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alanjjohnstone wrote:

Tim, i bow to the superior humourist, i'm well beat….but remember,  the Greater One who created Paradise – Jock Stein who created a host of avenging angels called the Lisbon Lions.Sorry, ALB, for the repetition but some on this forum require to have things explained more than once and often, more than twice and still no guarantee that simple truths will sink in. 

Humourist? Thanks for the compliment, gobshite is the more usual response to my ramblings.I am more than happy to bend the knee before Jock Stein, what he did produce a team to win the European Cup all born within 30 miles of Glasgow will never be reproduced.My Owld Da's best mate from the war was born and bred in Glasgow and in 1970 we had a wee trip up to stay with them.Whenever we went anywhere, Me Fatha would take me and my older brother to a match. On this trip it was decided that I was too little (at 9 years old) to go to the game, my brother Paddy at 14 was taken to the European Cup Semi Celtic v Leeds at Hampden, attendance around 140,000. By way of compensation the next night I was taken to see Hamilton Accies play Morton in the old Scottish 2nd Division (official attendance 2, me and me Da). So although I have a soft spot for Celtic, the Accies are my team in Scotland.Some of the older members of Glasgow Branch used to say that Partick Thistle were the "thinking man's team" in Glasgow, which, they explained, iwas why they got such poor crowds!

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

The Great Architect in the sky surely must be a Scotsman (or an Irishman)…who else turns water into wine. Isn't whisk(e)y the water of life, after all?And what does the Geordie God offer…Lindisfarne mead and Brown ale 

The people of Jaw-dee do have a messiah. He was known to perform great miracles at the temple of the people (St James' Park), and he was known to the true believers as "Kee Gan"I quote from the Book of She ra Chapter One, verse  number 9" and lo did a great saviour come from the south to take his place amongst the people of Jaw-dee, and they did know him as Kee gan.When the people saw Kee gan they proclaimed him as the Messiah and they looked upon his perm of curls and saw that it was good.And the tales of his miraculous deeds did travel far from the land of Jaw-dee even unto the darkness of the Land of Mackum and when the tribe that is known as Mackum beheld the miracles that Kee-gan performed, there was great gnashing of teeth (well the one or two they had left) and lo they did rent their vestments of red and white and did cry unto themselves the incantation "aye wa in thashitenoo".Unto this day the tribe of Jaw dee will shake their fists of vengeance at the cruel fat tyrant known as Ash Lee and cry out for the return of Kee gan, and consume the holy bread of stotty cake and with the sacred drink of broon perform the ritual of " gerritdoonyaneck" even unto the tenth bottle. So sayeth the lord

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

Hmmmm..the fact that mouse took on a life of its own and posted so many repeated posts would make anyone other than a rationalist suspect some sort of supernatural intervention 

hmmmm, if a supreme being did want to provide support for their existence perhaps feeding the millions of starving children in the world, or some other such miracle would be more credible than"the miracle of the pessimistic Sotsman's mouse".I suppose based on this "miracle" you could come to the conclusion that there is a god, but unfortunately he's a fuckwit!

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Bob Andrews wrote:

gnome wrote:

  it's the membership which should be giving greater cause for concern.

The Gnomemeister in his inimitable manner has one again hit the proverbial piece of ironmongery on its uppermost protruberance. The sad fact is, most members, in terms of legacies and bequests, are more useful to the Party dead than alive.

Have you made a will Bob?

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roman wrote:

alanjjohnstone wrote:

I linked to it on another thread a while back, but i suppose people forget…i did.https://www.gordon.edu/ace/pdf/F&EF09Stark.pdf

Quote:

Did early Christianity also attract lower class converts? Of course. Even when a wealthy household was baptized, the majority would have been servants and slaves, and surely some lower status people found their way to the church on their own. The point is that early Christianity substantially over-recruited the privileged,

 

