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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-269
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Gaza:
South America:
Markets:
Epstein:
China:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Subject: what role will labor play in the economy of tomorrow. Not a distant ‘tomorrow’ but one that’s arriving in waves. Each month brings another wave carried upon an in-coming tide. All major economies of the world are involved.
I posit this scenario:
a. Automation’s function is to reduce the labor component of production. Labor productivity here in the US averaged about 2% per year over the past 80 years. At 2%, that means every (approx) 23 years, you need half the workers to produce the same GDP.
b. Automation is getting better, and is being applied more widely every year, and it’s now being targeted at jobs that tend to pay more, like the “white collar” workers. Every year more types of jobs are subjected to the forces of automation.
b. Automation is a much bigger factor in job loss than “outsourcing”. Outsourcing had dramatic effects on US manufacturing employment during the 1985-2010 era, automation is continuous, and it affects the outsourced-to country _just as much_ – maybe more – than the outsourced-from country. Why? Because outsourcing is basically a tech-transfer activity. The US – to – China tech transfer was the biggest, most impactful tech transfer that has ever happened. No warfare was required; it was entirely voluntary.
The massive, implacable, absolutely irreversible impact of automation means that everywhere technology goes, the role of labor in production diminishes. The other impact of automation is that it tends to concentrate wealth-producing capacity into fewer and fewer hands, which tends to result in severe concentration of wealth into the hands of a relative few.
A corollary of wealth concentration is the fact that the people that don’t own the automation tend to make less over time as they’re squeezed out of the market by automation. This chart shows that workers tend to receive progressively _smaller_ share of the benefits of that automation. That means those workers become progressively less able to buy the production they’re producing. Which means that the market for the production tends to contract over time. It’s ironic: the more automation, the less market for the production. Here in the US the shortfall between household earnings (ability to buy) and consumption has been filled by debt.
Concentration of wealth equates to concentration of power, and in the West, that shows up as governmental capture, and the playing field tips even further in favor of the powerful. Every year it comes progressively _more_ difficult to politically dislodge the few that have amassed all that economic power.
There’s the scenario in short form. Please consider it, and point out any factual errors, because if indeed that scenario is mostly accurate, people that don’t own automation – or more broadly don’t own the capacity to generate wealth have a big and rapidly intensifying problem.
I acknowledge that some societies distribute wealth better than others; China is one example. Yes, China’s labor force is indeed subject to dislocation from automation, and maybe at a faster pace than the West’s labor force was. Because China doesn’t allow oligarchs to amass as much wealth, nor gain the customary power over governance that the West does, the fruits of automation are more evenly distributed.
But that doesn’t help the West’s workers. We don’t have what China has; our situation is quite different.
No doubt you’ve heard all this before. I often hear “ya, Tom, automation eliminates some jobs, and it creates others. We don’t have switchboard operators anymore; we have software developers. Quit it with the sky-is-falling rhetoric already!”
OK, let’s take a look at all those new industries you’ve seen popping up like daisies in spring here in the U.S. Please point out the industries which:
a. Use a lot of labor
b. Pay good wages
Take out a piece of paper and list them out. Write big, because you’re going to have trouble filling that one sheet of paper. But maybe you see something I don’t, and this is a perfect opportunity for me to learn something.
We have a big problem, and _no_ economic distribution system – communism, socialism, or capitalism – no “ism” is immune. They’re all subject to this force; some countries are less vulnerable in the short run, but the West’s economies are suffering badly from these effects.
Incidentally, these same forces tend to yield colonialism. Pursuit of new materials, and especially pursuit of new markets delivers colonialism. This is the fundamental reason the West is so eager to colonize Russia (resources) and the rest of Asia (markets). The West’s workers are not able to buy their own production, and the debt load can’t be extended much further.
I invite the bar to rebut my assertions. If those assertions happen to be accurate, please set out your ideas, plan, or other path forward for the West’s workers. Does your solution involve an “ism”? Is that “ism” immune to the effects of automation? If not, maybe we need something different than an “ism”.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Nov 23 2025 15:09 utc | 8
@LD. Thks, was hoping you’d weigh in on this. A few line-by-line responses:
LD: Automation is not an issue per se. It is mobility and accessibility to automation that will be gatekept. Think IP, think zoning, think regulation, education, etc.
