Is Capital Itself Bad?

Or is it just the people behind it that are detrimental to society in their pursuits of wealth?
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Yes it's "bad".
No, you can have the nicest people as CEO's yet they will still be forced to do as a CEO does.
Stupid question and a stupid thread.

You haven't explained why though.

Yes, the majority of problems are systematic and are not associated with individuals. That's what differentiates the anti-capitalist left from socdems and everything to their right.

read marx or pick up a fucking book. go to the reading list thread for a list.

A CEO that refuses to pursuit profit and the growth of his enterprise because it would mean doing bad things directly sees his self-interest, the interest of his enterprise and the common good suffer. Eventually his business would go under and be driven out by competition, and he would stop being a CEO.

Profit incentive prioritizes worthless paper currency over power, subsistence, and well-being.
dollars > a house, a job, and a place in society. This doesn't apply on an individual level, but in greater society, it does. It's nothing but cancer.

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That is the epitome of liberal thought.
"If nicer people [of my preferred identity] were in charge, Capitalism would be perfect"

Not only it isn't true, but all people are fairly decent and well meaning, and eat other people mostly because they themselves don't want to be eaten, rather than for some sadistic and malevolent intentions.

Yes, the tidal, non-personalized forces of capitalism create misery, not "bad people"

Capital is the fundamentally progressive force that acts to multiply society's labor output at a growing pace.
It's just that the process that it does that through kinda sucks.

That's valid and reasonable from your perspective. If that really is the case and Capital is a constant that leads to all these bad things happening, then what is the solution to creating a healthy and decent society?

It's liberals too, just replace the right-wing ought of "straight white christian males" with "genderqueer asexual females of an ethnic minority".

That identity does not have to be qualified on grounds of social attitudes to differences in biology and ancestry. It can simply be 'good citizens', 'working class citizens' (for an extra whiff of false meritocracy) and so on. The identity of the class-conscious proletariat is not merely qualified on the grounds of their togetherness and/or their common experiences, but their usage of that commonality between them for the sake of abolishing identities such as class distinctions as described within the Marxist tradition.

For the record, I treat 'identities' as being much broader than those which are commonly-attributed to 'identity politics'. In that sort of politics, the groups who are politically-distinguished through different identities act to preserve themselves even in an intersectional framework. A working-class identity politics cannot guarantee the freedom of the working class - instead, it may only abolish the present bourgeoisie while failing to abolish the trait of being proletarian - which by definition would necessitate a new bourgeoisie which claims to act in the interests of 'the working class'. Communists seek to smash such restrictive kinds of identity in their entirety.

I consider liberals to be right-wingers. You may be using American terminology, but even then many 'leftists' there are firmly on the side of capital.

The advocates of virtual capital are often profoundly uneconomic and abusive beings who drain and hollow the economy even at the expense of their own potential. They complain about the deactivation of the public even as they debase the currency and render desirable economic accomplishments ever harder to reach. They render unto the sorld the same arts for decade after decade while conplaining that they are bored. Indeed, they are very boring people, and were they always given their way vehicles today sould yet be slow, gaudy symbols.

Ahem. Unto the world, and complaining. Pardon my premature posting of draft material.

The so-called developed economies have grevious hidden poverties whereby people are no longer permitted to organize in large-scale for the achievement of ends not authorized by the unworthy, creatively sterile people who lead them today. We have become too primitive to dig deep mines and quarries, and almost too primitive to process metals; education is permitted only to willing slaves, who must thereafter dedicate their lives to apologizing for their sins of curiosity. It takes the resources of the nation to construct on the level that used to require only the resources of a community; it increasingly takes the resources of communities to construct on the level that used to require only the resources of an individual. This secular decline has brought with it grevious societal and even climactic challenges while being denied by voices of “progress” that have become transparently corrupted. A randomly chosen leadership would likely do better; the public’s growing awareness of this fact has brought with it authoritarian urgings that have been rightly denied yet also totally misunderstood.