Rodney Stark is NOT a New Testament scholar, I've read his work, his a good sociologist, but his work on the first couple centuries is just not up to par … it's not due to "tradition" that people say that early Christianity was mostly made up of the poor, it's due to serious scholarship. See John Dominic Crossan and Richard Horsley's work.One of his arguments that Jesus was middle class was that his family traveled to Jerusalem for a festival (in one of the gospels), he doesn't argue for the historicity of that even, nor argue that a poor family would not be able to do that, nor does he bring up the fact that in the story his family coudlnt' afford animals for scrifice (the offered birds). But either way, that story is NOT part of the earliest material most likely to be historical and thus one would have to argue for its historicity. The fact that Jesus is called "rabbi" doesn't mean anything since it wasn't an actual title until AFTER the 70 C.E. where the pharisaic movement became the main Jewish religious sect.It IS true that some wealth people became christians (as seen in pauls letters), but as other actual scholars have pointed out the prophets and traveling teachers required the rich people for financial support, but that's not how you do history, you can't just take a text and accept it at face value, you have to examine it and see how it could fit in different social contexts, and compare it to other texts.In short, be careful when someone who isn't a scholar of early Christianity comes out and says all the actual scholars of early Christianity are wrong.If you look at the Q source without the Matthean and Lukean context, in it's own context, as well as the Markean material in it's oral tradition form (take the individual stories and sayings), it's clear the audience was peasantry.The writings are BY DEFINITION coming from the middle class and up … but that doesn't define the movement as a whole. The fact that Paul includes AS TRADITION, the communist ethic, and then complains about people who aren't working but living off the rich, is exactly what you'd expect when someone from a wealtheir background joins a movement made up of peasants. When you go to the second century you see the same thing, the tradition sounds like it comes from the peasantry where as the writers recording them and framing them are clearly educated and middle to upper class.

You talk of the Q source and say it should be examined in its own context. I'm not an early Christian scholar, but I was under the impression that the Q source was hypothetical and was first put forward in the 19th Century. If that is correct, how can we examine it?

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The difficulty with the JC myth is that it is so hard to pin down. Why anyone would logically chose to declare themselves a true follower, is beyond me.The constant debate about the supposed meaning of the bearded ones "utterances", interpreted one way by one group of followers, interpreted another way by another group of followers, so that they can be used to justify anything, or at times nothing at all.For me, I think this is the crux of the whole argument, the entire body of the supposed JC philosphy is nothing but a hotch potch of borrowed contradictary and at times over sentimental guff. Nice bloke, probably, heart in the right place, probably, useful to the 21st century problems we face, no."His message" is clearly a mixed messge, one which pulls together a crude understanding of some aspects of preceding philosophies and religious messages, without any real understanding of the ideas that formed them, placed out of context and used willy nilly. On top of this were now supposed to believe, despite the evidence before us, that the message is a socialist/communist one!Anyway, that's enough about Jeremy Corbyn, let's get back to the debate about Jesus!

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MBellemare wrote:

     Yes, Steve San Francisco, you are banging your head against a wall, a certain wall of ideologues, trapped in the past. Semantics and the ignoring of concrete facts as somehow illigitimate, is the last resort of an outdated argument backed-up against the wall, a dying argument. So don't fret too much about it, this is how new paradigms come to the foreground. To be positive and optimistic, one can only hope on this forum, that some, who are truly interested in furthering knowledge, will examine the evidence objectively.     The fact is that Marx's analysis cannot fully explain the post-industrial condition. He is helpful in pointing in the right direction and offers good insights, but cannot explain a litany of post-modern, socio-economic phenomena, which are out of reach of Das Capital. So let me quote, the American, philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, who can incapsulate how these issues with Marx and his ideologues will be resolved:   

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competing paradigms…[manifest]… different worlds. [Each is] looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But …they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. Before they can hope to communicate fully, one…or the other…must experience a paradigm shift. It is a transition between incommensurables [and] the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all…The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. Conversion will occur a few at a time until, after the last holdouts have died, [and then] the whole [society]…will again be…under a single, but now a different, paradigm.

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And as I like to say, "some only turn towards verity, grudgingly and with much anguish!"

