lost&outofcontrol

Paying me more to do something I hate won't make me like it any better. How's that?

Do you not see the difference of position between France and Israel? France affirms that it will retaliate to any attacks against French interest. Israel is threatening a preemptive attack. What constitute preemptive? Is it Pearl Harbour style, Caroline affair of 1837, or Osirak reactor?

Due to completely external causes, the worker gets higher compensation to accept alienating work. At no point does the increase in compensation remove this alienation. I never become happier doing what I do just because I get paid more to do it. I merely compensate for this alienation by purchasing more of my alienated product.

To be honest I was hoping people would come to the opposite conclusion. Capitalism is the new religion then. Why do we have science again?

I'm still confused. Ahmadinejad words are incorrectly translated to indicate that Israel's existence is threatened. In response, Israel threatens to nuke Iran in a preemptive attack. You believe that Israel's actions are justified because president Jacques Chirac warned Iran* not to sponsor terrorist "attack against French interests" thereby validating Israel's course of action? A bundle of fun logic aren't you... In actuality Chirac did not specifically mention Iran, he said "any country". Quotations are taken from this news story

I meant unionized - my mistake. You are basically blaming capitalism in general. Of course blame has to go "around". We are all part of the production and consumption process that is capitalism and yet let market forces act as our Gods? It's like we walk on our heads.

I missed this reply earlier. Has France nuked Iran recently and I missed it in the news? I'm confused...

This never happens in the private sector. And you don't see anything wrong with that? Did you jump over the part about corporations divine rights and powers to rule over us as fictional entities. Does GM create jobs? If it does I would love to talk to him/her.

Where did he say this? The use of imagination to support ones opinion(s) is thankfully not an accepted method of analysis...

Ahmadinejad has never threatened Israel's existence.

Can't someone else do it? If you can't be bothered to participate [gain practical knowledge] in a solution then why pass judgment? Production to meet actual needs instead of corporations’ is everyone’s problem. Their [workers] cause is your cause. To blame "lazy" workers for the sorry state of General Motors or any other corporation is shortsighted. Should workers stop demanding better work condition or better wages? I have to say it is a good thing we are creatures of necessity else we would still be living in the stone age. Seems as tough you need God in one form or another to live your life. Whether it is God, General Motors or market forces, we still bow down before our own creations. Pity

You equate the products conceived to create artificial wants in an effort to justify the parasitic existence of these Godly corporations with the fulfillment of actually (human) needs. How about working out in a corporative manner with the actual assembly line workers a plan to build a vehicle that people actually need? Of course you can always wait for the General Motors God to build one and hope that it is the one actually needed...

Please compare the cost of living to see how much more of that $20/hr you get to keep in the end. Who are these mythical corporations with godly powers? I would like to meet with one if at all possible, I have a few grievances. I picture General Motors as some old coot à-la Howard Hughes. I bet Miss Wall-Mart is the female equivalent of Mr. Burns. Having power over us mere mortal beings, the abilities of corporations as non beings (fictional entities) are stunning. Bow down to the new Gods! I guess eating a shit sandwich is better than not eating at all then; it is eating after all.

Exactly, who the hell do these workers think they are?! Right now, the important thing is for GM, a fictional entity with more rights than real person survives this tough period. These lazy workers don't deserve the stratospheric wages while the poor shareholders gets screwed. Long live the parasites! Workers should realize that they are mere tools and should be treated as such. They have no right to demand better wages and job security. How dare they! It's not the workers who produces objects to satisfy our natural needs, it's the corporations. Amazing how people defend corporations on this forum. You are all capitalists yet you are more than happy to criticize unions and workers when they demand better wages?! I guess market forces prevail only when its to the advantage of the capitalist. By the way, if you think assembly line workers have it made, you should probably read Ben Hamper’s Rivethead. Assembly line workers are expected to work 57 of every 60 seconds. Try it for a few minutes to see how fun it is. The American Working Class Link Ignorance is bliss Remember two things... They just built a HUGE paint shop there, AND that truck plant was rated #1 in NA. Reach for the stars...

and the credit crunch. [warning, funny Beavis and Butthead clip on youtube]

My reply to your thread hijack. Don't confuse the particular for the whole August. Outsourced workers usually end up working lower paying jobs which reduces their quality of life. More workers thrown into the unemployment pool places downward pressure on wages (The worker with the a certain level of production = y use to be command x money and now only commands <x for the same y level of production). Your entire house of cards rests on the assumptions that new jobs created by new technology or progress will replaced the previously high paying jobs. When we look at wage levels historically we see that at the very best wages have remained stagnant for the past 60 years (this does not include many factors such as higher taxes) leading me and hopefully yourself (as it is quite obvious) that at best, job creation has barely kept up in maintain the quality of life for workers (if you knew anything about Marxian economics you would see that we've had the explanation for the last 140 years for this phenomena). Progress appears to be dialectical in nature (society in opposition to the individuals interests who make up society). On the whole, new job creation barely keeps up with the downward pressure on wages. Outsourcing is but one byproduct of this progress. To the individual being outsourced i.e., progress is something alien which at the most abstract level benefits society and more concretely benefits employers of labour. The markets should not become all powerful gods, let's all remember that humanity bears the brunt of "market fluctuations". To end the thread hijacking we can move our discussion elsewhere. But please August, do not assume things when replying to my posts - it makes you look simple.

