Capitalism is Violence

[georgephillip]

So are the bones of communist rats.

Socialism will come from the bones of capitalism.

"A century ago, Oklahoma had the strongest socialist movement in the US. Today, there are signs it's being reborn."

Red Oklahoma

 

[Weatherman2020]

So are the bones of communist rats.

Socialism will come from the bones of capitalism.

"A century ago, Oklahoma had the strongest socialist movement in the US. Today, there are signs it's being reborn."

Red Oklahoma

Yet still you chose to live in America out of all the nations on earth.
Most telling

 

[georgephillip]

((Human Energy(HE) times(x) Tools (T) [Knowledge/Skills; "picks-n-shovels"; Steamships, trains, planes and trucks; factories; Etc.] )) Plus (+) Resources(R) Equals(=) Wealth(W)

(HE x T) + R = W

That seems about right for industrial capitalism which produced goods and services, but we are dealing with finance capitalism (Marx called it fictitious capital) which produces debt and asset inflation.

Fictitious capital - Wikipedia

"Fictitious capital contrasts with what Marx calls 'real capital', which is capital actually invested in physical means of production and workers, and 'money capital', which is actual funds being held."

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

we are dealing with finance capitalism (Marx called it fictitious capital) which produces debt and asset inflation.

Marx's knowledge of capitalism was fictitious.

 

[georgephillip]

In a 2015 podcast conversation with American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, Vox’s Ezra Klein declared that “there’s nothing more dangerous than somebody who’s just taken their first economics class.” Often expressing a similar contempt for Econ 101 is University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak.

Taking an Econ 101 course in the US should be advertised as a Capitalism 101 class; it makes as much sense as taking a Religion 101 offering that limits its scope to Christianity.

 

[georgephillip]

hey’re called economic principles for a good reason: What is taught in a solid economic-principles course are the principles of the operation of a competitive economy guided by market prices.

Markets, along with corporations and money, are creations of government. The distribution of income isn't determined by an invisible hand's objective appraisal of each individual worker's and investor's marginal utility but the politically constructed laws and institutions that structure economic activity in a given society.

Capitalist markets function on ability to pay.

There are alternatives:

"The principle refers to free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.[3]

"In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist system will be capable to produce; the idea is that, with the full development of socialism and unfettered productive forces, there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.[4][5"

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - Wikipedia

 

[dblack]

hey’re called economic principles for a good reason: What is taught in a solid economic-principles course are the principles of the operation of a competitive economy guided by market prices.

Markets, along with corporations and money, are creations of government. The distribution of income isn't determined by an invisible hand's objective appraisal of each individual worker's and investor's marginal utility but the politically constructed laws and institutions that structure economic activity in a given society.

Capitalist markets function on ability to pay.

There are alternatives:

"The principle refers to free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.[3]

"In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist system will be capable to produce; the idea is that, with the full development of socialism and unfettered productive forces, there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.[4][5"

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - Wikipedia

Preach it Comrade!

You get 50 cents per post, or what?

 

[Toddsterpatriot]

"In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist system will be capable to produce;

We've seen how much a communist system can produce.
The answer is not very much.

 

[georgephillip]

How Venezuela Struck It Poor
The tragic — and totally avoidable — self-destruction of one of the world’s richest oil economies.
...
In the spring of 1959, at a secretive meeting at a yacht club in Cairo, Venezuela’s then-minister of mines and hydrocarbons, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, hatched a plan to give big oil-producing countries more control over their black gold — and a greater share of the wealth it promised to create. A year later, his scheme would be formally christened the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Venezuela, which sits atop what are arguably the biggest petroleum reserves in the world, was the only non-Middle Eastern country to be included — a testament to its importance to the global oil business.

Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s: It produced more than 10 percent of the world’s crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its neighbors Brazil and Colombia — and not far behind that of the United States. At the time, Venezuela was eager to diversify beyond just oil and avoid the so-called resource curse, a common phenomenon in which easy money from commodities such as oil and gold leads governments to neglect other productive parts of their economies. But by the 1970s, Venezuela was riding a spike in oil prices to what looked like a never-ending economic bonanza. Complemented by years of stable democracy, it seemed a model country in an otherwise often troubled region.

