO, some of the most ardent critics of the USSR were other leftists.

Any socialist country faces the same problem. Communism is a threat of elite replacement, so obviously it will be dealt with most harshly by other power centers - they wouldn't want, say, the USSR, funding Communist groups in their own countries.

education doesn't significantly change Autism Level or industriousness, race isn't just skin-deep, it is the result of 100s of 1000s of years of evolution in geographic isolation.
see first pic

I haven't gotten mad except for at anons who refuse to debate. Could you specifically point out where I've made running errors?

But the complaint in any case is that workers deserve to be compensated more–in which case capitalism is superior to communism.

see first pic
It's apples to apples as you can get. Similar countries, similar people, different political and economic systems.
see pics in for a global comparison

for a huge number of entrepreneurs, yes, it is how it works. Technology is certainly a real factor in economic growth, but business itself is a science which should constantly be improved upon.

Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at: abolishing alienation would only confer the mild benefit of doing work you think off the bat is "meaningful". My critique is that that benefit is outweighed by the greater productivity of capitalist industrial production, seeing as how your happiness on the job can generally be whatever you make it (given your psychological dispositions and general health) despite the intrinsic value of the work itself. I've met happy janitors and depressed teachers and I've even enjoyed working at a gas station.

I'm saying you don't have your dream job to be happy working.
In which case, your definition slave ideology is inherently a good thing. If everyone had "slave ideology", everyone would be happier. Another thing, "the ruling classes" is a meme. There are no solid classes, your wealth is based off of your ability to succeed. Furthermore, you could make the exact argument against communism–"how can I be happy enriching the state at the cost of myself and the economy in general!?!?" You are familiar, aren't you, with the old Soviet phrase (and the culture that created it) "you pretend to pay me, I pretend to work", right?

never claimed that, but i feel were gonna go down a rabbit hole of "niggers are subhumans lmao" really soon and i dont feel like having another I.Q = INT stat = "master race rofl" argument.
once again you have no grasp on marx if you believe this. class is determined by relation to capital not by wealth.
k

Poverty itself is a dynamic measurement defined as some % of median income

there are a priori assertions, not really many facts

I'm saying that alienation being a systemic problem of capitalism is a non-issue because most of your psychological health at work, as well as whether or not you in fact believe your work is meaningful, is up to YOU and your coworkers. Additionally, the benefit of having non-alienating work at a systemic level (to the extent you have no control over whether or not it is alienating) is far outweighed by the superior economic growth observable in free capitalist economies.

source? monetary wealth does actually describe real wealth, you know?

s-socilists b-blown the fuck out

again with the ideological a priorisms. You are decrying an obviously beneficial and healthy attitude because "muh porky", not because the attitude is harmful to society–you have just agreed that people would be happier if they subscribed to it, and I argue they would be more likely to succeed. You can still be communist and maintain healthy relationships with your coworkers and managers and even the capitalists involved.

Capital is a subset of wealth.

no but let's be honest Haiti is doing worse than the DR because of their lower Autism Level, higher aggression, worse culture, etc etc etc

literally every living thing is a result of evolution and yes the races evolved separately until very recently, how is this controversial?

but an isolated sustinence farmer has a better quality of life and lives in less poverty than someone who works in a sweat shop with suicide nets 14 hours a day that can barely feed his family. yet under your stats the labourer is richer than the farmer because he makes more currency.
and here comes the part where he doesnt back it up, or points to an infograph we probably already debunked or responded too.
these memes need to end. economic growth in a country means nothing if its all concentrated at the top, unless youre arguing for trickle down economics, which the empirical data (right wingers love numbers that can be influenced for akme reason) has proven to be bullshit.

Exploitation is a real explanation of the source of profit not a moral argument. Alienation isn't a psychological state.

READ KLIMAN

I can read 5 different Marxists and get 5 different explanations of the transformation problem.

And I can read five different bourgeois economists and get five different defenses of capitalism.

Wow, imagine that, he didn't respond. Really makes you think, no?

You might as well say video games don't exist since they didn't until very recently. We exist in this age of "very recently".

If behaviour were driven by genes to the extent that the far right and even the mainstream of elite opinion believes, you would expect Australia to be Mad Max.

Except that's not the point at all, nor is that even true.

