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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-089
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Trump:
Palestine:
Iran:
China:
Germany:
War of Terror:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Science button pushed, so I have to add that unicellular organisms have continued very successfully. I was struck years ago by an estimate that maybe half of global biomass as bacteria. (That’s estimating by weight, not numbers.)
Posted by: Debsisdead | Apr 28 2025 2:08 utc | 67 A good back on the diplomacy leading up to the accepted outbreak of WWII is Michael Jabara Conley, 1939. A longer perspective is Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War (his The Great Class War is also outstanding for WWI.) A recent detailed look at how Hitler came to power is Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover. It focuses on the intrigues and events of the six months prior.
Posted by: LuRenJia | Apr 28 2025 14:27 utc | 122 As to the question of what is democracy vs. democracy in name only, I prefer to say, bourgeois or proletarian/workers/socialist democracy. Bourgeois democracy is a form of the dictatorship of capital. Since the bourgeois democratic state defends private property in the means of production against the workers, that is, the minority against the majority, as well as against other states, by comparison no bourgeois democracy is real democracy, as in by the majority, for the majority and of the majority. There is still a meaningful distinction between bourgeois democracy, not least because all the great revolutions whose work was essential to bourgeois democracy, did so with equally essential contributions contributions from the working people, even from patriotic petty bourgeois. That’s why I think indifference to bourgeois democracy is wrong…unless and until it’s replaced with something better, the path forward, the dictaroship of the proletariat.
Posted by: Roger Boyd | Apr 28 2025 15:58 utc | 143 I rather suspect that the formal goal of reuinification with the PRC currently upheld by KMT has the mental reservation, when we Taiwan capitalists can join in ruling all China with our mainland peers/rivals/subordinates, after a true (bourgeois) democratic state has taken full power (i.e., become the dictatorship of capital once again.) More briefly, someday…but not today. The treaties are not being negotiated as we speak, so far as I know. I don’t think they’re even at the arguing-about-the-shape-of-the-table stage yet.
On the exchange about the labor theory of value, it would help to be more familiar with Marx. It should be notorious that Marx begins with a explanation that commodities have a dual character, use value and exchange value. Righ there, Marx speaks of utility, he just uses the phrase use value instead of the later standard academic jargon. It’s not long before he explains that the labor time must be the socially necessary labor time. I don’t know why it’s not often explained that what is socially necessary is discovered in practice by the operations of the laws of supply and demand. Briefly, a bad ten hour cake doesn’t sell and the bad ten hour baker goes broke. (He also further qualifies it with the term abstract, taking into account the issues of skills and/or the intensity of labor.)
The notion that unobservable mental dispositions in the heads of the purchaser and seller of a commodity in any single transaction genuinely explains anything is something of a leap in itself. It is something like the fallacy of division to think any psychic events in a single transaction can be simply applied to the whole economy. To put it another way, does a manufacturer purchasing cardboard boxes for shipping their goods does not do that kind of self-introspection? And, not just about this single transaction but in comparison to all the possible satisfactions/utilities of foregone opportunities—a decision implied by marginal utility. It is not even clear that most capitalists can generate reliable estimates of marginal revenue, much more important to their decisions in the long run I think. As opposed to that, a garbage collector should be paid more, because they have so little pleasure in their work? That is the obvious objection to marginal utility, usually passed over in silence.
Millions of intermediate commodities, and final commodities too, tend to exchange at relatively stable prices. In markets where marginal utility, psychic satisfaction, really do tend to come into play, so far as I can tell, are things like baseball cards or works of art. But things like baseball cards seem to me to have their prices fixed by collectors’ manual. And works of art are notoriously difficult to price at all, as insurance companies are well aware. The purpose of economics, satisfaction of human needs and wants, are better spent on explaining the larger majority of exchanges, I believe.
To that end, the proposition that the labor theory of value explains that prices tends to fluctuate around the abstract socially necessary labor time, according to the proportions of living labor; labor previously invested in means of production; the redistribution in profit, interest and rent determined by the operation of the laws of supply and demand for capital…well, it seems to me the labor theory of value is far from obsolete. This is even more true because in my judgment it’s this approach that leads to understanding phenomena like unemployment, financialization, monopoly, imperialism, capitalist crisis and the tendency to a long run decline in the rate of profit. I don’t think marginal utility has a theory of profit at all, at least I’ve never seen an economist (academically certified) who had one, absent the Marxists who burrowed in, usually masquerading as orthodox until they got tenure. And my belief is that the overwhelming majority of capitalists are confirmed Marxists in the sense they devoutly believe in the industrial reserve army of labor. They use it to guide their class struggle against workers every minute of every day!
Posted by: steven t johnson | Apr 28 2025 18:50 utc | 157
@Patrick Constantine | Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:42:00 GMT | 160
One thing railfans never address is how anti-cycling it is. rail ruts carved into a street make it an absolutely treacherous no-go zone for bikes. buses by contrast (either diesel or electrics powered by gurneys, not heavy-ass, tarmac-crumbling lithium batteries!) roll along on the same smooth tarmac as my two wheels
It’s always great if you can deconflict the traffic. In some parts of Berlin, the streets are broad enough to have a light rail line going in the middle; that works well. But when the rail goes into the dense parts of Mitte, it’s flowing along with everything else, which is quite dangerous indeed.
The light rail in Köln for the most part does not share actual lanes with other traffic, but the intersections are tricky. It’s all one connected network throughout the city, with large parts of it underground in the centre, and extending far into the Rhein-Ruhr sprawl around. The city is star-shaped, surrounded by the Grüngürtel green belt in many places, and it all works out so well that you’ll see almost no buses throughout.
Hamburg has no light rail, though the subway network is often overground. The distances to cover are fairly large for a city of 1.8M, due to the urban sprawl being recently monocentric with a number of subcentres which were added over time as the city grew. There are very many bus routes, some of them so heavily in demand that there were a number of experiments with specialized vehicles of up to 25m length. The weather is notoriously shitty, but all of it is flat, so it lends itself to biking. Because commuter traffic is already at or above the limits, there are plans to introduce deconflicted bike lanes all over, according to the observation that supply creates demand. Hamburg was also early to adopt a rental bike service.
In my observation, a modern and well-planned subway is hard to beat in all aspects – speed, comfort, capacity. The east-west connecting U2 from the seventies is a very satisfying service; enhanced by the modern rolling stock. Köln uses robut but fairly outdated material, and I gotta say, I never really get over this when I’m there. It’s good to see them planning solidly there, it’s probably very serviceable, and the overall system is great, but still. I will also give a point to electric buses, which are fairly common here. The experience both inside and outside of them is surely superior to a diesel engine, though much of it depends on the driver.
By the way, I don’t believe driverless busses are a good idea without installing a fixed guidance system which coordinates and deconflicts them with the other traffic. My hunch is that will be future of ‘autonomous’ driving. Fair enough, I say. Especially in the less densely populated areas, a slow going but constantly working service of light vehicles would be great. In denser areas, I would aim to reduce motor vehicles (non-pedelecs) to the minimum. Essential transports could then be told to go slow, like 25kph or so. This frees up space for light vehicles, which would go a long way to reconnect the people with the space.
For more nerdism, I warmly recommend https://dialog.hochbahn.de/ – even featuring long reports about construction sites written by girls!
Posted by: persiflo | Apr 28 2025 23:33 utc | 179
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