Such success makes the sorry state of Venezuela’s oil industry today, not to mention that of the country at large, all the more surprising — and tragic. The same state that, six decades ago, dreamed up the idea of a cartel of oil exporters now must import petroleum to meet its needs. Crude production has tanked, hitting a 28-year low in the fall of 2017 when it dipped under 2 million barrels a day. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a collapse of that magnitude [anywhere] without a war, without sanctions,” said Francisco Monaldi, a Latin America expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Venezuela has not, of course, fought a war in recent years. But the combination of plummeting oil revenues and years of government mismanagement has virtually killed off the country’s economy, sparking a humanitarian crisis that threatens to engulf the region. Caracas refuses to track inflation (or at least publish its findings), but the National Assembly calculates the annual rate to be more than 4,000 percent, and the International Monetary Fund predicts it could hit 13,000 percent this year. Given how much prices have already risen since January, the real number could be 10 times higher.
...
What explains the country’s precipitous decline from being one of Latin America’s richest and most stable states? Mark Green, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, blames President Nicolás Maduro — who, in May 2018, won another six-year term in elections widely denounced as fraudulent — and his “delusional” policies. But while there’s no question Maduro is partially culpable, to fully understand how a country blessed with the world’s biggest oil endowment could end up so crushingly poor requires going much further back. The fuse for the bomb that is now blowing up Venezuela’s oil industry — and the country along with it — was deliberately lit and fanned by Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, the strongman Hugo Chávez, not long after he swept into power in the late 1990s.
...
The decline and fall of Venezuela’s oil industry essentially begins with its nationalization in 1976, a time of booming crude prices and rising resource nationalism. President Carlos Andrés Pérez sought a much greater role for the state over the economy and especially wanted to use the country’s fast-growing oil wealth to turbocharge development. That year, to gain full national control over the oil fields, Caracas banished foreign oil firms and created a new, state-run oil monopoly called Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). The moves marked the capstone to Pérez Alfonso’s decades-long dream of Venezuela grabbing full control of its destiny. It was also the logical outcome of the widely held belief that the country’s oil, discovered in 1922 on the shores of Lake Maracaibo, was national patrimony.

At first, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company stood out from peers such as Petróleos Mexicanos in many ways. A large number of its executives, for example, had previously worked for foreign companies in the country and imbued the new firm with a business-oriented outlook and a high degree of professionalism. PDVSA had a lean workforce, an efficient cost structure, and a global outlook: A decade after its creation, the company acquired half of Citgo, the big U.S. refiner, and stakes in a pair of European refineries.
...
By the mid-1990s, international firms, including Chevron and ConocoPhillips, had moved back into the country and were hard at work unlocking Venezuela’s massive heavy oil deposits. But in 1998, the price of oil collapsed again, dipping to $10 a barrel. The impact on Venezuela — which, like many oil-rich countries, had never managed to diversify its economy despite a bout of reform efforts in the 1970s — was severe, given that petroleum exports then represented about one-third of the state’s revenues. Then along came Chávez, a former army lieutenant colonel who’d served time in prison for an abortive coup attempt in 1992. He won the 1998 presidential election on the promise to reshape and restore Venezuela’s reeling economy.

Among his first targets: the technocrats at PDVSA, especially the company’s deeply knowledgeable then-chairman and CEO, Luis Giusti, who’d led the drive to reopen the country’s oil sector. “Chávez saw Giusti as a potential rival. In fact, Chávez used the slogan ‘PDVSA is part of a state within a state,’” said Juan Fernández, a former PDVSA manager who would also fall afoul of the strongman. Giusti, alarmed by Chávez’s plans for the oil company, resigned just as he took office in early 1999; he was then replaced by a revolving cast of political appointees. The departure of Giusti, who’d spent three decades in the Venezuelan oil business and had won international plaudits for overhauling and modernizing the state-run firm since taking over in 1994, would prove to be bad news for PDVSA’s fortunes.

Chávez’s goal was to exert control of PDVSA and maximize its revenue, which he needed to fund his socialist agenda. But achieving the latter required cooperating with the rest of OPEC, which, as in the 1980s, wanted to cut production in order to raise prices. The problem for Chávez was that many of the PDVSA’s then-managers wanted to increaseproduction, by continuing the development of Venezuela’s technically challenging heavy oil fields. To do so, they needed to reinvest more of the company’s earnings rather than hand them all over to the government. So the managers had to go.