See pic related.

youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

And I don't give a shit about "entrepreneurs", the days of the cottage industry inventor are over and have been over for a century at least, entrepreneurs don't innovate shit.

Yes, the happiness of cattle being herded into the slaughterhouse. If you have a boot on your face, the healthy attitude isn't to love the boot and find happiness in it, it's to get the boot off your face.

Class are the relations of production, and I'd love to hear how you think there aren't relations of production. Wealth is determined by your access to capital and your ability to reproduce and accumulate that capital by whatever means, not some vague ideal like "success".

And you're not going to find many people on here who aren't deeply critical of how the USSR and the Eastern Bloc states were run. Under socialism, a worker works to enrich himself, not the state, though under the bureaucratic dictatorships that dominated much of the eastern bloc, I understand this wasn't really the case. That said, most people from the former eastern bloc say they were better off under those systems than they are now.

Not when it comes to the UN data

look, if you want to look at other measures of well being we can, but monetary wealth (especially for people at the cusp of poverty) is a huge factor in happiness.
you mean… unempirical evidence? the group of arguments to which philosophical a priorisms belong?
in the cases of China and Vietnam and …, it isn't. That's why millions of Chinese are creating a middle class

This is off topic but 1) "trickle-down economics" is sound stimulus economics according to Keynesians, who are not exactly right wing, 2) you can't prove it from correlational data of such a complex system, and the correlation actually points to "trickle-down" working and 3) "trickle-down economics" doesn't exist, it's a buzzword

you LTV dogmatists are the laughing stocks of the economics world. Just give it up for fuck's sake

are you literate? one of us is not understanding the other here, because thats not the argument i made at all. you underatand what i mean when i say capital, right? and its relationship to labour?
yes, and "slaves would be happier if they just accepted they were slaves and made the best of it tee hee"
of course people would be happier if they just believed in your system, most leftists are depressed af.
im also not saying you should become a weird antisocial yard just because you hate the system.
this is an interesting statement to pull out of your ass, considering you were touching yourself over "muh emporical data" for most of this thread.
no, haiti is doing worse because thats the destructive nature of capitalism.

this "empirical evidence" meme you have going doesnt make you look smart. you can play with statistics and facts and data to back up whatever you want. i hope to god you understand this, otherwise i really dont know what to say to someone who cant accept criticism because it doesnt have a fancy infographic.

Which never fucking happened. Race doesn't exist precisely because humans can neither significantly evolve that fast along with the fact that geographic isolation didn't exist to enough of an extent to prevent the constant intermixing of populations. Also race can't explain the failure of Haiti because Saint Kitts and Nevis, a nearby island country has the exact same racial makeup but has 14 to 24 times the GDP and the people don't get mudcakes.
No, there is no complaint, only an analysis of Capitalism that leads to the conclusion that class conflict is inevitable.
Give a reason why greater productivity is a better thing than greater worker happiness.
Lets take this Neo-Stoic viewpoint to the logical conclusion: surely people can also be happy in prison, in slavery, and in poverty, so lets completely forget about the outside world.
Alienation isn't about having a dream job.
You argue against Marxism yet you don't even understand the definition of class inherent to his analysis.
No Communist, not even a tanktard thinks the serving the state is the end goal.
It's a funny saying but it has no validity because Soviet workers were paid in wages.

That's not the only definition and that doesn't argue against my point that somehow having more money is now a better thing.
Again with this Neo-Stoic position. Again take it to its logical conclusion. Your argument would apply just as well to a slave complaining about his lot.
You're literally saying economic growth is more important than human happiness.
I doubt there are stats on peasant vs industrial worker happiness in 3rd world countries. But what do you think is a better life: working in the country with a livelihood you control under hours you choose while surrounded by a meaningful community, or working and living in a city sweatshop for 14 hours surrounded by people you don't know?
And you do know there are more important things than being a consumer of things, you know?

You're not realizing the definition of poverty is just not having much currency. It says nothing about your actual quality of life.

Saint Kits and Nevis is a fucking bank and resort masquerading as a country.

literally anti-science

absolute poverty is different from "poverty"

how fucking unappreciative can you be? If you earn more than 34k a year, you are in the TOP 1% OF INCOME EARNERS worldwide. Most western countries get you halfway there on minimum wage. We live in previously unimaginable wealth thanks in large part to capitalism. Your grandparents would probably be ashamed of your grandstanding attitude towards work.

