And I for one welcome our new demon bodied overlords. Embrace Overmind Thought.

Actually Existing Anti-Imperialist State

I really like this question and have thought about it even though I don’t have an answer. I have this vibe that we’ll see non-socialist nations (they have no DOTP) forced into more Anti-Imoerialist positions for survival. And I wonder if this may be a pathway for some states to effectively transition into socialism. Maybe a DOTP will form somehow in these nations, but idk what if will look like or how. And again, just vibes on my part.

Oh yeah I remember that! I remember one of my neighbors pointing up at a light in the evening and yelling about drones. I had to tell her not to worry because it was, literally, just Venus.

She also seemed mad at me for ruining the fun though

No joke. I think many Americans looked up at the sky for the first time in 20 years and just freaked out about any “light” they saw.

Also, half-seriously half-joking, I think most were looking for an excuse to be mad or freak out. That’s a common thing in the American psyche. Everyone seems so bored, or tense and close to exploding or some just want any reason to be pissy. It’s gotten to the point that our celestial neighbor in the sky can cause mass delusion events.

Also, some further thoughts. Read with caution.

I’m not certain how easy or straightforward it is to talk about exploitation of a single person. My understanding of Marx’s categories in Capital is that they are social relations, not so much people. Capital, not the capitalist, is the object of study. Labor, not the individual worker, is the protagonist. Marx himself notes in his Preface to the First Edition of Capital that

individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests.

When you hire workers to make commodities for profit you are acting as a bearer of capital. Capital, the larger social process, is “carried” through you or personified in you. When you go to work for your boss in modern capitalism you are an instance of the larger collective worker. These larger social relations are the fundamental starting point for Marx, as I understand it. An individual plays the “role” of these categories.

A single person may also “bear” multiple economic roles. They may be a landlord, and hence be a bearer of the interests of the landlord class. That same person may also be a wage worker too and hence a bearer of the class interests of the proletariat. This can make discussion of the exploitation of a single person somewhat tricky. I’m not saying it isn’t possible and I may just be ignorant of the best way to do so. I am saying that my own reading and understanding of Marx causes me to view things structurally and socially and things can get fuzzy when we reduce it down to what about this specific person.

Marx does make mention of the surplus value produced by a single worker, for example - so maybe there is no reason to suspect there is difficulty with discussing these categories for an individual - but again I always read that as personifications of these collective categories. But this may be my own bias here.

One index we could try to use to talk about the exploitation of an individual comes form an academic article from J. Cogliano (Computational Methods and Classical-Marxian Economics) in which he uses agent based simulations to try to simulate an economy as Marx describes. This is an approach that explicitly starts with the individual and isn’t an orthodox Marxist approach. The index is similar, but not identical, to ratios that Marx himself would use in Capital.

To calculate what Cogliano called the exploitation intensity index of an economic agent, you just compare a.) the total labor they provide to the economy over a certain time period with b.) the value of products they consume in the economy. If a person works many hours, but they afford very little or only afford low value goods then this ratio is very high. They have a high intensity of exploitation. On the opposite end, if someone works very little or not at all and they can still somehow afford high value goods then they have a low intensity of exploitation - and someone somewhere else is likely being exploited to support them.

This may be hard to calculate in practice. Especially if the person works multiple jobs or, like I said before, inhabits multiple “economic roles” (like somehow being both landlord and worker and part-time small business owner, etc.). Also, that measurement depends on us being able to measure the value of goods. Depending on who you ask, this either is the same thing as the price or isn’t the same thing but is close to it. Things get bloody real fast.

Also, this index obviously isn’t the end-all be-all of figuring out if someone was exploited. If someone is young, or disabled, or elderly such they can’t provide labor then I would not say they exploit others even if the above index suggests. Likewise when you do someone a favor and paint their house for free you (likely) aren’t getting exploited.

But using the above ratio can help to think about exploitation in some ways.

How much of my labor do I give to others? How much of others’ labor am I taking? In terms of hours of human labor: do I give back more than I use up, or do take more than I give?

Here’s my take: it depends. The labor you discuss may not even be going into making value in the Marxist economic sense of the term, especially if someone is doing a specific service for your. If you pay someone to paint a room or fix some appliance and they are self employed then you aren’t exploiting them. They use the money you pay to cover the cost of the tools and material and their wage. It may be possible they are “exploiting themselves” if they are underselling their own labor services. In this case, you care about the use-value of the product or service. You aren’t appropriating their product and selling it for a profit on the market. You don’t care about the exchange-value of the product. You are like their customer.

Surplus value, and exploitation, come into the picture if you hire this person to make a product which you then sell. Perhaps you contract them to design a shirt or paint a room, but your goal is to sell that shirt or room (house) on the market place for a profit. In this case it is the exchange-value of the product that you care about, not the use in itself. You don’t care for the room or the shirt for its own sake, just how much money you can get from selling it. In that case the worker would make value in their labor, and by appropriating a profit from the product of their labor you are able to exploit them.

You may still give that worker a “fair wage”, but by selling their product and realizing a profit you introduce the real possibility of exploiting them. You are able to use that profit to afford consumption items which have value in excess of the value (or labor) that you yourself provided to the economy. And the worker creates labor (provides labor) in excess of the value of the consumption items their wage affords them.

It sounds like you are just hiring someone to do something personal for you, like painting your room. In that case I believe you’re good. ;)

It’s all about the web of social relations. That very same action (like painting a room) can take on so many different economic forms once we start asking how this action fits into the larger picture of production.

Americans don’t understand geography

Or logistics, or planning, or strategy, or thinking, or…

Just take the island. Nobody has been so smart and so brave and so handsome as to just go in and take it.

One day, some generation of economists will learn the shocking truth that there is more to the economy than just money

It’s like the “top climate scientist” Nordhaus who tells us that because agriculture only accounts for 3% of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a large effect on the US economy.

Any time I hear something from a big brained economist I just tend to assume the opposite is true.

I think people here at least know that. We just want to bring out the crabs and have a small gleeful moment of celebration at his meaningless end. His death isn’t comparable to the Ayatollah’s. His is just a joke we’re all waiting for so we can crab dance over it.

To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

But I can see your point on how it can get annoying. As if putting our psychic energy into that has any real impact on how the war goes or can make up for the lives destroyed. But I think, or hope, the people at Hexbear are all aware of that for the most part.

Having reason to bust out the crabs just makes any day so slightly better

Peace at last

Unfortunately no

But still within range

assuming image is correct

Meet the new boss pole star

Same as the old boss pole star

Gave me a good chuckle in these trying to times. I love the dumb look on each of their faces as he just says that

was

But thanks for the fix, the see interesting even if beyond my ability to meaningfully ID. Will scan the dirt more often

Definitely some weird shapes around that first one. But idk what I’m looking at.aside from the square grids, I see a lot of oblong circular structures around it too, but those may be natural? Idk. One of those two above links didn’t work for me for some reason though.

Without an actual worker’s party to discipline you and hold you accountable to the masses, this is shit to expect.

You’ve dislodged an old memory. Every few years I’m reminded of that show. I remember one of the villains (maybe in just one episode) was some rich tech CEO (space Bill Gates?) and I remember as a kid having a sense of disappointment that the future world was still one where that could be a thing.

But now that I remember Tangea was some race-supremacist monarchical state with some other clearly oppressed species on their planet who were never portrayed sympathetically. And Mira was their literal princes and also in Buzz’s crew.

Shit… Fuck Buzz