Unfortunately for Venezuela, Chávez — like many of the people he appointed to run PDVSA — knew nothing about the business that was so central to the country’s prosperity. “He was ignorant about everything to do with oil, everything to do with geology, engineering, the economics of oil,” said Pedro Burelli, a former PDVSA board member who left the company when Chávez took power. “His was a completely encyclopedic ignorance.”

But Chávez wasn’t the type to let that stop him. In 2001, the former paratrooper pushed through a new energy law that jacked up the royalties foreign oil firms would have to pay the government. It also mandated that PDVSA would lead all new oil exploration and production; foreign firms could only hold minority stakes in whatever partnerships they struck with the national company.
...
The president survived the putsch, but his popularity plummeted — especially inside PDVSA. By the end of 2002, opposition to Chávez had solidified, and big labor groups called for a national strike in hopes of pressuring him to leave office. Oil workers backed the effort, setting the stage for what would turn out to be the critical step in PDVSA’s road to ruin.

During the two-month work stoppage, PDVSA’s output plummeted as field workers stopped pumping and tanker crews refused to leave port. Venezuela’s oil production fell from close to 3 million barrels a day before the strike to levels as low as 200,000 barrels a day in December 2002.

Crucially for Chávez, however, the international oil companies refused to join the protest. “The multinationals kept producing during the strike,” said Monaldi of Rice University. “That is what saved him,” by blunting the economic impact of the protest.

Chávez immediately fought back. During the strike, he axed scores of senior executives, including Juan Fernández, one of the organizers of the protest. In the months that followed, the pink slips kept coming, and by the time the smoke finally cleared, Chávez had fired more than 18,000 workers. With them went most of the managerial expertise and technical know-how PDVSA had managed to preserve during the earlier purges.

This evisceration of the PDVSA’s human capital would prove the most damaging of Chávez’s many moves against the company. Even his own government soon realized the harm it had done. Accidents and spills began to proliferate, and in 2005, a top energy ministry official admitted privately that it would take at least 15 years to rebuild the technical skills lost by the mass firings. Another energy ministry official even asked U.S. diplomats in Caracas to help arrange training in the United States. And in the years since, the situation has only worsened. Conditions at the company (and in the economy) are now so bad that employees take home a pittance — just a handful of dollars a month — and face political pressure to support the regime. Such treatment has led to the large-scale flight of skilled workers: more than 25,000 since last year, union officials say. According to Reuters, the exodus has grown so big that some PDVSA offices have begun refusing to let their workers resign.
...
For all Chávez’s abuses and mistakes, Venezuela’s oil industry managed to stagger along for a surprisingly long time. Production held virtually steady from 2002 (just before the strike) to 2008, when global oil prices peaked at almost $150 a barrel. That year, Venezuela earned about $60 billion from oil. (These production numbers come from OPEC; the government’s own estimates are higher and viewed skeptically by the rest of the industry.)

The higher prices more than made up for the slight decline in production — between 2002 and 2008, Venezuela’s output fell from 2.6 million barrels a day to 2.5 million — allowing Chávez to keep spending and masking the need for a major overhaul of the industry. But even high crude prices couldn’t hide the deeper economic dysfunctions caused by Chávez’s efforts to build what he called “21st-century socialism.” Shortages of common consumer goods became endemic. A country that was once an exporter of agricultural products had to start importing lots of government-subsidized food — another common feature of the resource curse. “In 2007, there were already intermittent shortages,” said Patrick Duddy, who served as U.S. ambassador in Caracas from 2007 to 2008 and again from 2009 to 2010. “There was, at times, no milk of any sort on the store shelves, not fresh, not powdered, not condensed — and this was when oil prices were soaring. It was startling.”
...
Reality finally came crashing down in the summer of 2014, about a year after Chávez died from cancer and was succeeded by Maduro. Oil prices collapsed from a high of more than $100 a barrel in the summer to less than half of that by January 2015. By the end of that year, Venezuelan oil was selling for less than $30 a barrel, even as the budget was predicated on prices of $60 a barrel. By this point, Venezuela had become nearly wholly dependent on oil revenues, which made up about 95 percent of its export earnings. Cheaper oil tipped the economy into recession in 2014 and a full-blown crisis in 2015, with GDP shrinking by almost 6 percent and inflation exploding. And because Venezuela had neglected to diversify its economy, the country was out of options.
...
All these problems cost PDVSA — and Venezuela — huge amounts of cash. Selling oil at a discount, shipping it off to China (and Russia) to pay off the national debt, and subsidizing Venezuelan drivers cost the company, and the country, more than $20 billion a year, Monaldi estimated. Among other things, this massive shortfall has made it increasingly difficult for PDVSA to pay service companies such as Halliburton and Schlumberger, which help it drill for oil. Last year, the two companies wrote off more than $1.5 billion in unpaid bills owed by PDVSA. And since they’re not getting paid, they’ve slowed their work on the mature oil fields that were once Venezuela’s livelihood. That means even less light oil — which makes all the industry’s other problems even harder to solve.

