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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

 Please don't tell me "socialist don't need information or information negotiation and exchange systems" because that would just break my heart to read and show such sad desperate arrogance and ignorance at the same time.   Maybe you should read the post card exchange examples and give me a nod of approval and encouragement before you start asking for more impossible things.  I've done like 5 impossible things on this design project for you guys already, and yes it's advanced my goals too which is great, but since it's going to help you guys so much a little postive encouragement would be awesome right now.  thanks and I appeciate if you take the time to read and consider https://goo.gl/8hfH91

 Steve.  Why don't you ever grasp the fairly simple point that when socialists talk about exchange we are using the term in its economic sense to signify quid pro quo market exchanges. Obviously socialism will be a non exchange economy in that sense. Quid pro quo market exchanges imply private ownership of the means of producing wealth and this is incompatible with common ownership.  End of story. We don't need long winded exegeses on  "information exchange protocols" or other such pretentious  twaddle.  Nor do we need some complicated schema for exchanging "postcards" or whatever,  Why can't you just converse like everyone else does without all this posturing.  "ill spend 20 minutes reading your stufff if you spend 20 minutes reading my stuff"  FFS You sure know how to get people's back up which is ironic considering you consider yourself to be a "UserExperienceResearchSpecialist"

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

 Is Marx apposed ot quid pro quo between two freely assoicating persons?  Seems to me he was all about seeking a fair exchange of service and labor between two people who voluntarily choose to associate for their mutual benefit.

Seems to me that you don't understand what socialism about.  Learn the difference between generalised reciprocity – which is what socialism is about – and the  quid pro quo  market type exchange system you're constantly going on about.  Here's a link that will help you to understand the difference http://anthro.palomar.edu/economy/econ_3.htm

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

 Sorry, mcolme1, but you're comments have not been helpfull to me in the past so I've stopped reading them and don't owe you any time or favors.  I believe socialist believe each person should be allowed to choose their associations freely and chooose what they do and who they exchange favors with.  So I'm choosing to exclude you from my circle of people who I will spend time on consideration of ideas they want me to think about.    Tell you what.  If you want to take a guess at how much time it would take me to read the articles and offer to read stuff I want you to read in return for an equal amount of time, then maybe there's still a reason to associate.  until you're willilng to make a fair exchange of time like I believe socialist should, then you're really just wasting my time with charity solicitations to "read this" for you're benefit.Talk is cheep.  Listening is expensive. You've produced no value to me or anyone else with this comment. That's true even in socialism. 

 That a bit negative and unnecessary on your part, Steve. There's no harm in looking up the links Marcos freely  offered you.  I find  this kind of contrived quid pro quo approach you are adopting – I will read what you suggest only if you read what I suggest –  irritating and distracting. It mirrors the kind of mindset of market capitalism.  You need to get over this kind of fetsishistic habit of yours

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Osama Jafar wrote:

what should be fought to end misery isnt profit or class its fear & stupidity; what i propose is simple encouragment to step outside the system. The future isnt the working class the future is the nonworking class & all these analysis are wrong.

Osama,  I get  the sense of what you are saying here.  You are suggesting that workers opt out of the system rather than fight it head on.  Well,  yes and no is my response. I agree in principle  with the idea that we should strive as far as possible to transcend the system of wage slavery – the cash nexus – that capitalism imposes upon us. It is not enough to just abstractly talk about an alternative to capitalism, We need some kind of "material correlate" to match our fine words about another kind of society. We need to acquire the  confidence that can only come through praxis that we are capable of moving beyond capitalism.  That is why attempts to transcend the money economy in the here and now are important to the socialist cause.  Without them, we are left only with abstract propaganda and abstract propaganda on its own has unfortunately proved to be a conspicuous failure. However however however…. Practical attempts to transcend the limits of capitalism in the here and now have also not succeeded  – even if in numerical terms they absolutely dwarf the impact of the political movement to overthrow capitalism.  To take just one example –  the Freecycle Network. It is massive by comparison with the political movement for socialism.  It is  "made up of 5,293 groups with 9,096,310 members around the world, and next door to you. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns and neighborhoods. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. "https://www.freecycle.org/It is great to see something like this and as a socialist it fills me with hope.  Anything that encourages the idea that we can do without money fills me with hope.    However the Freecycle network on its own is not going to do anything about challenging the capitalist basis of modern society.  Clearly.  Its is not going to eliminate the monumental structural waste that capitalism generates  The same can be said of LETS and Time banks  and intentional communities. etc etc   They are all positive developments in terms of predisposing people to be more receptive to socialist ideas but are not in themselves enough to bring about the real change we all need. The answer surely is not to see  things in simplistic black or white terms,  Abstract propaganda such as SPGB is carrying out is absolutely indispensable but self evidently it too is not enough on its own to bring about the change needed.  What we need is a fusion of approaches so that we can benefit from the synergies that develop out of that, Socialists need to come off the fence as far as moments like the Freecycle Movement is concerned and enthusiastically endorse them, and even get actively involved in them, while at the same time pointing out their limitations.  The positive feedback and contacts established in engaging with such movements will I believe help to boost the fortunes of the socialist movement itself and vice versa.  These kinds of movements are our natural constituency and we should wake up to this fact

