the more i read about history the more convinced i become that ‘fascism’ (merger of economic and political power for bourgeois ends) is the default state of capitalism

If you’re rly interested I’d suggest reading Cope’s book, as he lays out the figures and even the movement of the money better than I can with more citations than I can. As you suggest, it’s about the aggregate motion of capital. Take your restaurant example:

The restaurant isn’t losing money so long as imperialism persists, because they’re selling e.g. burgers for inflated prices. The burgers can be sold for inflated prices because e.g. construction worker is paid inflated wages. Construction company can afford to pay inflated wages because it’s buying artificially cheap materials and because it’s being paid inflated fees by e.g. a bakery. Bakery can pay the inflated fees because it’s buying artificially cheap materials and because it’s selling e.g. cakes at inflated prices. The cakes can be sold for inflated prices because e.g. tech employees are paid inflated wages. Tech companies can afford to pay employees inflated wages because e.g. government buys new windows hardware at inflated prices. Government can afford those inflated prices because a. the global south governments pay them yearly debt repayments or b. because they tax superprofit made in the global south.

why do business hire anyone?

1. So they can sell shit to them 2. Because they still have things that need doing 3. Because trade unions fought for higher wages (cf. Emmanuel Unequal Exchange) for more detailed examination.

And if all business in the core are inherently unprofitable, what is the mechanism that keeps them afloat?

Cope argues superprofits from imperialism

I can’t say I’ve ever heard that definition of value of labor power.

It’s the definition Marx uses in Capital. The difference between value of labour power and the value of the products of labour is the source of surplus value. Marx himself invented the category of labour power; earlier economists thought that the employer buys labour.

Why would capitalists pay these workers as much as, or more than, the value of their labor?

First off so they can buy the commodities and avoid the horror of warehouses full of unsold goods. Second off because the trade unions won higher wages. Arghiri Emmamuel’s Unequal Exchange looks at how that came about over the the 1860-1920ish period, then intensified after ww2.

in other words, the capitalist is either not making money or is actively losing money by employing them.

This is exactly Cope’s point; businesses in the global north are not profitable unless kept aloft by the superprofits

Costs of living are actually lower in terms of percentage of wage in the imperial core, as I said in original comment (as as Cope shows with numbers both for wages, costs of necessities and hours of labour to earn necessities)

Cope has read all three vols of capital and cites and engages with them extensively fwiw. He is aware of Marxs arguements and in fact cites Marx extensively to support his arguments. I would suggest reading the Cope book bc, tbh, you could probably follow the maths better than I could. He takes all your points into account and directly refutes them (some of them even in the two prefaces). It felt like reading Marx, in terms of his thoroughness.

Becauase the prices of those commodities, produced in the global north, are generally kept high bc the wages paying the people doing are kept high. In addition, theres a lotta expensive equipment thats much more availible in the north than south, and anyone caught doing medical treatment below these high, expensive, standards (or without a license) is imprisoned.

Also bc, yknow, in socialist countries that welfare is actually a concern. But you’ll also note that AES puts a lot more emphasis on preventative care than expensive treatments, when possible, because unlike in capitalism the goal isnt to wring out as much money as possible.

I’d also note as this is the marxism comm, “healthcare” isnt rly included in “value of labour power”. Value of labour power is the value required to allow the proletariat to exist, not to exist healthily. If the proletariat, as a class, continues to exist i.e. can afford sufficient food and shelter to not literally die—that is what capital considers the minimum value of labour power.

The vast majority of the work done in the belly of the beast involves the destruction of that beast, not the enlargement of the consumer class making up the beast’s stomach. That doesn’t mean all the work; there are very oppressed people in the US and there are ways to help them (e.g. seizing empty properties to house homeless people, forcing cities to allow empty spaces to be used by homeless people and/or for community gardening) that don’t rely on more exploitation (e.g. “build more houses using cheap materials from the global south and high wage construction labour in the global north”).

That said i wanna re-emphasise the degree of international inequality in hellworld.

In Divided World Divided Class Zak Cope maintains that there’s no legally (illegally, yes, but if one is paid min wage and working legal hours, no) exploited workers in the global north. He is using the marxist definition of exploitation i.e. “being paid less than the value of the products of your labour”, so he isn’t arguing it doesn’t suck to work a min wage job, but he is arguing that anyone paid the legal minimum wage is paid over and above the value of the products of their labour (if they are even a productive labourer). Cope shows that this inflated wage is largely paid through superprofits and their various redistributions.

Cope shows the degree of the inflated nominal and real wages relative to the South, and he argues that the source of these living standards is redistributed superprofits from imperialism. He lays out his numbers, sources and methodology for his calculations fairly upfront, alongside more detailed statistics in his appendices. He concludes that the Global North extracted around 8 trillion dollars of surplus value from the South in 2008 alone, which re-appears in the North in various amenities, social services, cheap goods, and high wages (3.4 to 3.7 times higher (in terms of purchasing power) in the OECD countries). These wages ofc exist so the capitalists have someone to sell their products to so they can realize the surplus value and prevent crises of overaccumulation through ever increasing consumption–but without the superprofits the capitalists would not have any money to pay this consumer class; every single global north company with legally employed global north workers would go bankrupt.