That toxic mix collided in 2017, when production suddenly collapsed by 30 percent, marking a net decline of 2 million barrels a day since Chávez launched his plan to use Venezuela’s huge oil endowment to build a socialist paradise. The oil ministry now is reportedly bracing for a further fall during the rest of this year, to as low as 1.2 million barrels a day.
...
Real reform would require a wholesale change in the country’s economic management: getting hyperinflation under control, establishing a stable and realistic exchange rate, and building an enforceable legal framework that could offer foreign investors some semblance of predictability and protection. Of course, it’s impossible to imagine Maduro doing any of those things, especially after recently winning (or stealing) another term. And his re-election carries additional short-term risks for the tottering Venezuelan oil sector. The United States is considering additional sanctions that could limit exports of U.S. crude and refined products to Venezuela or even ban the purchase of Venezuelan crude by U.S. refineries. Either move, or both, would deal yet another body blow to an industry already on its knees. What likely can’t be put back together again is the state oil company. “There is no money in the world that can bring that back,” Burelli said. “You might be able to rebuild an oil sector full of private players but not PDVSA.”

Ultimately, Caracas’s bid to nationalize the oil industry and assert its sovereign rights to the country’s black gold has all but ensured that less and less of that wealth will be left for Venezuelans. With no other vibrant economic sector, the only way to fund the government is by increasing oil production — which would require investing up to $10 billion a year for a decade, Burelli suggested — and the only way to attract that kind of investment is by offering international companies favorable terms. That means a bigger cut for them and a smaller cut for the state.
...

How Hugo Chávez Blew Up Venezuela’s Oil Patch

The seeds of the apparently sudden collapse of Venezuela’s once-proud oil industry were sown two decades ago.

getpocket.com

How would you evaluate the influence of capitalistic violence on Venezuela?

In Defence of Marxism

"When Hugo Chavez was in power, the Venezuelan Revolution made tremendous steps forward in housing, healthcare, and literacy.

"Neighborhood councils and committees of workers and peasants emerged organically, along with factory and land occupations.

"The question of socialism was put on the agenda. However, this was not coordinated and integrated into a plan for the end of capitalism and imperialism in the country.

"More than 60% of the economy was left in private hands.

"The private sector will not invest in a situation of massive government regulation and intervention in the economy.

"In addition to this, there was a program of conscious sabotage by the rich businessmen and landlords—fully backed by the CIA and the State Department."

 

[dblack]

"In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist system will be capable to produce;

We've seen how much a communist system can produce.
The answer is not very much.

But the scarcity is shared equally! Well, except some are more equal than others, but you get the idea.

 

[dblack]

So are the bones of communist rats.

Socialism will come from the bones of capitalism.

"A century ago, Oklahoma had the strongest socialist movement in the US. Today, there are signs it's being reborn."

Red Oklahoma

Around that same time, several counties in southeastern Kansas elected socialists. I'm not sure if they seized all private property or what. Those were the days, eh, comrade?