Yes. Capital is M-C-M'. Clumps of value that move around and attach more value to themselves, from a strictly physical point of view seemingly constantly switching in and out of existence, growing in money terms. Even if all firms in the market society turned into worker-owned coops, the systematic logic of the system would remain: Obey the clump, feed the clump, or else…

Capitalism itself is flawed. Our argument is not that capitalists are evil humans (even if they may be), but that the system itself has flaws that are a feature, not a bug: Infinite growth in a finite world, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the exploitation of laborer's surplus, the dependency of the proletarian masses from the bourgeois elite, capitalism leading to monopolization of markets, capitalism putting profits before people, capitalism having no mechanisms to stop being environmentally destructive and so on.

Wow identity reductionism, class isn't an identity no matter how much you stretch the category, it's a relation to means of production, it's a fundamental part about how people reproduce their existence. You can loose an identity, and live, if you loose your relation to the means of production you die.

Identity in the social context is how you relate to a big other.

If you equate class with identity, then you assume a social context similar to theocratic feudalism, where the identity of king or lord was synonymous with the ability to gain surplus, and the big other was basically believe in a god that made kings.

good grief smashing identities ? this is magical thinking whereby changing language changes reality. Communists seek to change the material conditions.

Suppose you are a CEO who is really engaged with environmental issues and you shift completely to green energy at the expense of your own profits. You will quickly drop out of the market because of your competitors who keep maximizing profits. And if you were to give each and every laborer the full value of the product they created, you would drop out even quicker because that would be akin to not making any profits at all. It doesn't really matter how nice or morally admirable you are as a person; no one can escape the logic of capitalism.
Now that doesn't stop the fact that there are still plenty of exceptionally greedy people at the top simply because that is what wealth does to humans. But this is not the root of the problems.

This image showcases the absurdity of bureaucracy.

Read what I actually said.

Of course this is what Communists want, and that would result in the smashing of identities. Even without class-consciousness, if there are substantial changes in the conditions which we find ourselves in (in terms of the resources available and the social structures which exist), then our relationships and their movements change. We see the world quite differently, and locate any political struggles along the lines of the present order if we are not motivated to completely change that order itself, resulting in the construction of a new landscape on which one can string together various kinds of fragments of identities to create new ones even if fragments of the old ones are still plentiful. Communists identify the problem as being a long-term existence of any such landscape itself rather than merely the current landscape - the latter of which is the most that 'idpol' struggles ever set out to change. Landscapes of that sort always provide a possibility for conflict and the reemergence of competing political forces which may aim to subjugate others.

moralizing is idealistic and undialectical
there is no good and bad, only desirable and undesirable

this still bugs me, i don't think class consciousness is an identity either, you can gain class consciousness, like you gain knowledge or a perspective, you cannot be a class consciousness.

I have no clue what you mean with a landscape for identities.
I basically read this as
landscape=virtual-reality-game
identity=pockemon

In anycase i don't have one, of these. You are better off with universalism than particularism.

In any case i want a planed economy with labour vouchers, with some form of democracy over surplus, and a rapid transformation program for changing the energy sector to a sustainable foundation. How are textures of social fields related to this.