Even as the majority of people’s wages, livelihoods, etc become more stressful and precarious in the North over the last 30 years of neoliberalism(I’ve heard this called structural reproletarianisation, book was written in 2013 so is slightly dated regarding specific numbers), Cope argues living standards have been increasing; in the late 90s food, electronics, clothes, etc were all cheaper than they were in the early 70s and all sorts of novel luxuries became increasingly prevelent even in poor households. At the same time, wages accross the global south were being slashed, social programmes destroyed, environmental regulations voided, governments toppled, food prices spiked, etc. Wages in the north stagnated and jobs became more precarious and often shittier, but cost of living fell and continued to fall basically until the crash we’re in rn afaik.

Cope maintains that while it sucks to be a worker in the US, Canada, etc, it sucks much much more in the global south and the relative unsuckiness of work in the North is paid for by superprofits in the global south. Increasing wages in the north or demanding more equal sharing of the superprofits from imperialism are both demands that reinforce the citizen’s privileged position wrt the international working class.

That said, Cope doesn’t make the point that people in the north are to blame, or responsible for things (he is a marxist, not a moralist). His point is, that, much like the petite bourgeois as a class have property to reinforce, the citizens of the global north have a property (their entitlement to welfare, “safety”, cheap goods, political rights) that they don’t want taken away, which Cope argues is a key reason why, like the petite bourgeois, we often see the citizen working class of the global north turn towards fascism.

Carrying on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping

the gospel of mark (haven’t gotten around to reading the others yet) gives me a lot of impressions of a jewish proto-nationalist struggle against rome, but then mystified and distorted by 1. people from outside the context misinterpreting stuff and 2. the empire itself adopting and coopting the movement (or the movement selling out)

There’s a neat sorta process of

“jesus inspired to preach (which, in historical context is equivilant to agitation)”

“jesus starts preaching literally about the corruption of judean society and the temple”

“jesus gets his ass beat by locals for telling them they’re sinful”

“jesus starts preaching in parables so he doesn’t get his ass beat”

“jesus builds movement and explains things literally to the apostles, but continues parableing in his preaching”

“jesus does mutual aid, healing people of physical and mental ailments (not curing imo, but alleviating symptoms (psychologically or literally with oil))”

“jesus confronts the demon legion (which is many)”

“jesus goes to jerusalem, intending to agitate more and die as a matyr to incite rebellion”

“jesus’s followers abandon him and it all falls apart”

30 year break until the actual attempted revolution

“some guy remembers jesus’s ideas (sees visions) and thinks “the rebellion would work if the whole roman empire rose up instead of just judea””

“starts spreading faith to non-jews”

which leads varying religious/cultural ideas being taken literally, misinterpreted and morphed until apocalypse means “the literal end of existence” instead of “the collapse of the existing social order” and jesus is turned into literally god, when in all likelihood he was preaching more or less what isiah or jeremiah did

Jesus also gives instructions for agitation:

8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.

9 Wear sandals but not an extra shirt.

10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town.

11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

12 They went out and preached that people should repent.

13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

also hilarious how even the people more sympathetic to de-growth on here imagine it as a world where you just get a new smartphone every 5 years instead of every year

often using the same works.

This is pedantic maybe, but I wanna mention there are actually Marx-works available today that weren’t 20 years ago, and 20 years ago there were works available that weren’t 40 years ago etc. Marx wrote a lot, and its still not all transcribed into print, much less translated from Marx-language into German.

Saito absolutely a GOAT (for an academic. I’ll put my issues with saito at the end of this post). Shitstain who wrote this article has barely read Saito’s work, because if he did he would 1. realise that actually Saito does directly address modern fertiliser and several other things the article brings up 2. Saito’s proofs for Marx’s changes are far more conclusive than a letter and some excerpts. It actually hinge more on Saito’s discussion of the differences between all the different manuscript varients of Capital, and his reading of the critique of the gotha programme.

Thing that pisses me off the most is actually the complete distortion of marxism the fool writing the article (others have given his name in other comments; i am genuinely too spiteful to remember it. Leigh-something i think). Firstly and most infuriatingly, the fucker editorialises critique of the gotha programme to make it agree with his machine fetishist nonsense. Article-writer cites the conditions for ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ as simply “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly” The full list of preconditions is as follows:

“after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”

I.e. the distinction between physical and mental labour needs to be abolished, labour needs to be the thing people want to do. Anyone who’s read ch15 of capital knows machine work is not something people want to do. In Capital, Marx is actually very critical of complete automation of everything. Marx’s solution to the drudgery of machinework is to distribute it more equally and reduce the amount of work (in the sense of alienated, uninteresting labour) done altogether, not to make more shit using more machines. If the author of the article had even read the editorialised quotation they published, they’d notice Marx demands not just the increase of productive forces, but also the “all-around development of the individual” which Marx repeatedly asserts is incompatible with division of labour in the workshop or the mindnumbing repitition of machine labour for someones entire life.

All this said, while I think Saito has a better grasp on Marx’s analysis of capitalist production than the article-writer will ever have, Saito’s more practical politics are horribly academic-radlib. I don’t trust the article-writer to represent Saito’s most recent book accurately, as he fails to do so regarding either of Saito’s earlier works, but the sorta urban solarpunk imperial core stuff described wouldn’t shock me much from him, and it is true that Saito does the ritualistic academic-radlib ‘marxist’ denunciation of Stalin.

Karl Marx fanclub. We will dig him up and make Marx bathwater