Tom: Agreed. Automation much less an issue if everyone owns the automation.
LD: Humans have no choice but to rise to the next level of the value chain.
Tom: Well, apparently that choice isn’t being made; people don’t _seem_ to be identifying this trend as a problem, and getting out in front of it. That’s why I asked people to list out all the new industries (or other labor-using-activities) that we’d evolve ourselves into. That’s the issue, LD: we’re not re-allocating that labor to equally-rewarding (on any count) activities.
LD: There is no more going back than there is a going back to dirt floors and candlelight.
Tom: Are you sure about that? If US stopped borrowing and continued automating (which is likely unless we really crash), then you’d see some dirt floors and candlelight. Here in the US there are whole swaths of the country (so-called “fly-over” territory) that are emptied out. Dead towns. Not a little; a lot. And many of the major metro areas are fueled (mostly) with debt-related consumption, except in the parts of town that are hooked into the gravy traiin.
The real economy – the part that actually makes the stuff we use …. is phenomenally labor-efficient. Food, energy, transport, manufacturing, materials sourcing … uses a rather small -and diminishing- fraction of the labor force. A pretty big component of the rest of the economy isn’t on solid footing; it needs a lot of external-inputs that aren’t being generated from the economy itself.
That whole MAGA thing is largely coming from red-state “flyover”. Why? Because they’ve been squashed by automation first. And it’s still coming. What’s MAGA’s (current) solution? Blame others. Immigrants. Outsourcing. Did they find a way to do as you suggest, and evolve into a better role? Not so much. How come? Are they lazy and stupid?
==== and now on to William Gruff. So glad you stopped by, William, as I’ve been looking forward to this discussion.
“How is automation a problem for communism?”
To the degree that communism functions, it’s not. I see communism as a big clue: it advocates for lots of people owning the means of production. I like that part.
Here’s what I don’t like about communism at the moment:
a. It doesn’t seem to work all that well where it’s been tried in the past. I can posit some reasons for that, e.g. there tends to be a disconnect between what people contribute .vs. what they get back, but that may simply be my ignorance talking. I’m hopeful that you’ll be able to identify countries, regions, even locales who enjoy a good std of living (all counts, not just consumption of stuff) that use unalloyed communism and whose participants are content with it (e.g. it’s not top-down enforced, but bottom-up elected).
b. It’s not politically possible in the West, for the reasons I set out above (prior post) and some others. Those that have are not interested in sharing, and the “haves” don’t think the share-ees (recipients of sharing) are competent to made good use of the share-proceeds. The reasons, beside simple selfishness, seem to be:
b.1. I did some major work to earn my stack. If you do that same work, you’ll have your own stack. Why do we need a different allocation method? If you use it, the one we have seems to work pretty good.
b.2. After these sort of societal wealth re-allocations (e.g. the “revolution”), a few years later the same (types) of people have re-acquired the lion’s share of resources (even in “communist” countries, there’s still a social order, and the folks at the top are “more equal”, etc.). You can re-allocate wealth temporarily, but it’s a lot harder to re-allocate personal capacity. Which is a big clue: “personal capacity”
So if communism could address those (few that I know of) shortcomings, then no, I don’t see automation as a problem for communism; the people would be getting the benefits of their productivity, and from an economic point of view (simple econ vitality) that’s a good thing. If the operators of communism are competent, (right alloc decisions, maximize societal good) then it ought to work pretty well.
I suspect that there are other issues with communism that I don’t know about, and I suspect that because some pretty competent countries, like Russia and China, invested heavily in communism, but seemed to have left it mostly behind in favor of socialism-capitalism blends.