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mcolome1 wrote:

 That term can not he applied to the US workers when it is a highly developed capitalist country, and all the peasants are wage slaves and capitalism has been applied to agriculture. Populism does not come from being Popular, as  Anarchism does not mean chaos 

 Well, yes,  I agree populism does not mean "popular" but I think you are still missing the point about what the essence of populism is and therefore not recognising it where it manifests itself as, for example,  in Trumps campaign which was run on a clearly populist ticket.. I repeat: populism is based on the perception that the political establishment  has betrayed the people and that what is required is a more direct and forceful representation of the people's wishes.  Often populism goes hand in hand with  belief in a charismatic "strong man" political figure to do the job At the heart of the idea of populism is a patron-client relationship,  In return for the support of the voters , the Leader cum Saviour will affect radical change to the the existing political order to bring it into line with the wishes of the people,  Its for this reason amongst others that socialists oppose populism.  The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. With respect, Marcos , I think your conception of populism is too narrowly defined. America has had a history of populist movements..  Agrarian populism was quite widespread in the 19th century but it does not have to take only an agrarian form.  The Trump  phenomenon is an expression of populism.  A lot of Trump's support came from the industrial rustbelt.   And you can bet your bottom dollar that many of those gullible voters that voted for Trump in the expectation that he will radically overhaul the status quo will sooner or later realise they have been conned and will come to see him as part of the "establishment." Perhaps then another populist movement will arise, maybe with a more left wing agenda – some reincarnation of Bernie Sanders  perhaps?

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mcolome1 wrote:

 We have different perception about the working class movement, and I have mine and you have yours.   Before you tried to correct me in regard to Sterve, the so called researcher, and then,  you and others members of this forum were seeing the same things that I was seeing.

 Marcos,  I am simply saying that you cannot infer from the OP the kind of ideas you tribute to him/her. It may well be that he/she holds those ideas – I  dont know anymore than you do –  but you cant just assume this is the case

mcolome1 wrote:

I do not calli it populism, for me, populism does not exist, it was a Russian phenomenon that proclaimed that the leading class were the peasants, and that type of trend wrongly  existed within many organizations in Latin America too,   it was written in the works of Georgi Plekhanov, an ex-populist, and most populists became terrorists. The Bolsheviks opposed populism

 Well, this is how Wikipedia defines populism:Populism is a political ideology that holds that virtuous citizens are mistreated by a small circle of elites, who can be overthrown if the people recognize the danger and work together. Populism depicts elites as trampling on the rights, values, and voice of the legitimate people I  would say in the light of this defintion that populist sentiments are definitely on the rise.  Trump's whole campiagn hinged on the delusion that he was some kind of saviour of the people who  had beeen maltreated  and betrayed by the political establishment represented by the likes of Clinton.  And the people bought this crap  imagining that a billionaire buffoon was one of them intent upon overthrowing this political establishment. What is that if not populism?

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mcolome1 wrote:

You are trying to tell us that the  system of profits have been eliminated in England and the USA ?  Are you  trying to tell us that one individual  is able to stop or detain the continuation of the state and the interests of the ruling elite ?  Are you trying to tell us that one billionaire  leader is detached from his own econimical interests ?  Are you trying to tell us that one individual would be able to stop market which is the real causes of war ?  Didn't Obama continue the same policy of JFK, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush Sr and JR ?  Are you trying to tell us that the state is separated entity from the economical base of our society ?   I think that everything that I have learned in Political sciences, history, anthropology and economics is completely wrong. We should start all over again, or probably you are too naive

I don't think thats what User555net  is saying.  Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that he or she is saying is that this is what many people are thinking and feeling today. They feel betrayed by the political establishment.  Of course, we all know that they should never have put their trust in the politicians in the first place,  Just as we all know that Trump is going to betray them just as surely as his predecessors. Nevertheless, I think as description of the popular mood of the times its fairly accurate.  Populism is on the rise in many parts of the world.  Developments like Brexit and the election of Trump are part of a wider pattern,  This signifies something more than the usual change of government and its replacement by a more or less identical successor government.  I would use the analogy of the Kondratiev long wave cycle which can be superimposed on the normal ten year capitalist trade cycle.  Of course fundamentally its still capitalism but there has been a shift in the relationship between the political and economic realms, a change in the institutional  architecture of capitalism itself – possibly away from neoliberalism towards a more mercantilist world if Trump's words are to  be taken at face value

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

How long will it be before Trump back-tracks on all his policies and threats? 