Bingo! We should mechanize (automate) every job there is. Just imagine the profits* when employers don't have to pay wages. Oh wait, everybody will be out of a job and won't be able to pay for anything. [*Yes I know I am ignoring the law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit.] Come on, you cannot be that thick can you?! The fear of abuse is what forced them NOT to give 48h notice. It had nothing to do with the strike. This ignores the added cost of traffic jams, increased road wear, the higher rate of accidents, the diversion of resources from the police and rescues services, the environmental impact, and increased fuel consumption. All caused by the added traffic of simple minded folks who cannot see past their noses like you. Good thing not everyone is like you. As a society is that what we want? A bunch of kids who don't know any better. Entrust them with the lives of how many people? To reduce the turnover rate you have to offer people careers (look at call centers to see what happens when you have a bunch of kids getting paid $10/hr - industry wide average turnover rate of 40%). You want mature people with experience driving a bus filled with 50 people. People cannot pinned this strike on the evil unions, the workers voted against ratifying the deal reached between the union leaders and the government. The vote by the workers represents a real feeling of dissatisfaction on the part of the workers. One cannot dismiss their point of view as if it were nothing. This of course ignores the greater problem of people like Oleg and Co. who wish to reduce all work to subsistence level (except your own jobs of course). Make everything cheap by turning everyone into monkeys who can be bought off with "Tim Hortons" coupons - once people don't make enough to live on we'll deal with it right? We are all individuals blindly moving about...

I don't know if you noticed but your entire argument is a prisoner of market logic.

What other nice people does McCain know?

I agree that people on welfare are part of the market. My point about the circuit of capital is that we have to start from the concrete reality of human needs (production/commodity) and not of market driven needs (money/abstract people). I realize that we appear to be far from the original subject of the current financial crisis. My point of contention is that if we try to understand it (financial crisis) from a market perspective (abstract things, market driven needs and not real human needs) we will not be able to grasp the essence of the problem and end up reproducing it (like august's point about being scared of death driving the current volatility). My original point was in part this: the destruction of the labour movement in the 1970's reduced the cost of labour which led to unbridled (I can't find the quote from Alan Greenspan) expansion on the back of debt which became the main driving force in the creation of profit (surplus-value) after the 70's. This (in part) led to the current credit crunch.

Screw people, market = God (by conveniently forgetting the fact that markets i.e. value, are nothing more than though in consciousness). Need to live is a real need. Whether I'm part of the market through welfare or by being able to pay for my needs is irrelevant to real needs. The production circuit should not be Money (Market) -> Goods (People) -> Money (Market) but Goods (P) -> Money(M) -> Goods(P); production to meet actual real needs outside of a narrowly defined "market". The basis of your analysis are abstract market driven needs (need to create value).

The mayor of Ottawa has been charged with bribing a fellow candidate. He's reneged on just about every campaign promise he made and we might end up with the biggest tax increase in the city's history after O'Brien campaigned on a platform of "zero means zero."

So we've establish that from your point of view production is not meant for actual human needs but for market needs. The basis or goal of production is to meet market needs then. You've abstracted real living people instead of starting from them(the kind that have to eat/think/etc to live). In other words your definition of people from the point of view of your economy is someone that can afford goods (that can participate in markets). This is the main issue with most bourgeois economist. They start from the markets to analyze the economy and in the process they define the various parts of this economy (machinery, people) not as real things existing outside the markets. Goods being produce for money instead of human needs. If nintendo was a real person he or she would be rocking it!

Good for nintendo? If I'm dying of thirst, is it wishful wanting to want water and not be able to pay for it?

When Bill Gates buys a better private jet it is somehow a good thing for me? This is why I limited my examples to things (cars, televisions, consumer goods in general) that I can own. Of course technology advances are (can be) good things (including medical equipment and similar things) but they are always implemented within capitalism for the good of capital (lowering of variable capital) in general and not humanity (mechanization, efficiency, and the resulting loss jobs, i.e. variable capital). The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things (take the fanciful story of the farmer having to dump milk for lack of market). I mostly agree with you on this point. The keynesian cross is a desired total spending curve. No matter how much an economy can produce it is wholly dependent on the desired total spending of consumers, i.e. the demand side within markets. The farmer should not produce beyond what the market can bear because a certain amount of his production will go to waste. Screw people who can't pay for it... This point strikes at the heart of the problem. Production is organized on the basis of market demand and not human (real living people) demand. I guess it comes down to what is more important. Profit level have been of marxist analysis of economics since 1883 (at the very least). The empirically observable fact of the declining rate of profit proves that Marx was right when he said (paraphrasing): Every capitalist works to reduce the wages bill, and turn over as much material as he can, investing in expensive machinery and increasing constant capital © to cut labour costs (variable capital(v)); this produces a general increase in the “organic composition of capital” ( c/v). However, since it is only the variable capital that produces profit, the result is a falling rate of profit. If we eliminate manufacturing from the graph I provided, the profit level ends up being is much lower (from the graphs that I've seen anyway - hopefully someone has a better source than I do). We should probably limit our discussion on the service sector (dualism between mental and physical labour...) so that the discussion on the current financial crisis can continue. I'm not trying to insult you white doors. I think that we both have a differing point of departure on the organization of labour as a whole. You appear to be starting out from Markets in general, abstracting people in the process. I (try to) start out my analysis from actual people (goods produced by people for people).