OK, that’s enough for an opening gambit. Let’s see how you respond to that.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Nov 23 2025 16:30 utc | 31
@W. Gruff, who said:
I seriously doubt most people have any idea what automation really is. Or how long it has been around. I know as a fact that anyone who thinks you can fully automate a capitalist economy doesn’t have the first clue how capitalism really works. Hint: only the early adopters reap profits from process improvements, and even they only profit briefly until the competition also applies the same process improvements, as they must or they go out of business. Full automation necessarily means the death of capitalism because profits are impossible with full automation. You simply cannot exploit a machine tool. Tools in and of themselves cannot create surplus value, no matter how fancy and complex the tool is.
Really enjoyed that story, and the above-quoted last para.
I don’t expect automation to automate the entire economy. I do expect it to systematically pick off the most expensive labor activities, and get machines to do those jobs. Definitely.
And yes, full automation does imply the death of capitalism, not just because of diminishing profits due to relentless competition, but also because there’s too few with the buying power (income) to buy all production. And we’re seeing both of these phenomena play out, big-time, right now here in the West.
That statement “tools can’t create surplus value” means more to you than it means to me. Tools do create enormous value, because they obviate the need for human labor. If you’re the owner of that tool, you get an enormous value, and I’m not sure “surplus” necessarily applies.
Checkpoint: I took a sec to refresh myself on the term “surplus value”. From wikipedia (and most other sources):
In Marxian economics, surplus value is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount it cost to manufacture it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the product minus the cost of the materials, plant and labour power.
As a wanna-be capitalist, when I read that definition, I thought “boy, that sounds just like … profit!”
So, if use a tool to generate more profit, and I “exploiting” the tool? You bet. If I use labor to generate a product, sell it for a lot, and only share a part of the profit with the workers, am I exploiting those workers?
Maybe; if there were no other economic factors involved, like investment (and risk) in equipment, facilities, materials, etc. then yes, I am exploiting those workers, and they should go on strike and/or seek employment elsewhere, or even build their own factory and own what they operate (which I certainly advocate for).
So William, what is it that communism offers that is not obtainable via capitalism-socialism blends? I’m not being clever; I’ve looked forward to this discussion particularly because I want to learn. Some very smart people advocate for communism, and I clearly don’t understand it sufficiently.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Nov 23 2025 16:54 utc | 40
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Nov 23 2025 15:09 utc | 8
The West has degenerated to the point where they don’t even understand the work of some of their greatest intellectuals, like Marx, and they think themselves brilliant when they try to reinvent the wheel. “Standing on the shoulder of giants” is lost on them. Tom Pfotzer here is a great case in point.
Two takeaways:
- Communism is not the same as welfare capitalism.
- Communism calls for a revolution in the relations of production, not mere wealth redistribution (“change in the material conditions of existence” as per Marx).
Automation has always been present in human society, with the capitalist epoch simply making it extremely prominent. Humanity’s sophistication in tool-wielding is one trait that distinguishes us from other apes. You see that windmill or that waterwheel? Those are automatons! Back in the 19th century, Luddites feared the loom machine bringing about mass unemployment and sought to smash them. Now, it’s robots and AI.
Tom mentioned “The West’s workers are not able to buy their own production”. That’s been covered by Marx already!
Marx noticed that an investment in constant capital (automation, machinery, land etc) led to greater increases in production than if that same amount was invested in variable capital (employed laborers). Capitalist competition demands that capitalists prioritize investing in constant capital lest they be outcompeted. If the intensity of exploitation of labor by capital remains constant, then the rate of profit will tend to fall so long as investment in constant capital is favored, because profit is surplus-value divided by the sum of constant and variable capital. Marx formulated it as The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall in Capital Vol. III published by Engels in 1894. To preserve profit, capitalists must intensify the exploitation of labor, which leads to the contradiction Tom brought up: capitalists cutting costs by underpaying or firing workers while demanding that workers buy all the capitalists’ products.
Instead of thinking of the endpoint of the labor struggle as getting capitalists to “Use a lot of labor” and “Pay good wages”, the goal should be to abolish wage labor altogether. And before the fascists in MoA chime up: no, abolition doesn’t mean going back to slavery.