Hasn't he already done so? Wasn't he threatening  beforehand  to bring criminal charges against Clinton  if he was elected.  His acceptance speech seems to suggest he has changed his mind on that score and now wants  to …er…"heal the divisions" that afflict Murrica. Pity. I was quite looking forward to Clinton being prosecuted.  I hope Corbyn sticks to his promise about putting Blair in the dock as a war criminal

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Well Alan I picked the winner on both occasions so perhaps I should really pursue a career in gambling I guess – although is it absolutely certain yet that Trump has won?As with Brexit what we are seeing here is the pus coming out after the boil has been lanced.  This is the legacy of years and years of institutionalized contempt and cynicism that the poltical establishment  has displayed towards the electorate.  There is a sort of change going on in the world which is a little deeper than the usual case of Tweedledum taking turns with Tweedledee in holding the reins of power.  A sort of threshold has been crossed.Where this take us I don't know.  But the way in which we socialists put across our ideas needs to accommodate this shift in the mood of the working class.  In a perverse kind of way the idea of President Trump is not the altogether depressing thought it would otherwise be

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jondwhite wrote:

If Trump wins, Democrats owe an apology to Berniehttp://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.htmlor should Bernie have run as a third party candidate?

 Too late for Bernie now.  He blotted his copy book by endorsing Clinton and, for many of his supporters, that was unforgivable. If Trump becomes President Trump, as is now looking likely. this will once again expose the folly of that tactic of voting for the lesser evil instead if sticking to your guns

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Capitalist Pig wrote:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/item/12431-illegal-aliens-a-drain-on-us-taxpayers-report-saysaccording to the CIS, 47 percent of illegals use welfare; 39 percent use food assistance and 35 percent use Medicaid.  remind me again how illegals are getting nothing and stregthening our economy? I'm not demonizing immigrants I just don't want someone to walk into our country, illegally vote in our elections, and collect goverment benefits that our veterans don't even recieve. Is that too much too ask for?

 CP.  Amerikkka is not your country in any meaningful possessive sense.  The workers "have no country" as the Communist Manifesto put it way back in 1848, "We cannot take from them what they have not got".  Why do you identify so strongly with the delusional abstraction you call your country? The nation state was an invention of capitalism and served the interests of capitalist class that required the intervention of a state in the affairs of society. Primitive accumulation that kickstarted capitalism would not have happened without the armed might of the state to enforce it.   Nationalism is just the the nationalisation of our sense of cultural identity in the interests of the capitalist class. But the capitalists themselves don't practice what they preach.  They invest their capital in whatever part of the world yields the greatest financial return.  They have no loyalty to their supposed motherland. Yet sheepishly you expect the workers display such loyalty. In era of capitalist globalisation nationalism is an irrelevance .  Its primary purpose is to sow divisions among the working class along so called national lines in order to more effectively rule over them.  If you identify with this thing you call your nation then ipso facto you ally yourself with the capitalist minority in this nation and oppose yourself to fellow members of your own class in other nations It is very sad to read a fellow worker extolling the virtues of this toxic abstraction called the nation state,  the identification with could conceivably reduce humanity to a pile of ashes through a nuclear war aided and abetted by the utterly stupid and misguided ideology that is nationalism.  By then it will be too late to discover that we have a common interest in opposing nationalism

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

.  I am suggesting and building a prototype of an alternative exchange system and a change to how goods and services are exchange.  Marx suggested an alternative exchange system too.  (by "exchange" i mean any trade or giving or voluntary sharing of time in which you will act as someone elses servant using whatever means and abilities you own.   When you're trading time, ownership of the property doesn't come into the question.  Property is not necessarily owned in a time value exchange system just like time is not necessarily owned in a capital goods exchange system.   it's not required for a time exchange economy to have private property, but it's not excluded either.  A time value exchange economy is ambivalent about the need for a property ownership. All that's required to make an exchange in a time value currency is that you have time you can offer or time you need from someone and that you or they have the means of working as agreed for that time.  It's vaguely related to the means of production since you can't trade an hours time running a corn planting tractor assembly without the ability to come up with a corn planint tractor assembly to spend your hour as promised.  But if nothing is owned and their's no private property then nothing much changes for a time valued market exchange. The time value market exchange system could keep functioning in a world without private property, but it can also function in a world with private property.  I think it would probably work better in a society without property, but that's one of the questions I'm here to research answers to.  

