What would you think of someone who didn't save a drowning child because he didn't want to ruin his new shoes? One of the world's most famous philosophers, Peter Singer puts it to you that you, and all of us, are doing exactly that right now.

AristotleJr · 2012-05-24T14:57:29.985019+00:00

I believe the one cause that Zizek is referring to is capitalism. Or, if you prefer, the consequence of limiting access or control of the means of production and how goods are distributed. Since private individuals can wield immense power, like super-wealthy George Soros, things like manipulating the monetary supply that results in food shortages in part of the world can be done at great profit to the individual, to the detriment of those without power and access to decision-making.

Most food shortages and lack of access to the basics of life like clean water, food and shelter are not limited by a material force, but rather by the way the productive forces are organized. Which is why society will at the same time produce millions of Snugees, or employ people to fly their dog out on a private jet so that the owner can pet them, while billions languish in hunger and poverty. One is profitable, the other benefits humanity, and they are often misaligned due to the way that the economic system is structured.

cottonball2 · 15 days

I think it comes from here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/14/MNFQ1MP92G.DTL

"Several studies, according to Gandy and Wetendorf, indicate that women suffer domestic abuse in at least 40 percent of police officer families. For American women overall, the figure is 25 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

So not 40% of the force, but 40% of officers with families.

RedPlebiscite · 1 month

The use of blacks/Chinese/just about any stigmatized immigrant groups as strikebreakers throughout the early 1900s? Specifically, using 30,000 black workers, who normally would not have been given the time of day, much less a job, to break a steel strike in 1919, leading to race riots.

http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/chapter4.htm

There is a whole book on it here: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1171303?uid=3739920&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=56014054933

Osama_Bin_Downloadin · 3 months

For videos, this series on the labor theory of value is great: http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/

If you really want to delve in, all of David Harvey's lectures on Capital are free and available online here: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

Reading should be an integral part of any socialist's life, as developing a cogent theory is needed. Haymarket books has a lot of good stuff, including The Meaning of Marxism and a whole series of "and Socialism" that relates different struggles like the environment, women's liberation, black liberation, etc. http://www.haymarketbooks.org/

Of course, a lot of the classics are free online if you look. http://www.marxists.org/ has a lot of good stuff.

deicidium · 3 months

So by voting for Paul you would rather have a ruthless capitalist than a spineless capitalist? He's just about the opposite of everything socialist. He is for defending and protecting one thing, private ownership of capital. Every policy position of his derives from this. He is about as anti-socialist as it gets.

Sunserpent · 3 months

So you smash a window in. What does this do? It causes a large company approximately .00000000001% of their quarterly profits, while at the same time, it pisses off the worker who has to clean up the mess, gives excuse to riot cops to smash people's heads in, and alienates a boatload of people who are supportive, but not yet radicalized. As a tactic, it makes 0 sense unless you are going to destroy the whole building because it has some important structural role. Breaking the Starbucks window is not going to bring about revolution, it will act as a hindrance.

Sunserpent · 3 months

Look at the last time there was a general strike in the US, or anywhere really. What did the conditions look like? I think you will find that there is a strong, militant labor movement with a good amount of unionization. As of now, the unions in the US are weak and small. Could you get a few thousand people to take a day and march in the streets? Probably, but that's not what a general strike is. A general strike is when the working class realizes their power at the point of production to halt the system. I don't think that the US is anywhere close to that.

samfo · 3 months

Are you aware of the context around what happened? It's a hot debate, even in Leninist circles, but during that time, to leave the Tsar and his family alive was to leave the bloodline still intact for counter-revolutionaries to rally around. Looking back it seems ridiculous, but when you're facing a group that sees descendants of the Tsar as the rightful rulers, removing them is a powerful blow.

There was a lot of debate about this. It wasn't "We're pissed at the Tsar, so let's kill him and his whole family." It was a tactical decision, and may or may not have been the right decision, but I don't think it qualifies as "mass murder".

RedPlebiscite · 3 months

Really? There's still hundreds of encampments? It's hard to keep track, but Occupy Together lists a few hundred Occupies, but doesn't say how many are actually camping. Firedoglake lists 60 that have encampments, with 8 of them being threatened with eviction, and another (Austin where I am) was evicted last Friday, and is still on the list.

All of the large encampments have been cleared out, including OWS. "nearly all gone" may be a bit exaggerated, but a good portion have been cleared and face police repression. What, should we wait until there are only a handful of encampments left before we start to evaluate what to do when the encampments are gone?

Stthads · 3 months

"I think they need to get jobs," said Jeff Eichler, who was visiting Indianapolis from Baltimore, Maryland.

That's some high-quality heckling right there. At least one asshat yells that at every protest I have been to lately, and I have been employed without interruption for the past decade. Most of the people I know there are also employed and taking time away from their work or family to stand up for what they believe in. So I'm not really sure why this one is so popular, since it's both ignorant and a complete red herring.