Choosing between automation or humans is a false choice. You can have both if you abolish the capitalist relations of production. The anarcho-communist Errico Malatesta, writing in 1900 about The Irreconcilable Contradiction, summed up the situation the best:
Whenever no one needs the labor of a worker, the worker cannot impose any agreement: he must die of hunger—more or less slowly, more or less convulsively, but die of hunger he must… unless he can break free from the current system.
And progress tends to make the labor of an ever-increasing number of workers unnecessary.
This is the ultimate, irreconcilable contradiction between capitalism and progress.
Either prevent all progress, enshrining the current castes, abolishing competition between capitalists, prohibiting any production development, any new machine, any new scientific application, and reducing workers to the status of domestic animals granted rations by their masters—in short, a regime like the one the Jesuits exercised in Paraguay;294or destroy capitalism and organize production not for the profit of a few, but for the greatest well-being for all.
When people die of hunger because there is too much stuff, or because it is too easy to produce it, or because it is too durable, destruction might appear—and might fleetingly be—more useful than production. A fire, an earthquake might be a blessing, bringing work and bread to the unemployed.
But destruction of wealth is not how workers can emancipate themselves. And luckily the time has passed, at least in the more advanced countries, during which workers thought they could stop progress, and put as much energy into smashing up machinery as it would have required to take control of it.
We must not fight progress, but direct it to everyone’s benefit.
And for that to happen workers must take possession of all the capital, all social wealth, so that it would then be in their interest that products abound and production require the least possible effort.
This is why it is necessary to make the revolution.
Labor organizing, strikes, resistance of all kinds can at a certain point in capitalist evolution improve the conditions of workers or prevent them from worsening; they can serve very well to train workers for the struggle; they are always, in capable hands, a means of propaganda;—but they are hopelessly powerless to resolve the social question. And thus they must be used in such a way as to help prepare minds and muscle for the revolution—for expropriation.
Once again, I must emphasize that the Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani-types aren’t revolutionary at all. They’re reformists. Like Tom, they ask the wrong question. They ask how “some societies distribute wealth better than others.” They don’t seek to shake up the existing relations of production under capitalism. A description of Bourgeois “Socialism” from Chapter III of the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels:
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.
A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.
Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.
Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.
If Americans and American wannabes still confuse welfare capitalism for communism, then there won’t be any revolution in the relations of production.
For goodness’ sake, read some Marx.
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Nov 23 2025 17:51 utc | 71
Antiwar.com
Justin Raimondo
—————-
OKINAWA MON AMOUR:
RAPE AS A METAPHOR OF EMPIRE
In the waning days of World War II, on the island of Okinawa, a group of villagers had had enough. Their American conquerors, having vanquished the Japanese in one of the hardest fought battles of the Pacific conflict, had been enjoying the fruits of their victory – and Okinawan women were at the top of the list. GIs would come into the village, and take whomever they wanted: no one knows how many were raped, but the number is probably in the thousands. Japanese men had no choice but to stand by and watch as their wives and daughters were violated and abused. But there was some resistance. Evidence of it recently came to the surface when the bones of three American GIs, who had been listed all these years as missing in action, turned up in an isolated cave just north of the town of Nago. Now some elderly villagers have come forward with the story of what happened to those three nineteen-year-old American servicemen, who vanished, suddenly, so many years ago. The three, who had descended on Nago repeatedly in search of women to rape, had been ambushed by the villagers and killed. The deed was kept hidden out of fear of retaliation by the US military authorities – but why did the villagers choose this moment to come forward?