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The problem is that you see a post industrial society from your very limited perspective of cosy North American academia.Try telling this to the billions of Chinese and Indians (and others) who are now being dragooned into factories, former peasants being starved and displaced into the ranks of the proletariate. Is this a post industrial society for them? Try telling the banks of minimum wage Brits working in call centres, that their industrial scale employment is non exploitative and isn't part of the accumulation of capital by the small minority who own and control!Your ascertion, that you have come up with some kind of novel solution, the concept of a collection of self contained cooperative communities, is a laughable re run of the failed ideas of Prudhon.Merely paraphrasing crude, sentimentalist incantations about "the rabble" doesn't make you a revolutionary, any more than Johnny Rotten wearing bondage trousers and putting safety pins through his nose made him an anarchist. Sadly it shows you up as just another wannabe anarchist poseur, attempting to look wind swept and interesting. Another sheep in wolf's clothing.

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

 No. That's not what Marx or I meant in every case that we use the phrase "immense accumulation of commodities".  I'm refering to a region of space like a store where an immense collection of things like toasters and blenders (aka commodities) are accumulated.  You could define "an immense accumulation of commodities" with geography and a map in the lexicon of discusstion that's relevant and I'm using.  Capitalist call that a store and it fits the definition of "an immense accumulation of commodities".  Socialist call it a store and it fits the definition of "an immense accumulation of commodities".  

 I feel like I am banging my head against a brick wall here.  You clearly dont understand what a "commodity" is if you think a  non market socialist system of production is one in which there will be "an immense accumulation of commodities".  Everyone, apart from you, seems to understand that socialism in the Marxian senses entails the abolition of commodity production.  Your eccentric interpretation is something that is unique to you alone, dont  bring Marx into the picture.  He would have guffawed  heartily at such an example of profound ignorance on the subject

In classical political economy and especially Karl Marx's critique of political economy, a commodity is any good or service ("products" or "activities"[1]) produced by human labour[2] and offered as a product for general sale on the market.[3] Some other priced goods are also treated as commodities, e.g. human labor-power, works of art and natural resources, even though they may not be produced specifically for the market, or be non-reproducible goods.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_(Marxism)I understand your definition of commodity well enough I think.  that definition from wikipedia is more right than wrong isn't it?  Do you not understand the definition of the word "accumulate" maybe?  I can link to that too you need help.  Or is it just when you put them together that your preconceptions prevent you from understanding? you have a prek-conception about what marx meant that somehow makes one region of space called a store "an immense collection of commodities" in capitalism and if you change government to true socialism then that same region of space called a store is no longer "an immense collection of commodities"?  can you explain how this works in more detail? the way I interpret Marx, A general store in capitalism or in communism is "an immense collection of commoodities".  

I will try to spell this out for you as simply as I can.In a socialist economy there will be no buying or selling of any kind.Therefore, if you look at the part of the quote from wikipedia that I have marked in bold, you will see that by DEFINITION, there can be no commodities in a socialist society because there is no buting or selling!!!!!!

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

alanjjohnstone wrote:

This is certainly something we can agree upon – I am certainly no Einsteinian physicist. and this wiki entry simply blanked my mind rather than illuminate it.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenceI fared a little bit better with this explanation of Marx's economics https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/social-reproduction

