skunk

I didn't mean to be curt with my other reply I hope it didn't come across that way, I just don't know what you mean by most of your questions. So I will answer as best as I understand them

first of all, labor seems to be the constant in your worldview that everything revolves around. do you believe (or think that it’s possible / desirable) that we will eventually have a fully automated luxury society?

The process by which we produce the things that keep us alive, how we work, define how we relate to one another and how society is structured. The relation between slave and slavemaster, serf and lord, employee and employer are fundamentally different and shape all of society. Society at it's core is defined by it's mode of production. In that sense "labor" is indeed what my worldview revolves around, but I wouldn't say it's a constant. How we labor and what we do constantly changes. Whether we will eventually have a "fully automated luxury society", I don't know. Luxury is having a very comfortable life (relative to others) and what we consider comfortable and how we enjoy things is again defined by society around us so I'd say no, or it depends on what you compare luxury with since it's a relative term. We already live in a luxury society compared to even 100 years ago. Even once we are able to do it without oppressing the global south I don't think our quality of life would significantly diminish. The reason we don't consider having comfortable transportation, (theoretically) good healthcare, the sheer wealth of information we can access in instant with a rectangle we carry around or our multi-roomed homes with running hot water, a fridge, washing machine and dishwasher a luxury is because everyone has them. To the average laborer from 100 years ago however these things would surely look like a "fully automated luxury society".

Fully automated is also too nebulous a term for me, presumably we will still cook our own food, raise our own kids what I would consider inevitable is how we relate to our labor and how we perceive it. For instance people might do gardening where they raise crops as a fun neighborhood activity, where everyone is welcome to pluck the crop as they need or wish. This is for instance very common in Viet Nam. Farming communes were already wide-spread before sanctions and capital reimposing itself on society forced them to introduce companies again.

secondly, it seems to me that the point that “bourgeoisie” doesn’t work is a big problem to you.

It's not so much that the bourgeoisie doesn't work. It's that they are parasitic on others labor. They take without consent. That's my main issue. "From each according to their ability..." is not a call to have make everyone work as much as possible but rather a call to share what we can.

thirdly, it seems to me that you’re defining ~~communism~~ socialism as essentially our current society, just that CEOs don’t get huge bonuses and shareholders don’t skim company profit. so, in other words, our current world minus the stock market: every company has to emit zero profit (such that no shareholders gain from it) and all the money must instead be spent on the business itself: wages to workers and resource acquirements.

Absolutely not, communism is a classless society, socialism is the intermittent period. Shareholders or other forms of passive income are antithetical to that.

no, I'm a marxist and leninist, not a social democrat

Sorry maybe I overreacted, it just felt condescending, no hard feelings I hope

ahem I know about e^-x^ and convergence thanks, I had some math in high school too.

I don't know what it means for the tendency of the rate of profit to be negative (or positive, or 0 for that matter). It's not a number. If you're talking about the rate of profit of course that can go negative. I think what you mean is that it will be balanced out, but not as high as it was before. Here is how its explained in Wage labour and capital, emphasis mine

We have just seen how the fluctuation of supply and demand always bring the price of a commodity back to its cost of production. The actual price of a commodity, indeed, stands always above or below the cost of production; but the rise and fall reciprocally balance each other, so that, within a certain period of time, if the ebbs and flows of the industry are reckoned up together, the commodities will be exchanged for one another in accordance with their cost of production. Their price is thus determined by their cost of production.

If you want to illustrate this movement a function like cos(x)/x would be more prudent. Here is 10*cos(x)/x to make it "pop" more:

Remember that convergence doesn't necessarily mean monotone convergence, and you'll be hard pressed to find a monotone graph in economics 😄 Here is a more illustrive graph for TRPF

You also say that "companies continue to produce stuff as long as the profit is larger than zero, which it always stays" which is absolutely false! A companies profit absolutely can be zero, or even negative! Remember profit = m - m', where m' is the money you have after selling the commodity. Or in more plain words, if you have less money after selling than before producing you made negative profit. If you didn't get your investment back, you didn't make profit.

done

Nature compells us to work for food anyway, that’s not exploitation and coercion, that’s just survival.

Not all of us ahem bourgeoisie ahem

The construct of society is predicated on the idea of “from each… to each…”

of course, however what makes a societies differ is exactly what gets filled in to the "..."

"from each slave to each slavemaster" -> slavery
"from each serf to each lord" -> feudalism
"from each worker to each owner" -> capitalism
"from each person (according to their ability) to each person (according to their need)" -> socialism 😄

This is not how communism works, how any socialist society operates, I'm sorry but you've completely fallen for the propaganda and are living outside of reality.

The fact that "Buying and selling with a currency" is not capitalism is also very clear from the fact that we were buying and selling with a currency under feudalism, under slavery, currency predates capitalism by millenia.

Ok so unprofitable businesses keep going bankrupt, get gobbled up by a bigger corporation until one corporation has a monopoly. That's the trend we're seeing right? How many corporations for food are there left now? Nestle, Unilever, Coca Cola, Mondelez and that's pretty much it right? Well what happens when the tendency of the rate of the profit to fall forces them to no longer produce food. Do we just go extinct?

This (in case of the "butter mountains" and in general) isn't some politicians deciding which companies to keep, this is the state intervening to save itself. They have to prop up an entire industry that cannot reduce costs any further which means that the price keeps fluctuating around 0 profit which means the entire industry goes extinct. That's why there is a fixed price on milk, not to save some companies, but to prop up the entire industry. Capitalism will devolve sooner or later into state planning since without this state intervention industries start collapsing.

Could you imagine the ramification of the entire dairy industry dying out? (😸) The economy would go haywire, entire villages depend on their dairy farming, they would revolt it would be pandemonium. This is where capitalism finally leads.

oh ew I scrolled down never scroll down on twitter (transphobia)

The medal is very cool though love the medal

no that's biblical https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/die_H%C3%A4nde_in_Unschuld_waschen look at "Herkunft"

If the person doesn't want to work how will they sustain themselves? They have to rely on other peoples labor without contributing their own. If people don't want to subsidize someone else then that person would either have to start working "against their will" or take other peoples labor without consent, which you have already pointed out, is not vegan. So if everyone were vegan that person would be compelled to work as they are able in order to be able to remain vegan.

Idk its kinda tortured logic when spelling it all out lol

not necessarily, very abridged version:

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall will soon mean that an industry will stop producing said commodity. It can't anymore if it's unprofitable. This is where the state has to step in and start subsidizing that industry or buying the commodity themself in order to articially inflate demand in order to keep that industry afloat. See e.g. the "butter mountains" of the EU.

That wikipedia article on "The tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is a horrible introduction btw. If you want to know more you can read "Arbeitslohn und Kapital"/"Wage labour and capital" by Marx himself, much more digestible. And rather short.