 Its a pity you did not heed my key point about what constitutes an "exchange economy".  Had you done so we could have all been spared this long rambling – not to say haughty –  lecture of yours which only succeeds in evading the point and in you tying yourself up in knots.  Once again, and for your benefit, what makes an exchange economy an exchange economy is the quid pro quality of the relationships that define it.  In other words, I give you something ONLY ON CONDITION that you give me back something in return.  Necessarily, this implies an exchange in ownership  titles to the things being exchange.  In other words it implies private property. I am NOT talking about "exchange" in the looser sense such as  when people "exchange" ideas over the internet. I am talking about a very specific narrow meaning of the term as applied to the field of economics.  You don't seem to understand this..  In the looser meaning of the term we can indeed talk about there a kind of exchange or reciprocity in a socialist or communist society.  The anthropologist term "generalised reciprocity" neatly sums up for me what a socialist society is all about. You freely invoke Marx but nowhere do you cite any source which makes me wonder how familiar you are with the subject anyway.  Allow me to quote from the Critique of the Gotha Programme where Marx says this: Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. Did you get that Steve? The producers do not exchange their products And so we come to your fanciful idea of a "time value market exchange system" which you try to reassure us " could keep functioning in a world without private property, but it can also function in a world with private property".  Really? So in this " time value market exchange system" if I offer to expend a certain amount of time doing something for you and you decline to reciprocate that means no "market exchange" will then take place – yes?  If not why call its a market exchange at all.  How can you separate the exchange of labour time from the aforementioned "exchange of products" which that this labour time served to create? Note the thoroughly bourgeois content of your whole argument.  Exchange  of time is perceived as a matter of purely self interested concern and confined to dyadic one-to-one exchanges between individuals..  There is no conception of the wider community in your vision which seems to have its roots ina mythical  petty commodity producing society To that end you debase the very meaning of words like market and exchange economy and reduce them to meaningless drivel .  You remind of the economists who glibly talk of the "natural capital" that Mother nature provides thereby universalising pr "naturalising" and  rendering timeless, the capitalist mode of production. If your "time value market exchange system" does not signify private property then why on earth give it such a ridiculous name? Socially necessary labour time is of course how value is constituted in capitalism.  It seems to me this is what you fanciful scheme boils down to – just another version of the same society in which time is bought and sold