AndreasBWagner · 3 months

When I first heard someone say "There is nothing more unfair than treating two unequal people equally." I was kind of pissed, because the person meant to say that some people just don't deserve the same things that this upper class white dude had. Once I thought about it, I started to agree with the quote, but coming from a different angle. It would be extremely unfair for each person to have exactly the same salary. A single mom with a kid is going to have a much lower quality of life than a single 20 year old dude who lives with his parents, even if they made the same amount of money.

There is no "fair" competition because there are an infinite number of situations that people can come from. That shouldn't be used as an excuse to shrug our shoulders when someone uses leverage over someone who is at a disadvantage, but to attempt to make is so that these situations are more rare, and instead of encouraging competition, we encourage cooperation.

AndreasBWagner · 3 months

I don't think calling an idea "fucking retarded" adds much to the conversation unless I somehow missed your nuanced analysis comparing views on existentialism and determinism being the root of political disagreement with a mental disorder.

erg0S4m · 3 months

Because as Marx described in Capital, it is not the amount of time spent to produce the commodity, it is the socially necessary labor time. Basically, the average time it would take someone with average skill to produce the commodity. So I may be an amazing painter and it would take me an hour to make a painting that costs $200, but it may take you 3 days. The amount of socially necessary labor time going into the product may be 4 hours, because that's how long it takes the average person working in that industry to produce a given value.

Also, I'm not aware that Marx indicated that price could be derived from labor time, since the amount of socially necessary labor time will vary based on advances in technology or training. I think that his criticism attempts to show that there is a relation there, even if the exact calculation is incredibly complicated.

Or what about two people who want to purchase a subscription email service, one is willing to pay $10 per month and the other is not, yet the amount of labour that went into the product is the same in both cases.

Then you are not in supply-demand equilibrium, which is what Marx assumes in Capital. He did this because he wanted to cut at the heart of classical economics, since at that time, most classic economic models also assumed equilibrium, so that a person would always exchange a product for another with equal value.

Or a rare earth mineral that takes the same amount of labour to mine as other minerals but has more valuable uses, how can the LTV explain a higher price for this mineral?

I think that LVT accounts for the amount of value added through the application of labor. I don't know how it applies to things that have value with no labor input. (For example, how do you value a barren desert versus fertile cropland?) The expensive mineral was already more valuable before the labor was applied, and the application of labor time to mine the mineral likely added the same amount of value as it would add to a less expensive mineral that was of equal amount of effort to mine.

louiebaur · 3 months

Do you have a source for that? Even by the conservative Heritage Foundation's estimates, (see note 3) only 30% of stock ownership is in retirement accounts like 401ks and IRAs. Though maybe Exxon Mobil bucks the general trend.

Pilebsa · 4 months

To suggest if we didn't have a centrally planned safety-net infrastructure then we wouldn't have a social safety-net at all paints humanity in such a horrible picture.

Unfortunately, it's a true picture. Could you name some other places where they have a social safety net like Western Europe, but is voluntary to contribute to? Charities are great and all, but they mostly act as a bandaid on a headwound, providing small numbers of people with scant services. I know you would like to believe that everything would be fine if we just didn't plan out how to provide for the needy and just wished that kind people would find them on the street and take care of them. However, that seems pretty naive to me.

Libertarian philosophy actually increases competition for resources and goods by staunchly defending capitalism and private property, and then asks people to be generous and care for others out of the goodness of their hearts. It seems like you want the world to be a certain way, then try to build a system that would put up every possible barrier to that world.

Which would you feel more proud about: being forced to pay for safety-net programs through the government, or voluntarily donating money to your local community to promote the well being of everyone?

Of course the later, but it's not about what makes me feel good or how righteous of a person I think that I am, it is about the consequences of my actions. Will a planned system that provides services for the most disadvantaged and requires all to help pay for that system be a good thing or a bad thing?

What if everyone contributed to the well being of society without being forced to do so? The definition of altruism. Isn't that a society we all want to strive for?

Personally I think that would be awesome. It's what Marx wrote about the higher stage of communism. Unfortunately, I don't think you get to an altruistic society by destroying any system which provides for the common good if it requires that all of society chip in.

AristotleJr · 4 months

Capitalism is great in theory - but it seems to always end up being manipulated and controlled by small groups of people or companies.

That is how capitalism works. It's not that it's been corrupted. Constant accumulation and consolidation is a part of the capitalist system, both on paper and in practice.

runagate · 4 months

Bill Gates started Microsoft, which was one of the cornerstones of the technological revolution that fuel's the US economy. His company makes the software that makes the world around you tick, and it made him billions.