Qualitative evidence and a priorisms are notoriously unreliable you douche, that's why scientists use the scientific method (for the most part) and not 19th theoretical psychobabble that doesn't fit the facts

Do you really want me to dig those two up for you because you are in such disbelief that they could be unequal given no other information but their races?

i think this debates over if from that entire wall you only manage to nitpick one thing.

Hundreds of years ago, when peasants, artisans, and merchants were revolting against feudal nobility, would you have dismissed all of their complaints about freedom and democracy as you today dismiss complaints of exploitation as irrelevant? This ultimately comes down to a bucket of value judgments, which you can't really be empirical about in any meaningful way.

I didn't actually read that whole post, I just get upset when people cite bank islands as an actual argument.

It's not Haiti even though it has the exact same racial makeup, therefor you can't say race is a determining factor in how a country turns out.

It's anti-science to believe race exists; it's a completely rejected concept in human biology that only has relevance in sociology.
You didn't address his point at all.
Saying the I.Q of a population determines the status of the country is ridiculous nonsense. If it did then 1920s Netherlands should be like modern Somali, since they both have the exact same I.Q. adjusted to modern testing.

If making racial claims is an example of empiricism, then I think it might be reasonable to claim that empiricism and positivism have a definite reactionary character.

Very. Why should people be content with what has been achieved so far, instead of trying to get more? Something also tells me you haven't met very many people who make 34k/year.
Evidence will always support the current status quo, because each stage of development of social relations is superior to the prior one. But based on this you can't make the claim "this is as good as it is ever possibly going to get ever so stop trying and accept any shortcomings as inevitable."

so because this is the best time as of right now, it means that we cannot improve any further? imagine if this argument applied for all of human history, we'd still be living in hunter gatherer societies.
so because i participate in society, i cannot criticize society? really makes you think. also dont bring my family into this, its a pretty weak argument.
weve showed you the logical inconsistencies in your arguments and youre accusing us of babbling on and on.
i never claimed that the Autism Levels werent different, i claimed that their situation wasnt due to the Autism Level, fucking learn to read.

idk where you are, but it sounds like night. go get some sleep youre arguments are slipping.

trivially wrong
read OP
Actually yes, you should take responsibility to do whatever you CAN to make yourself happy, regardless of your station in life. Working in capitalist society isn't slavery (like Solzhenitsyn experienced in the USSR…), and it really isn't hard to enjoy your job if you have any education
There is no denying that the attitude produced by USSR work/subservience was lazier and less productive than that of their capitalist counterparts

jesus christ you really don't think that an extra $100 a week would make you happier if you were just scraping by before? pic related

No, read it again…

ok

you really like responding to the same point over and over again, don't you?

how do you plan on shifting the wealth disparity anyways

Material prosperity is one side of things, but what about workplace democracy? Are you also opposed to that?

Holla Forumsyp false flag

Most people who are happy with their careers are happy because they feel valued and because they have seen their material wealth steadily increase. This is the natural progression of a worker in most economic systems. You've just got a really bad case of the spooks

see youtube.com/watch?v=7367vdii2Js and pic related you dotard, race exists
it's a taboo topic and the PC police have shut down any discussion (academic or otherwise) of it, but it is very real, just the same as with any animal.

IQ IS a good predictor of general intelligence g

the fact that you commies think living in 21st century Western Europe or America is "like annudah holocaust" or "slavery" is utterly disgusting and reveals how little perspective you have for what real poverty or bad economics is

democracy is a failed god, and is definitely not good for deciding where resources should go. See Greece or Portugal right now.

we never said this, we just wanna make things better for everyone. we can smell your fear porky
ah yes, anyone that disagrees with me (which includes biologists, geneticists and most of the scientific community) are all liars controlled by da JOOS!!!!!1!
that doesnt answer his question there.

2 capitalist failures thats right

Living in America or Europe isn't slavery its just not the best system and we could make it better.