AMERICAN RAPISTS ON THE RAMPAGE
The reason is because, even after all these years, nothing has really changed. Barely a week prior to the recent G-7/G-8 summit held on Okinawa, an American soldier on a drunken binge wandered into an unlocked home and molested a 14-year-old girl; he was found in the girl’s bedroom, half-naked, trying to rape her as the military police walked in to arrest him. This was only the most recent, and hardly the most heinous, of a long series of incidents stretching back over the years. In 1995, three US military personnel grabbed a 12-year-old Okinawan girl, drove her to an isolated spot in a rented car, bound her up – her mouth, eyes, hands, and legs – with duct tape, and repeatedly raped her. As she lay bleeding and unconscious, according to the account of one of the participants, Seaman Marcus Gill, they snickered and made dirty jokes about their victim. Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, recounts in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire:
“A few weeks later, from his headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the commander of all US forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, remarked to the press: ‘I think that [the rape] was absolutely stupid. For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” Although Macke was permitted to retire following this lighthearted comment, there was no Congressional or official inquiry into his leadership of the Pacific Command and no review of why a decade after the end of the Cold War the United States still had one hundred thousand troops based in Japan and South Korea. There was only endless public relations spin about how the rape of a child was a singular ‘tragedy,’ not a consequence of US basing policy, and how East Asia ‘needs’ its American peacekeepers.”
—————
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j072600.html
PS
Somebody should do an autopsy on ChaLmers JOhnson and Justin Raimondo
Posted by: denk | Nov 23 2025 18:06 utc | 78
Decades-long media fixture Katie Couric has just released a tell-all memoir in which she describes a cocktail party she attended at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2010 along with other high-profile members of the legacy media. George Stephanopoulis of ABC News was there, as was Charlie Rose of CBS. This party took place 2 years after Epstein was convicted of prostituting a minor in Florida. People continued to move in his sphere regardless of the nature of his crime. There’s no effort in Couric’s book to ponder how it was that the well-connected prestigious members of Manhattan’s eminent institutions remained connected to this guy. In fact, she does not self-interrogate about this.
Because she did not have to.
Couric wrote this book before June 2025, which was the exact month when politicians, legacy media representatives, members of the ruling elites and the beautiful people suddenly woke up and realized it was not okay to perpetuate a r’ship w/ a convicted pedophile, let alone to profit from it.
The trouble is that those selfsame people undergoing said awakening had continued to associate w/ Epstein for nearly two decades in some cases after the financier’s public troubles began w/ the criminal trial in Florida.
They did not care that he was a convicted pedophile until they all at once suddenly on 1 June did care very badly that he was a convicted pedophile and that they had continued to hang out w/ him.
But by then Epstein had been dead nearly 6 years.
Before Epstein died, whenever he needed to launder his reputation and rehabilitate his image, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at doing his bidding. People in his social network were comfortable looking away from the crime for which he was convicted because they had looked away from so much already: the financial crises they helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the corporations they defended, the housing crisis they milked for personal enrichment and the surveillance technologies they failed to protect citizens against.
The ones who continued to socialize w/ Epstein and provide him succor and look to him for donations were not in the least deterred by the fact that he was a convicted pedophile.
Until 1 June, that is.
Matters changed on 1 June, because that was when Permanent Washington swung into full-on megaphone action to tar DJT as Epstein-adjacent, even though DJT had ended his association w/ Epstein in 2000 over a dispute.
In other words, when DJT rode down the escalator in 2015, everybody already knew that he had at one time moved in the same social circle as Epstein. Everybody knew, too, that the association had ended.
But the only thing that mattered on 1 June 2025 was the renewed effort to undermine DJT’s presidency in the Here & Now by virtue of innuendo, rumors and gossip which Permanent Washington believed connected DJT salaciously to Epstein: if only the FBI would release the so-called Epstein Files, which may or may not even exist in actual file form, we could know for certain-!
Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested for sex trafficking in 2020, and she was convicted in 2021, which means Congress had at least 3 years during Autopen Robinette’s administration to call for the release of the Epstein Files, but Congress did not do so.
Moreover, after Epstein’s death in custody in 2019, Congress had at least a year and a half to clamor for the release of the Epstein Files, but they did not then either.
All at once in June 2025 Congress began to agitate heavily for the release of the so-called Epstein Files, with Democrats bellowing particularly loudly because they believed DJT’s reticence to sign an Executive Order, releasing the Files, meant that he was covering up misdeeds.
Suddenly there was plenty of smoke swirling about the Epstein Files but no actual fire. Vague intimations of rampant criminal wrongdoing seized legislators’ imaginations, even though there seemed no factual predicate for such things. Normal evidentiary constraints evaporated. S ince the central figure of the story, namely Epstein, was dead, who could refute whatever claims the media wanted to stir up-? The media gave itself license to go heavy on innuendo, gossip & hearsay—and to imply criminality at every turn.