'Identities' as I discuss them are not the circumstances which give rise to ideologies which people use to attempt to locate their struggles. They are also not the ideologies, and they are not reducible to conscious articulations of ideology even though they involve those. They are simply the behaviours that people acquire and act out in light of such a conscious articulation. A man who is white is not automatically a 'white man', he must regard himself as belonging to that group in order to have that identity, but to act in accordance with what he sees as being what's expected of white men, he doesn't need to be conscious of his actions after that. He could alternatively regard himself as being an Asian woman in identity because he wouldn't see himself as fitting in with and performing the functions of 'white men' but 'Asian women' instead, (this is why even though it is easy to mock things like 'transraciality' and transgenderism as it is very difficult to justify within the current state of affairs, there is something radical about it - but it can only be taken towards that conclusion by wholly destroying the present landscape of identity, which means crushing the ruling order in its entirety to remove the need for consistent organisation along lines of identity in order to survive in a market-like society). A lot of these identity-based distinctions have some basis in actual circumstances, but again, at best they are reifications of the functions which these groups play unless we are talking about the Communist (negated) identity. As for being 'a class conscious', that's linguistic confusion, it would be better to call it 'being class conscious', since the property and functions of being class conscious are a key rallying point for the identity as far as the ideology (and not the concrete circumstances themselves) can be concerned.
Somewhat. The landscape of the social world is simply a collective term for all of the social circumstances which we face at a given point in history. The basic textures of this landscape are maintained unless there is successful revolutionary movement. Identity politics as we know it involves movement within this framework to make certain groups more successful in reaping benefits from and being made successful by the ruling order (in our case, capital) - it is like collecting moving different players in a game.without changing the game itself. The game itself sets the terms upon which people have to work to justify anything - from allocating hormonal treatments so that transgenders may transition quicker to issuing state-issued girlfriends for horny incels to cum into. It comes down to whether it will serve capital politically and economically.in the way that ensures capital's reproduction in an optimal fashion regardless of how much it actually frees people. Particular hegemonies try to demonstrate that they can manage capital in a better way so that it may be expanded or saved, and groups who rally around their shared identities may attempt to build their own hegemonies so that they can get a bigger slice of the pie. If they fail, they are left with crumbs and must viciously fight over those crumbs - this leads to explosive tribal conflicts. Those who do have hegemonies wish to enlarge their existing slices of the pie (think of the usual ethnic nationalists!) and they become militant about about it. 'Good citizens' of centrist liberalism are pitted against populist 'provocateurs' in the struggle for extra portions of capital. But all insist on keeping capital itself - the very rules of the game - besides Communists. They are therefore stuck creating blackmails for each other, and seeing nothing wrong with this since that is all that politics is reducible to as far as they're concerned. Identity politics in truth is much more common than 'radlibs versus nazis'. It is perhaps representative of internal disagreements within bourgeois politics as a whole.

There are 2 problems with this:
1. "A man who is white" has as assumption that races are real. Sorry but there is no science to back this assertion. I will consider everybody a crackpot on the level of a flat-earther. if you map the colloquial word "race" to the closest scientific terminology, you get sub-species. Your first part of the sentence reads like this "The homo-sapiens-white is not automatically a 'white man"

2.The white-man-identity is attached to pale skin and caucasion ethnic features, self-identification is not a relevant factor. Identities are reified through third party identification, ie how people talk about you behind your back. The delineation you are attempting create here by claiming that identities depend on self-identification only creates communication breakdown, and intensification of identitarian conflict. Every-time a feminist yells about "white males" in a twitter-spat with some white-identitarian, the people that do not wish to have an identity foisted upon them, are now forced to equivocate white-identitarians and feminists as both being racist.

Probably not, you'll unlikely be able to separate "women" from reproductive function and "Asian" from geographic location, you might play linguistic games where you end up with exchanging terminology, but not the dynamic. As far as breaking this down ,goes, consider how brutal biological language can be, where you might end up with something like gestation as rootword.

All the other identities got nouns, so no it don't buy that.

So why would i bother with all this, why would ever consider to using a bourgeois framework.