But Holla Forums favorites in these kind of arguments like Gould actually were Jewish, with a strong sense of Jewish identity, left-leaning politics, and a strong opposition to racism out of a desire to prevent a rise in antisemitism.

k
…
whats your point? is this abiut the jews or about marx and capitalism? or are we bringing conspiracy theories into a debate of empirical evidence.

No, not at all, and in fact I believe communism would slow the rate at which we improve
No, criticize all you like, but you're fundamentally wrong and very bourgeoisie to scoff at being as rich as you are as if it didn't mean anything
I don't think so. Your G-pa probably worked his ass off 10x harder than you and was also way happier than you.
No you haven't all you've done is revert to a priori ML religious babble. I haven't seen a single piece of quantitative evidence so far this thread that actually supports MLism

I am getting more impatient

How is wanting to change the economic organization of society a spook? There currently exists poverty in the midst of plenty, artificial scarcities of many commodities, hierarchical organization of society that defies the promises made by the liberal thinkers of the enlightenment, vast swaths of the population being ripped off in order to give the capitalist his profits, and massive seizures of land forcing people into the ranks of wage workers.

And all this time I thought you were just a social democrat with a racist streak. I guess the worth of democracy isn't something that could be empirically verified, eh?

well then, why not try in earnest to find the best ways to make it better, instead of slavishly devoting yourself to 19th century philosophy?

Ah yes, anyone who promotes research that is "amoral" or "racist" is WRONG!!! Including James Watson, the discoverer of the double helix

The only "worth" of democracy is making everyone feel equal. That's bullshit, not everyone's opinion is as correct as the next person's.

...

I'm leaving this thread, devoid of ANY quantitative evidence whatsoever that communism is better for society, only apologetics in the most original sense of the word.

Why not start with turning over productive assets to the wage laborers presently employed working them?

??

also the argument that poster was making was not that money can't make you happy ever you humongous mongol

it's a spook to work towards your self-interest and aspire for greater things other than wage labor now? stirner is rolling in his grave
>see youtube.com/watch?v=7367vdii2Js and pic related you dotard, race exists
human "races" does not exist from a biological standpoint because they are not clearly delineated and differentiated from each other. depending on what exact genetic difference threshold you use you can end up with either 6 races or 300.

it's not the egalitarian flag it's the enlightened fedoraman flag

...

It's hardly a conspiracy. If "right-wing white racists are distorting science to fit a racist agenda" is a reasonable idea, why isn't "left-wing Jewish antiracist leftists are distorting science to fit an egalitarian progressive agenda" a reasonable idea? Certainly there are a lot of left-wing Jewish antiracists in prominent academic positions in biology, Gould is just one example.

...

Then it should be even more trivial for you to disprove it.
I did and it doesn't answer my question.
You're not answering the "can" part, you're skirting around whether people in objectively shitty states should accept their station and make themselves happy in it.
So now you need education to be happy with your job? This is a shifting of your position, but furthermore, you're effectively saying that if you're not smart enough or don't have the material means to go to school, then you're shit out of luck.
I don't know if that's true, but if it is there's nothing wrong with not sacrificing humanity to the God of Productivity, which seems to be your position.
You're implying the global poor were scraping by before they were forced into urban work.
I did and it still seems like that's what you're saying.
Yes, I suppose all lives are the same to you because they can just magic themselves to become happy. Thankfully that means decreasing global poverty is no longer necessary because poor people can be happy with their life regardless.
Because you aren't answering it.

>see youtube.com/watch?v=7367vdii2Js and pic related you dotard, race exists
I'm not watching a 24 minute video without any explanation or reasoning.
Wow, humans aren't genetically homogeneous and there's a difference between two populations across different ends of the Earth? If race exists surely you should be able to name all the current races and how they are defined.
There used to be other actual human races like Neanderthals but they no longer exist.
And if it was the main factoring in determining the status of countries than Haiti shouldn't be different than Saint Kitts and 1920s Netherlands shouldn't be different than 2017 Somali.
That wasn't his point. He was implying that you would've said slaves should've just accepted their position and be happy.

Define "improvement" and why it's good. If you're a real Stoic you should know that externals have no moral value and the only real improvement is with the individual.

And Einstein was a Socialist, therefor Socialism is objectively correct because Einstein was a good physicist.