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An example of what I m talking about which I have just literaly come across in the last 5 minutes .  In response to the question "why would anyone supprot capitalism?" this contributer writes,,,,, Ozgur Zeren, Author at ViaPopuli.comWritten Jan 3 #1 reason is because they don't know what Capitalism is.Just like how they don't know what Socialism, Communism, Democracy, Fascism etc are.They think that going to some store and choosing a product to buy, or their mother-in-law opening up a small shop, or them being able to quit their current job and take up another job somewhere else, is 'Capitalism'.Some even go as far to equalize it with 'Freedom', or * gasp * 'Democracy'.What is Democracy ? Communism ? Do you really know ? Capitalism is Halliburton. Capitalism is Exxon. Capitalism is Koch brothers being able to buy Congressional elections:Capitalism is an economic system in which there is no limit to the amount of wealth, therefore ownership of, and power over the economic and social life by a tiny minority in a society.It's a modified version of Feudalism, in which everyone is told "You can also become a small baron if you 'work hard". Except, no one gets rich by working hard.Working Hard? Thinking You will get Rich by Hard Work? Endless praise and retelling of stories of those who 'made it' from 'rags to riches' are repeated from the media, giving a false impression to the people who watch it.Another movie about Steve Jobs is coming, this summer. What they fail to say is that, for every Jobs that succeeded, there are hundreds of thousands of very talented, very well educated and sharp people who never make it to that level, with most not making it to any level but just working under those people who 'made it'.Then think about those who were just average people. Think how much chance these people have.And people like Jobs are an exception too – most of those who dominate the social and economic life of the society do not come from inventor, scientist or creative backgrounds, having created something greatly useful for the society – look at Mitt Romney. Dick Cheney. Even, Trump. They are the majority, not people like Jobs…And people arent aware that the concentrated ownership of wealth has massive effect on their lives. These stuff, these characters like Trump, Cheney etc seem like personas in a far away place, seen mostly on TV, and have some say in some far recesses of the socioeconomic life of their country.They are not aware that a few major Telecommunications companies like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast are currently in the process of suing the Federal government to force it  to acknowledge Internet backbone in USA, as their 'own property', which will give them the right to do anything with the internet traffic that passes through it. Which means that if they want to censor a site by charging them 'fees' to let that site 'access their subscribers', they have a right to do it. Which means private censorship, but hey – if Federal government loses the court case and the internet backbone -a strategically important infrastructure of an entire country – is declared the 'property' of those who own/leased it, then it will be their 'right' to do anything with their 'private property'.At that moment the websites, blogs, small businesses of all these people who were praising capitalism without knowing it, would face the actual capitalism – being subservient to the whims of the biggest property holder. It would be funny to see how would these people cope up with entire internet backbone being privatized as such, leaving no option for anyone who wants to access ~200 million people in US but to bow down to the terms of these top dogs, but, hopefully it will never come to pass."……I can only see capitalism being beneficial to satiate greed….."You are seeing it incorrectly: Not only greed can never be satiated, but also Capitalism rewards, encourages and enforces greed:Those who stop at nothing to maximize their profit, accumulate more wealth (capital), which allows them to wield more power in their economic environment. Those who stop at any morals, ethics, laws or regulations get left behind, and are bought out, competed out, or destroyed by those who don't. And in the eventual end you end up with a sociopath socioeconomic environment in which the most ruthless of the players dominate everyone and enforce their values…………Go to YouTube and see Milton Friedman screaming "I believe in Freedom", equating Capitalism with "Freedom" in panels, interviews and debates regarding the issue. As if there could be any freedom for one's mother in law and her small shop in a rural neighborhood in US with Walmart around.But true – its about freedom – its about the freedom of the exceedingly wealthy minority do do as they please with the economy and society. Not with the freedom of anyone else in that society.Private Tyranny.  People are not aware of this. They are unaware that their choices, freedom and whatsoever they think to exist in this system actually don't exist. They are limited by their money/wealth, and will never attain the amount to be truly free. They are unaware of this, because they don't even know that they don't know, as Noam Chomsky puts it.Hence, they subscribe to things they don't even know, mirroring narratives that are sold to everyone by those who perpetuate those things for their own benefit.Just look at the spectacular examples in other answers – people who can't properly define Communism are talking  about how it "just doesn't work", people who don't know a modicum of world history talk about how 'everything else having been tried', people who don't know about alternatives to capitalism call you to come up with alternatives.People don't know Capitalism. That's why they support it.843 Views · View Upvotes

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

 NO NO NO.  You foolish person.  who told you that nonsense and why do you believe it?  What exactly do you mean by "exchange" because I exchange air just by breathing?  And I exchange time with friends and with advertisers on TV and with you guys here on the forum.  So everytime two people get together, they are exchanging time with each other.  So when you say there will be no exchanges, it sounds like you're saying people won't talk to each ohter and won't exchange favors or gifts.  Is that what you're intending, or can you clarify what you mean by the quote? and if people are exchanging things they can cary or things they can say or time, then what do you call that instead of using the word "economy"?  Can I just replace the word "economy" with "Socialism" in my statements and make that work if you think an economy is the opposite of a socialism?  You're making up non-sequiters and passting them off as QED 

 Sigh.  You evidently dont understand what I'm driving at, Steve, or you are not familiar with the jargon or whatever.  When I say common ownership logically entails the demise of any kind of exchange economy, I am NOT talking about "exchange" in the trite sense that you allude to.- exchanging ideas,  breathing etc . I would have thought that was pretty obvious and I didnt need to spell it out. Its just a silly objection you are raising here. I am talking about an  exchange economy.  Do you understand what is meant by this?  It means goods and services in general are exchanged on a quid pro quo basis.  They are bought and sold because the  means of production are privately owned .  Common ownership thus logically precludes economic exchange whether this takes the form of money-based exchange  or barter.  You have been going  on about the need for a "unit of currency for collecting taxes that is hourly based" .  But "taxes" and "currency" are forms of exchange-based phenomena – meaning all you are really putting forward here is an alternative arrangement for administering a system of private property relationships. Thats not what socialism is about….

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For a slight variation on this theme of group sex, this might be of interest.  It seems that sex with other human species might have been the reason for Homo sapiens's success https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-with-other-human-species-might-have-been-a-secret-of-homo-sapiens-s-success/?WT.mc_id=SA_EVO_20161024

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