Well, the wikipedia entry isn't completely wrong, it's just limited and being used wrong in some arguments, Just like a lot of the posters in this forum are not wrong about socialism or economics, they're just using a limited understanding that leads them to wrong conclusions in some arguments.   For E=MC2 the problem is the false assumption that that all matter is stationary and nothing in the universe moves.  The E=MC2 equation failes when objects start moving and but not by much.  You have to move things around at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light before the short equations starts to become seriously wrong. for most everyday objects like tossing a ball to put it in motion you can safely ignore the thousands of a decimal place difference between the truncated short equation and the longer more accurate equation. That was in the video at the link I gave and probably a better source for accessibility and simplified better than the wikipedia entry of E-MC2.  Likewise the posters in this forum aren't entrirely wrong, it's just they assume that prices have to be in capital based dollars and not income adjusted dollars.   If there were no such thing as pricing on a sliding scale, then I wouldn't have much of a disagreement with people who argue for a political revution and abandoning capitalism. The moral here is that being close minded will close your mind to some solutions. I looked at your social-reproduction page.  thanks for the helpful link.  It's not wrong, but it omits the "surplus value" capturered by the retailer in any sales transaction and it also doens't allow for a variable extraction of surplus value from the equation during the sale process.  According to the page you linked there is no such thing as a sliding scale and the existencce of aa sliding scale price tag breaks the theory. So Marx thoery as described in the page you linked only works if you ignore the existence of a sliding scale price tag. for most current purchases around the world, that's a pretty safe assumption and slding scale pricing makes up probably less than 1% of econmic transactions in todays average market so ignoring the sliding scale price tag seems reasonable in todays market for today.  It was definitely reasonable to ignore the existence of a sliding scale price tag when Marx was doing his work and writing. But If I can make a sliding scale conveneint and ubiquitous so it makes up a larger percent of economic activity then we'll see a strong divergence between the results of the truncated marx model on the page and a better representation of how surplus value moves in an economy. in general there seems to be some inattention to the sales part of the flow diagrams and it conflates the identity and motives of the retailer with the motives of the communal good of all the rich people together.  "The essential capitalist condition is “only if communal wealth can be syphoned off by the capitalist class [in Marxian terms, only if surplus value Ⓢ can be realized by the capitalist class]”."  ignores the rather obvious fact that in a capitalist economy people DO NOT make communal purchasing or job decisions and they can't make some communal decisions about price or jobs because of how capitalism forces competition between people first and uses a crowdsource price setting solution. That's a problem for the whole theory because the rich people don't act out of comunal for all rich people as a group in solidarity, they act out of personal profit seeking and will gladly take money from their rich neighbors.  so there's no overArching organized and authoritarian "rich people club" with the power to set prices in the marketplace from a top down structure, it's just individual business people individually trying to make the most money that sets the price and indiidual sellers will undercut and do other pricing tricks that don't get explained by traditional capitalist or marxist economics.  you'd have to usa a behavioral economics or institutional economics analysis to really point out the faws in the page you liinked to, but since so few people understand behavioral or institutional economics principles I didn't bother with that kind of explanation. What marx is describing in his diagram or whoever created the diagram is a good representation of the state of a nation scale economy at a time many many years ago when it was probably pretty close to accurate.  There was no thought back then to how a sliding scale price tag might affect things in a society. We know better now. after reading the first article and commenting above I read further down the page and found this quote that seems relevant. . ."Marx states point blank in Capital Volume 1 that political economists have “never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him”. This is the expression of determinism."So what does an income based sliding scale do exactly in regards to this quote from marx above?  It asks the question of what if labour is represented by the something other than the value of it's product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value.  With a sliding scale price tage the labour is NOT representative of the magnitued of the product time.  Instead your buying power (your labor buying power) is adjusted at the cash register so that if you are rich because you captured a lot of surplus value in some way hten your price goes up. This meens the value of your labor is NOT EXACTLY represented by the value of it's product and labor time, but instead the value of your labor is represented by your salary in combined with and modified by the price adjustements at the cash register.    

Steve I think you make the common mistake of using the term Value and price/wage, to mean the same thing. In common parlance this might seem sensible, however from a Marxist point of view, value and price are very different.You might find the link below uesful:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/

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Hi NeilWelcome to the forum and hopefully to the World Socialist Movement.

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Vin wrote:

Gates is not that much of a philanthropist. I have asked him on numerous occasions to lend me a tenner and he has blanked me everytime. After everything I'v done for capitalism, that's what I get.