Combine that with political incentive—-to derail DJT’s presidency—and the cultural appetite for moral theater, and the result is exactly what we’ve seen for months: a story w/ the lowest evidentiary standards performed before us w/ the highest level of moral certainty. Against this backdrop, both Ro Khanna of California and Thomas Massie of Kentucky have begun referring to Epstein’s private estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands as “rape island.”
One of the survivor’s of Epstein’s pedophilic crimes actually began recruiting underage girls for Epstein from the local high school in her early 20s: she instructed the girls to tell Epstein they were 18 when he opened the door to his mansion, otherwise he would not let them in. So the entire criminal enterprise saw at least one survivor, like her, morph into a trafficker herself eventually.
Meanwhile, DJT signaled he would sign the Epstein Transparency Act calling for the release of the Files if Congress passed the legislation, and we’re now in a holding pattern—-all the votes have been tallied: we’re awaiting access to the Files.
DJT’s green-lighting the release of the Files removed him from the center of the smoke and innuendo somewhat, so this holding pattern period is marked by a kind of sobering quietude.
Posted by: steel_porcupine | Nov 23 2025 18:13 utc | 82
@AllUnderHeaven:
First, thanks _very much_ for taking the time to write such an excellent, informative, 3rd-party-substantiated post. That is exactly what I hoped would happen. William: take note.
Most of the substance of your post I agree with, especially the part about my apparent re-inventing of the wheel, as these issues have been debated and thought about since well before Marx’ time. Hundreds of years. Why are they still being discussed, if it’s “settled” since long ago?
Because it’s not settled, of course. If the dogma of the past was so perfect, it would be implemented.
Let’s focus on this statement by you:
Like Tom, they ask the wrong question. They ask how “some societies distribute wealth better than others.” They don’t seek to shake up the existing relations of production under capitalism.
I don’t advocate for distribution of wealth. I advocate for distribution of the _capacity to generate wealth_. There’s a big difference. And more specifically, the _creation of that capacity_ in those that don’t already have it. Personal capacity to generate wealth.
Your remarks about the “relations of production” I think is a step in the right direction, altho I’ll point out that in your post, a definition of what, exactly, “relations” are isn’t provided. No doubt you know exactly what that is, but remember, I’m both ignorant _and_ very stupid, so says William. A great orator knows when to educate the audience so they can understand what’s being said.
For the benefit of other unwashed, here’s what’s meant by “relations of production”, from wikipedia:
By “relations of production”, Marx and Engels meant the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. As people must enter into these social relationships, i.e. because participation in them is not voluntary, the totality of these relationships, along with the forces of production, constitute a relatively stable and permanent structure, the “economic superstructure” or mode of production.
If you read Marvin Harris’ books, he also talks about these “relations”, but it’s not just production but allocation and ultimately consumption relations he speaks about, and he also explains how environment (resource base), technology (what humans know how to do with those resources) determine what can be produced, and then he gets into the “relations” bit above, which is mainly the “politics” part of the “political economy”, e.g. who gets what. That’s where things tend to come apart.
So yes, indeed, AllUnderHeaven, it’s about relations. It’s about what you’re free to do, and constrained-into to do with respect of economics (e.g. getting what you need to provide for you and yours).
And if Marx posited that ultimately capital would have no need for people, well, we’re closing in on that situation. Great that Marx pointed it out, and even better that you’re here to remind us of it, and yet…
what do we do about it?
Fight a revolution and take all the extant wealth, and capacity to generate that wealth, and distribute it about?
Has that not been tried before? Did it work? This is the question that William seems unwilling (I didn’t say unable) to address, and I wish someone of the Priest class would take a second to do so.
Are the any other means to change the “relations of production”? Of course there are. Let’s start generating those other options, do some debate, see which ones seem most workable. E.g. “workable” given where you currently live.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Nov 23 2025 19:07 utc | 100
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