And instead you propose some literal plutocracy?

define marxism leninism
its the most irrelevant topic. because my grandpa had it hard i cant complain and try to improve my community? i should just accept things and conform? and here i thought it was communism that stripped people of individuality.
once again not understanding what a bourgeois or marx . . .
gee i think thats like the 15th time this thread youve ahown your ignorance.
hmmm
because youve ignored all of them, i even called it way back up there. and youre probably gonna ignore this too.
so am i, pls debate in good faith and stick to the topic you presented.
and you know the best way of doing that is?
understanding what youre debating.
how?
R E A D I N G M A R X

...

didn't you say you would leave the thread ages ago?

anyway this post was particularly outrageous and defamatory so why not reply:
never claimed that, only that their phenotype is significantly disadvantaged in performance in industrial societies
tired old talking point

communism is against the self-interest of everyone except for the elite party members who run shit and give themselves extraordinary gibs and freeloaders who have no skills and no desire to work

cool reductionism

People even provided counter statistics that you ignored.

Remember, just because we don't immediately ban you doesn't mean this is a good place to come fishing for BTFOs.

It's almost as if he, dare I say it, didn't start with data, but instead – would you mind sitting down and holding on to your bottocks firmly as I am about to propose this astonishing hypothesis, thank you – once his pronouncement started yielding negative replies to the assertions that he (and I'm speaking entirely in a hypothetical scenario here to entertain the gentlemen and fair animé ladies reading this, as he surely didn't do what I am going to describe in this satirical composition for the enjoyment and gaiety of our electronic discussion club to read, for he is surely a man of honour) had made without becoming acquainted in the least with either the theory nor the facts on the ground as they pertain to it or what he had mistaken for it, that only then he embarked on the journey of finding evidence in favour of his propositions, discarding anything pointing away from his assertions and only taking those pieces which did not, and even this "did not" only being based on the most superficial glance at them; and then returning from what should have been, if you allow a metaphor, a journey from London to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro while he only went for a one-hour walk returning with a drawing of Mount Kilimajaro he bought at a store selling knick-knacks, reckoning it being a good enough "proof" of the deed, and the painter himself has never been there nor even worked from a photograph, indeed the painter is blind.

Let me solve the mystery: I assure you he was merely joking, and what a joke it was! You wonder: Can it be true? Can a man have that much gaiety in his posts? Indeed it is true, indeed he has. He is the gayest gentleman I have met in my life, and he deserves our applause.

Where is the evidence for this hypothesis?

oof just got here, whats the status of the debateroni?

Yes, how reductionist of me to point out that Greece and Portugal are both capitalist making their economic crises capitalist crises.

Look up the history of Australia, m8. Sydney started as a penal colony.

What if you're both right? What if Science (which you Fucking Love) isn't infallible at all, and is especially fallible when it combines biologists trying to do statistics and conclusions that potentially have broad political consequences? What if science, like every other area of human inquiry, is not a source of complete and unbiased Truth, but yet another ideological battleground for people with concretely different material interests to carry on their political and economic struggles?

Wouldn't that just bake your little fucken noodle?

Also, "economic freedom" is a meaningless statistic, it's basically just a ranking of how much the Heritage Foundation likes your country.

And capitalism is any system based on the reproduction and accumulation of capital through commodity production. It isn't a measurement of big gubbermand vs small gubbermand. In fact, capitalism couldn't exist without the state.

Marxism is wrong because Greece and Portugal are black.

You can't empirically prove a normative proposition, you actual chud. Why are you assuming that economic wellbeing is mutually exclusive to solving alienation? You're really begging the question.

This can't be given empirically because there has never historically been such a thing as "Marxist production."

Ill

Again, you can't make any empirical qualitative statements about communist production because it has never existed.

None of the other options you proposed (which by the way, is basically saying you can either be a parasite or get parasited) are available to a lot of people, or aren't systematically denied to most people, or give you any real freedom to make a living without exploitation being involved in any way. I'm glad you didn't tell me to pull myself up with my bootstraps and start a co-op though
capitalism is against the self-interest of everyone except for the bourgeoise who run shit and give themselves extraordinary riches and their families who have no skills and no desire to work

I love how neolibs find the idea of a ruling class abhorrent if that ruling class happens to be the Nomenklatura, but is perfectly fine with it if it's the Bourgeoisie.