Bill Gates had some good ideas when he started Microsoft, and should be compensated for the value that he produced. However, it is those that work at Microsoft that are actually making those products that make the world tick, not Bill Gates. He siphons off billions from the work that others do. How is that not parasitic?

runagate · 4 months

Some capitalists are not parasites.

I would beg to differ. I think that by definition, capitalists are parasites. If you are a capitalist, you make money not from your own labor but from the labor of others through your ownership of capital.

Of course, with petty-bourgeois owners, it is more nuanced, since they earn through a combination of their own labor and the labor of others. They obscure the difference between their value earned through labor and their value stolen through the use of other's labor.

Trisa · 4 months

Exactly. Someone once asked me in a discussion if I wanted other people to take what I had worked for and earned and give it to another group. I replied simply, "No, that's the exact reason why I am anti-capitalist."

kthrn · 4 months

Yes, except one side of the curve takes in a whopping 50% of the poverty level in cash benefits, maximum, whereas the other side takes in more money a year than most will earn in their entire lives.

To conflate the two is to conflate a mosquito bite with a gunshot wound to the head. i.e. They are different by many orders of magnitude, and one is far more deadly.

kthrn · 4 months

Your principle makes absolutely no sense. It's like saying, sure, we have problems, but why point fingers at the group of people who cause these problems through their actions? Birth, yes, there is no reason to say that because someone was born into a certain group, they must be "fixed". However, if by your actions you enter into a group that is causing harm, you should be stopped.

If you see a group of people who through their actions are making things worse for others, for exploiting people, for harming them, you call them out on it and try to stop them. We can debate if you think the private ownership of capital causes problems and harm to others, and that is a fair debate, but don't act like there is some high principle for not blaming things on a group if that group is defined by their actions.

kthrn · 4 months

Yeah, I don't know why people keep calling me racist either. All I said was there were a bunch of wide-nostril-ed, big lipped, fried chicken loving, watermelon eating, good for nothing lazy people in my neighborhood, and we should kick them all out because they are sucking up the welfare driving around in their Cadillacs drinking 40's of malt liquor. Those that say I am racist are the real racists, because it can't be that I make subtly racist comments which I fail to recognize due to my own privilege. After all, I don't see race.

░░░█░░░░░░▄██▀▄▄░░░░░▄▄▄░░░█ ░▄▀▒▄▄▄▒░█▀▀▀▀▄▄█░░░██▄▄█░░░█ █░▒█▒▄░▀▄▄▄▀░░░░░░░░█░░░▒▒▒▒▒█ █░▒█░█▀▄▄░░░░░█▀░░░░▀▄░░▄▀▀▀▄▒█ ░█░▀▄░█▄░█▀▄▄░▀░▀▀░▄▄▀░░░░█░░█ ░░█░░░▀▄▀█▄▄░█▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▀▀█▀██░█ ░░█░░░░██░░▀█▄▄▄█▄▄█▄████░█ ░░░█░░░░▀▀▄░█░░░█░█▀██████░█ ░░░░▀▄░░░░░▀▀▄▄▄█▄█▄█▄█▄▀░░█ ░░░░░░▀▄▄░▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░▒░░░█ ░░░░░░░░░▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀

(Note, I am being sarcastic to prove a point.)

kthrn · 4 months

Which is usually done by the class of people known as "workers", and not by those at the top. Those at the top may make directives like "Make these products cheaper.", but leave the petty things like how to make that happen in the real world to the plebs that work for them.

LonestarRanger · 4 months

Folks, below is the statement prepared by the Occupy media team and myself. Chief Acevedo made it clear that eviction would happen soon. Councilmembers Cole and Tovo communicated that it was a possibility as well. When confronted at City Hall Plaza, City Manager Marc Ott refused to comment on possible eviction and only said they would get back to us. Thanks y'all.

Due to imminent eviction from City Hall, we encourage everyone who has supported us to write city council requesting a written statement of eviction to ensure the safety of our people at City Hall and the preservation of our right to protest. You can copy and paste this below:

"Hi, my name is ___ and I'm an active member of Occupy Austin. We're concerned that the City Manager and APD will be unjustly infringing upon our 1st Amendment right to peaceful assembly. I strongly urge Mayor/Councilmember ___ to express my concern to the Office of the City Manager and demand that they establish a clear line of communication by issuing a written statement to infoscribes@occupyaustin.org and to be posted at our info tent in order to ensure both our safety and the preservation of our right to protest"

http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/council/contacts.htm

We are unsure of when the eviction may take place. As a result, we fully intend to continue with our plans for the three month anniversary party tonight and tomorrow, and we CERTAINLY WILL BE CONTINUING AS OCCUPY AUSTIN well into this new year.

NO FUTURE MEETINGS OR GAs WILL BE CANCELLED. Locations may change, stay tuned for that.

Thank you all for your continued support. ♥

LonestarRanger

TROPHY CASE

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