 

[georgephillip]

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.[1][2][3][4] Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets.[5][6]

What role does violence and imperialism play in capitalism? Specifically, how did US capitalism benefit from centuries of genocide and chattel slavery?

https://crossworks.holycross.edu/cg...context=political_science_student_scholarship

"Despite all these benefits of the new world order, Smith also criticizes British imperialism, and more specifically the monopoly of the East India Trading Company, so it is unclear in Smith whether imperialism is concomitant with capitalism or the remnants of mercantilist mentality which is being rendered anachronistic."

 

[Confederate Soldier]

So are the bones of communist rats.

Socialism will come from the bones of capitalism.

"A century ago, Oklahoma had the strongest socialist movement in the US. Today, there are signs it's being reborn."

Red Oklahoma

Congratulations! Six Percent, only 94 more to go!

I don't like Nazis, but it's a great poster! The Red Menace must be stamped upon!

 

[georgephillip]

I don't like Nazis, but it's a great poster! The Red Menace must be stamped upon!

I have no respect for Hitler or Stalin, but I see a much bigger Menace to the world today

War Danger Has Not Disappeared

 

[georgephillip]

Ah, so everyone being poor is the best society.
Again, why aren’t you in North Korea?

Because I can conceive of a society in which no one is rich or poor.

 

[Stryder50]

"From each according to his ability ...
... to each according to his needs.
- Karl Marx (village idiot)

So, whom decides what "each"s "abilities" are, or should be?
Whom decides what "each"s "needs" are ?

Human nature being what it is, many have "wants" they consider to be "needs".
Most humans will show more "ability" if they can keep most of what their "abilities" produce; but ...
... most humans will do the bare minimum to avoid "the whip" when most of what their "abilities" produce will go to others.

Along with being an idiot, and a lazy non-producer (taker of wealth), K. Marx failed to understand human motivations and thought others would be more altruistic than reality and history has shown.

Similar stupidity and ignorance applies to the majority of those whom support versions of socialism~communism, in that they are displaying greed themselves. Maybe small scale versus large scale, but still the immorality of theft from others = greed; seeking from others what they have no moral or ethical right to have.

 

[Stryder50]

Ah, so everyone being poor is the best society.
Again, why aren’t you in North Korea?

Because I can conceive of a society in which no one is rich or poor.
View attachment 485718

There is no "free lunch".
However, thieves such as yourself think they are entitled to the labor and produce of others whom are more resourceful, ambitious and less lazy.
You are social deadwood and have yet to show why anyone should tolerate your continued existence.
You appear to have not even produced enough in your lifetime to support yourself, let alone give back anything to society.
Be glad your shark-feed self isn't in my lifeboat.

 

[Turtlesoup]

hey’re called economic principles for a good reason: What is taught in a solid economic-principles course are the principles of the operation of a competitive economy guided by market prices.

Markets, along with corporations and money, are creations of government. The distribution of income isn't determined by an invisible hand's objective appraisal of each individual worker's and investor's marginal utility but the politically constructed laws and institutions that structure economic activity in a given society.

Capitalist markets function on ability to pay.

There are alternatives:

"The principle refers to free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.[3]

"In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist system will be capable to produce; the idea is that, with the full development of socialism and unfettered productive forces, there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.[4][5"

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - Wikipedia

How is this an alternative when socialism has never worked (like you)......it, like you, just wants to steal what others have earned

 

[georgephillip]

Corporations and businesses treat taxes as another cost of the goods and/or services thye provide and pass such on to their customers/consumers. In essence it is usually the customer/consumer whom pays the taxes levied against corporations/businesses. This is basic Econ 101.

That is actually basic Capitalism 101.
Corporations may pass on their taxation costs to consumers, but those taxes can also be used to partially pay for public benefits like Medicare for All and tuition-free public colleges.

How does the corporate income tax work?

 

[Stryder50]

Corporations and businesses treat taxes as another cost of the goods and/or services thye provide and pass such on to their customers/consumers. In essence it is usually the customer/consumer whom pays the taxes levied against corporations/businesses. This is basic Econ 101.

That is actually basic Capitalism 101.
Corporations may pass on their taxation costs to consumers, but those taxes can also be used to partially pay for public benefits like Medicare for All and tuition-free public colleges.

How does the corporate income tax work?

You remain clueless and haven't a fug idea what you are talking about.
Meanwhile you continue to prove as a deadwood non-produtive useless waste of human skin.
World will be better off once you are gone.