Hey, man, those apparatchiks worked hard and risked a lot for their posts :^)

Can you empirically justify exploitation and alienation? No you can not.

Why do you think these claims are false?

"Muh graphs"

I think he's implying that his second pic disproves that theory.

Nevermind the fuckery that is "household income".

both of these are painfully real, wages are stagnating for past 40 years while wealth continues to concentrate in hands of fewer and fewer

I dunno, we really should abandon capitalism because trying to cling to centuries-old ideas may be stupid.

Oh well in that case

OP, the United States has been on a downward spiral of boom and bust since Reagan/Clinton neoliberalism, with each collapse worse than the last one. The United States has also seen a massive increase in wealth inequality during this time period. Imo, both of these facts add "empirical" evidence towards Marxism and against neoclassical economics

youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
(video is a bit outdated and is liberal trash but is a good summary of the facts regarding inequality, along with citations)

time.com/3957499/american-economic-crises-history/

(if any econofags want to find a better source for my second claim I'd appreciate it, too fucking tired to do research rn)

user for fuck's sake, you should be able to see the problem with that first graph, a drooling mongoloid brainlet should have been able to see the obvious problem with it. Adjusted for inflation, that 13ish dollars at the beginning of the graph is worth 100+ dollars in terms of purchasing power by 2008 at the end, in other words, the shlub making "only" 13 dollars an hour in 1948 is making more then three times as much as the 'economically enriched' guy making 35 dollars in 2008. This is so obvious, I'm forced to conclude that you're being wilfully disingenuous. At least you saved me having to read the rest of the thread early on.

...

pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-sees-300-violent-attacks-inspired-far-right-every-year

t-t-thats the j-jews

Alienation isn't merely a psychological phenomenon user, that is just base psychologism. Alienation refers to what is your place in society as an exploited worker, you are alienated from our produce, you exist in a big chain that you don't have any control over. Philosophers like Althusser view alienation as a basic fact of socialization, it can be seen in many societies, but only capitalism does to gain this qualitative difference , that is, becoming a subject through ideology and as a result being intellectually alienated from the real processes that Capitalism develops. It is primarily a social phenomenon not a psychological one, because it has nothing to with happiness or unhappiness, an alienated worker according to Marx can be perfectly happy he is being exploited but might use ideology as vehicle to subjectivise himself, in the modern era, that is how nationalism primarily acts.

HUME'S
LAW

NORMATIVE TRUTHS CANNOT BE DERIVED FROM DESCRIPTIVE ONES

False dichotomy especially when it comes to Marxism.
Exploitation means that workers don't own the means of production, which is bullshit. Name a Marxist economy where the means of production weren't effectively controlled by an oligarchy of full-time pencil-pushers.

Co-ops vote to lower their own wages. A worker in a private company who volunteers to lower his own wages would either be told to get back to work or offered a deferred compensation/charitable donation plan in response.

The best managers are workers who are past their prime. Under communism a worker keeps working until he retires and then afterwards lives an unproductive life of getting drunk and chasing after hookers.

Ironically, Marxists are supposed to fight for the "working class" yet they want 18 hours a day to do things that are not working.

what argument are you attempting here

...

Try reading it from a non-adversarial point of view.

Is this the ebin "the working class are burly white men in blue uniforms" meme?

so is he a glorious "noy picking sides make you smarter" centrist?

Based on what, pray tell?

Why is it a choice between economic prductivity and alienation/exploitation? A marxist economy would develop faster without the hamstringing done under capitalism- production is organized for profit, not development.

Youre relying a lot on the idea that Marxism equals the stagnating soviet union, but how do you classify china? Their growth is much higher than America's at the moment…

As for why the two things are bad: exploitation puts the rewards for labor outside the hands of the majority. It relies on building a small ruling class which is to know best, but this class loses sight of whats best by becoming focused on retaining class power.

You also seem to have no respect for the fact that Marxism is aspirational- you want to compare to socialist economies as you define them which have existed, instead of being open to the idea that we could do better than we ever have before.

Now, alientation is a negative externality which can be eliminated. Things like mass shootings and terrorism and war result from the organization of society into classes and competing national ruling classes. Under communism there would be no fear of falling behind and being crushed because no class would be trying to wipe any others out, none existing.