That's 'cos he knows your a Mackem

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MBellemare wrote:

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      Let me answer your other question, why doesn't a network of capitalists raise prices to outlandish new highs. Well, sports does it all the time. Stadiums have raised the price of entry in North America with huge mark-ups. Sport stars demand obscene salaries, CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution.Michel Luc Bellemare         

Ok let's test out this scenario. My beloved football team decide that for me to go and watch my back and white herooes I will have to pay an Additional £20. As a loyal fan I go along to the match as per usual. Before the match I meet up, as usual with the lads in my hostelry of choice, however instead of my usual modest consumption of 10 pint Bottles of Newcastle Brown, I only have enough money to consume a pityful 8 pint bottles. Similarly, on my walk up to St James' Park I stop off at the bakers. The baker happily bags up my usual order of five large pork pies, but to his dismay I shake my head and indicate I'm only going to purchase 3 of his delightful comestibles.In the aftermath the brewer and the baker get together. "Oh my god, the fat bastard has cut down on his consumption, what are we to do!" they cry amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Well they decide there are only two options, we can either reduce production, to meet the new requirements, or we can reduce the prices to ensure the glutton continues to consume our wares and doesn't go off in search of other cheaper purveyory of beer and pork pies. Either way, they decide, it will mean a cut in profits.And when the final scores come in, I have spent the same amount of money, The football club have made greater profits and the baker and the brewer have made less. Sadly, no pixie dust, just simple straight forward maths, that even I, with 8 pints, 3 pork pies and the two kebabs I purchaed to celebrate another home victory, gurgling away in my stomach, can work out!

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MBellemare wrote:

   Another quick comment, if you factor in creative-power, i.e., both unquantifiable and quantifiable labor-powers expended both in production and outside of production, in everyday life. My economic models introduced above, work and function adequately in explaining, that the rate of profit, and the falling rate of profit etc., can be circumvented, indefinately, via creative networking,Michel Luc Bellemare     

factoring in something means taking account of (something) when making a calculation, if this is unquantifiable, how can "creative power" be said to be factored in, in any meaningful way. You may as well say that you have been factoring in magic pixie dust and when you do that it explains the meaning of life, the world and everything.I have previously asked you to back up your view that capitalists can increase prices by small amounts when they wish without impact (If they could do this with impugnity, it begs the question, why don't they?). You have studiously chosen to ignore the question of the magic capitalist price rise impugnity. If we add this to the Pixie Dust of "creative Power", we can see that your "economic models" seem to have more in common with JK Rowling that Karl Marx!

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

It appears to be more a play on a forum user's name drawing attention to what is perceived to be the tone of his responses by Michel, and i would be slightly hesitant in suggesting it possessed any racist undertones,  Tim-nice-but-dim,   from Al-everyone's-pal.

So what your saying is that making a sterotypical reference to someone's perceived ethnicity, which is intended to demean or belittle that person, i.e. calling Marcos "Sub-Comandante", in an attempt to belittle him, does not have racist overtones?It is not merely a play on a person's name, it is not about Marcos's name it's about his perceived ethnicity and an assumption that the person's view is of less worth because of that ethnicity.And by the way, I'm not particualarly dim and I'm certainly not particularly nice.

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MBellemare wrote:

    I agree with you David B. on most all you've stated. I think you see the concept of creative-power, and how it informs value, price and wage. And your right persuading people as to certain artificially fabricated price, value and wages is a major task of capitalists. Hence why controlling the means of both mental and physical production are so vital to capitalists. It seems to me, that we are normalized to pay certain prices and to conceive certain imagined values onto things. And if capitalism, was not the dominant political economic framework of society, we would cast-aside and/or discontinue the production of many capitalist commodities. 

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As for sub-comandante Marcos, and his statement that I am not using the term "value" correctly, I see value as arbitrary and as an artificial social construction. As a result, I am using the concept of "value" arbitrarily and as an artificial social construction. Just like Marx did, although he would never admit it, because he couched it in labor-time, quantifiable labor-time! Quantifiable labor-time, which is only validated when it is realized in circulation.     

Am I the only person on this forum that thinks that the use of the term "sub-comandante Marcos" is actually an attempt at a racially stereotyped slur?

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