Okay, then one can say 'man who has an ancestry which involves people who are 'white''. There may be biological trends which help to illustrate this, but even if they do exist, they are caused by the mode of social organisation in the first place and the fact that these people happened to stay in a given set of areas and reproduced with their own sort rather than become more cosmopolitan. To put biology itself as the cause is to construct a just-so story, because nothing in biology itself actually makes us think in certain ways (no genes, no hormones, and no neurological processes can be said to actually cause people to think in terms of ideologies, which are systems of ethical and moral thought - for there would need to be an exploding infinity of possible combinations of any of those factors to explain the vast diversity of thoughts that people can have). However, I am not talking about the biology, I am instead talking about how people relate to their circumstances and place themselves what they imagine to be the struggle which they have to participate in - which includes understandings of that biology, regardless of however wrong and mystified those understandings are. Even those who are conscious of having very similar biological histories do not end up identifying as being part of the same struggles. When I said 'white man', I did not say 'white racist', i.e. that identifying as a 'white man' necessitates that one identifies as a 'white racist'. Are there not plenty of people who refer to themselves as 'white men' and also 'anti-racist'?
He might consciously talk about his features in that way, but he is interested in what he believes they mean - which, independently of his consciousness of this, corresponds to what groups it allows him to become a part of and how it allows him to survive and live while under capitalism. In short, it is little more than how he is able to service and be serviced by capital. His biological traits and his appearance do not matter by themselves as far as anyone could give a shit, but instead it is the ghosts which explode out of them which are made to matter. These ghosts are mystifications of their real relations and the reasons for their success, and again, a common theme is that they misrepresent the terms of the reproduction of their livelihoods under capital as being the general terms of their reproduction.
Identities are indeed reified by the actions of third parties, which make it ever-harder to escape and destroy the game of capitalism, but not exclusively-so - how is identity reducible to reacting to how people talk about a group of people when that group isn't there, or even the actions of other groups as a whole? A first party is also at least superficially complicit in this order even though they may or may not have much of a choice besides complying when it comes to surviving or living in a certain way. This complicity also applies independently of a group's understanding of why they're taking that identity in particular (their rationalisation). They can pull anything out of their behinds when justifying why they have identified themselves in the way in which they have, e.g. the pursuit of Worship, Liberty, Justice, Race, Peace and much more. It still justifies their participation in the game, and fighting for a large enough place within the dominant hegemonies so that they can reproduce their wet dream of a society is precisely what they want.

Why should this solely be a concern for those who don't want to be shoved into a stereotypical category? The white-identitarian is certainly racist because a core tenet of identitarianism is racial segregation, and the feminist would also be racist if they mean to say that those who have a white ethnic background (and in this case, happen to be 'male' by some qualification) as a whole are inherently counterrevolutionary owing to their politics or their biological and social history (and before you start, those who identify as 'white males' are not reducible to being a gang of racists - the struggles which each identify themselves as being in and also objectively pursue are entirely different). On a side note, the people who do not want an identity stamped upon them may identify as such, but unless they choose an identity of no identities (the Communist antithesis of identity) and practice this, they are not actually against having an identity stamped on them. They believe that they are doing it to themselves, but it is most likely that they got that sense of identity from somewhere else, and in reaction to the actions of others (whether they perceive those actions correctly or not).
You're describing objective things and practices, like giving birth and having an ancestry which is localised to a certain part of the world. They are points around which identities can be constructed, yes, but they are not the identities themselves. A transwoman, for example, was born with a male reproductive system but identifies as having the qualities of 'women' in some way, and this can relate to how she was socialised throughout her life, how she currently conducts herself and wishes to eventually conduct herself, the characteristics which she uses to distinguish 'men' from 'women' and so on. She can identify objective factors with which she can construct her identity, but none of these factors inherently justify her transition. What she should do next according to anyone at all is not guaranteed or ethically-necessitated by what she has been doing up until the present moment. Why transition and not be a femboy? The is-ought gap is not closed by referring to past and present circumstances alone. That is not to say that there is no valid justification for transitioning (it is the same with being a femboy!) but instead that there is no teleology to history in front of us; it can only be retrospective.
That is because when nouns are used to name things, the processes of being a given thing (i.e staying a certain way) are all summarised into a single term - once could call it a meta-monadic concept. Identities involve stasis at a certain level, but they are not wholly static. Again, they are the consciously-constructed notion of a place within a particular political struggle. In this case, I could swap 'being class conscious' with the word 'Breadpilled'. It's that easy.
Because this is the way of the world right now, and if we don't understand how it works, then we would have to be incredibly lucky to find a way to abolish it. Communism is not a movement which aims to be forever stuck at the fringes of the world, away from popular discourse. That is not to say that we must empathise with the reactionary filth which is sprayed around in such discourse at an alarming frequency or even make any kind of compromise with it in the long run. We need to show that accepting the field of identities as it is now will only lead to bloody conflicts as groups battle to the death for their supremacy in capitalism.

