(Part 2) Top products from r/ShitLiberalsSay

> I prefer to think of him as channeling some of the Marxists from the 1970s.

>So let me explain what I mean by this. It's individually rational for any firm to, for example, move jobs abroad. Because if you do, you make more money. That creates a competitive dynamic where every other firm does it, and collectively what's individually rational becomes collectively disastrous.

>The last time capitalism got into trouble in the 1970s, a bunch of Marxist theorists started to think about capitalism in this way. And if you think about the border tax arrangements that possibly are coming through, it is essentially trying to, in some sense, solve that collective action for capital.

He's making the trivial point that conflict theorists from the Marxian tradition made during the stagflation crisis that there are crises of accumulation and conflict between labor and capital that can only be solved by the state as an agent. He's referring to people like Robert Rowthorn, Geoffrey Harcourt, Joan Robinson, Nikolas Kaldor & other people centered around the Cambridge School in the UK, namely post-Keynesians and neo-Ricardians who draw upon the Marxian tradition inaugurated by people like Rosa Luxembourg, V. Lenin, N. Bukharin, Rudolf Hilferding and then moving up through Michael Kalecki and JM Keynes. The falling law of profit calls for financialization, militarization, monopoly and imperialism, themselves forms of state action on behalf of capital, intimated within Marx & Engels, when they discuss the joint stock company as a form of socialism within capitalism and the role of new markets, innovation and monopoly.


Basically, it implies that Keynesianism and corporatism are themselves the theories of a state captured by the capitalist class to coordinate their interests in the face of a falling law of profit.

Trump is a classic corporatist and a form of rentier Keynesian; hence his focus on patronage crony infrastructure plans with massive tax cuts accompanied by protectionism; he's operating on the theory that with the right inducements of carrots and sticks, the corporate class can act better in their collective interest through the mediator of the state, revitalizing their rate of profits and accumulation, while furthermore buying of a certain segment of the labor class, white, male laborers involved in primary products and manufactures, reducing their conflict with the capitalist class at the expense of those left out. It is a theory of social conflict & capital accumulation rolled up into one. Rowthorn, himself, joked that Monetarism was just Marxism but with the signs reversed, as though the capitalist class read Marx and realized his insights could be used to preserve the capitalist class against the worker. There is some truth to this. Monetarism focusses on reducing the power of unions & increasing the rate of profit, though Trump combines this further with corporatism.

It is perhaps over simplifying the intellectual tradition and attributes too much intelligence and insight to Trump, but as a rentier, extractive capitalist, he probably has an intuitive idea about extracting the public good and using the state on behalf of corporations.

Blyth is a legitimate economic historian and historian of economic ideas.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BasicIncome/comments/5cymfw/mark_blyth_on_ubi_and_a_postwork_world/

(Mark Blyth talks about the sufficient surplus which exists to provide for the whole world)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth_global_trumpism_and_the_revolt_against_the_creditor_class.html

(Blyth reinforcing my points above)

https://www.amazon.com/Austerity-History-Dangerous-Mark-Blyth/dp/019982830X

(Blyth on austerity)

Yes. 'Murica has worked hard over the last century to demonize socialism in all of its forms. One of the more recent books I read about it was One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse. He also had a good interview on NPR about it.

There's actually a lot of theoretical work in evolutionary biology that can be couched in terms of dialectical materialism, whether explicitly or tacitly. If you find this sort of stuff interesting, I definitely recommend those two books at least for starters.

How about the natives, and afrikans fighting against their genocide and enslavement?

I haven't read it yet, but it I've heard it covers this topic well:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

Gar Alpervitz revealed the true reason for the bombs imo.

read the description of it here

There's a whole book!

/u/Jayk is correct here because of this. Sam Harris tried to address this problem in "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values", but he didn't really overcome the problem. Others have tried as well, but it still comes back to science being unable to actually determining anything other than how to achieve a goal, rather than opposed to which goals to achieve in the first place.

Idk about all that god talk, though...

To be fair, communists do ignore bourgeois ethics; in which the fundamental and paramount principle is sacredness of the right to privately appropriate socially produced wealth. Fuck that shit.

Alternatives to bourgeois ethics for anyone who is interested:

• Their Morals and Ours
  
  
• Humanism and Socialism

my book on mexican slang says that while cabron is relatively tame in mexico, it is a grave insult in cuba and some other countries and means that you have cuckolded him. additionally, they say that in brazil it means handsom or foxy.

they go on to say that it literally means a big goat, but is used in the way that americans say asshole. un cabron de siete suelas (a seven-soled cabron) is a "24 carat" asshole. in mexico, cabronear means to be cuckolded knowingly, and cabronismo is to prostitute one's own wife.

I don't think he did. The only place I can find this quote is in the summary of this terrible book.

You could try The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings. It gives a good introduction into the conflict and is very critical of the USA's role and behaviour in the war. Or you could try his "Origins of the Korean War". I've heard good things about those two volumes but haven't read them myself.

Hey on that topic here's a book about how slavery is the foundation of American capitalism that I've been reading: https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/046500296X