Nope you are still engaging in identity reductionism.

While you can break down all identities to class relations, this is not reversible. Because identities are not foundational, while class indisputably is foundational, quite simply because capitalism is commodifying everything.

I sort of get why you are trying to impose an identity (of no-identity, giggles) where there is none, but consider that once you have to short circuit your theoretical framework like that, you basically just have found the limit of the explanatory power of your framework.

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No, capital is not "bad".
What's bad is EXPLOITATION, and in order to obtain capital you must exploit workers.

$$$ is not bad, especially if you made it without exploiting others while sitting on your ass like a faggot just because you were born into a rich family.

"I inherited Daddys oil company and now i am a sitting member on the board of trustees making 100k a month doing nothing blah blah" is exploitation and bad.

"I own my own farm and me and my family pick the fruits and sell them in the market" is not bad.

"I work in a co-op and me and the other employees own a factory that produces X" is not bad.

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"I own starbucks and i pay my workers shit wages but get insane amounts of capital and profits that I use to open more starbucks and pay even shittier wages" is bad

its simple dude

This is what happens when you don't read.
Point me to where I said that identity is foundational when it comes to political struggle. Identity is about how people relate to the current world in their practice, but they are not fully conscious of the reality of their practice itself when they perform whatever actions they do. This practically-unconscious domain is where we find class relations, particularly as it concerns the proletariat, who do not in any way need to identify as proletarians to be proletarians. Even if they do call themselves proletarians and act as proletarians, in fact, they do not necessarily act as a unified class (one can identify as a proletarian but also be a scab), and even when they do, it is not necessarily with the Communist project in mind. Nevertheless, this business about me sidelining class in the analysis isn't as relevant as you are saying it is, since that is not what you are saying you are isolating within my text as the concern for your objection. You point to my words about the necessity of choosing an identity of no identities as evidence of me being an identity-reductionist. I did not say that the Communism is reducible to proletarians doing this. It is one of several requirements! Communism is a conscious project, and as such it requires that people settle upon some kind of identity at some level, even if it is not of the same sort as the identities which we are used to encountering and buying into in our world of bourgeois politics. Again, if you were bothered to put together the pieces of what I've been saying over and over again - that an identity is related to how we understand our footing in the world and what we should be doing alongside how we act in our practice; that Communism hinges upon consciousness of the world as part of its project of radical practical criticism and engineering of all that exists - this would be very fucking clear to you.
Stop ignoring what I've said:

Read the critique of the gotha program

half of my slaves are women i am progressive.

Capital on it's own isn't bad. Hell, it in of itself is critical in order to reach a higher stage of development within society. The main problem rests in how it has been and is accumulated within Capitalist society as a whole, (CEOs extracting it from workers and hoarding it for themselves to increase profits yada yada). Capital can be eventually used to benefit society as a whole when it is re-distributed to benefit the people as a whole.

checks out

As other people have pointed out, "capital" is a thing with multiple meanings even within marxist terminology, but that aside, what are you arguing he didn't read or understand about Marx?

They will always criticize and ridicule the tank until the enemy is at the gates

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This guy named carl wrote a great book on capital, he even named it "the capital"

Give it a once over OP

sjw fag

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You are an idealist retard who will probably be mulched in the coming years, maybe TV is a hobby more fitting for you.

God I hope so.

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You don't understand, you're the ones getting mulched and everyone else is surviving. The current situation is the one you describe.

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Okay I spent a minute deciphering this and all I'm going to say is that Christian internet is overly obtuse for a group committed to indoctrination, "God" is not real, morality doesn't exist, and nobody gives a shit about your parables. Those that have to be liquidated have to be liquidated, if we don't get rid of them we're all dead.

I just got mulched.

bureaucracy doesn't have anything to do with it, she got denied because it raises profits