Has anybody already started a business where signing the contract literally enslaves you?

I could have sworn that it was only a few months ago when I saw an advertisement for Modern Warfare II in a pizzeria. Did they seriously spend only a few months making this?

Wait, what’s this in the comment section?

MW3 the $80 DLC which there was alot of evidence of it being DLC

Ah, that explains it!

I kind of wish that the designers explored the World War II setting more instead of a heavily fictionalized modern setting. Maybe I’m overgeneralizing here, but it feels like a lot of WWII titles approach the setting in a very formulaic way: the Allies consist of the Yankees, Brits, and Soviets whereas the Axis consists of the Germans and that’s it; only rarely do any other powers appear, and paramilitaries are even rarer. Several years ago I once griped about how there are no video games where the Italian Fascists are the main antagonists.

The only recent WWII title that’s impressed me is The Light in the Darkness, which is unique because it tells the (Jewish) civilians’ side of the story. Unless there’s something that I overlooked, everything else looks pretty generic.

since 1939

???

Answer:

1. ‘Prior to 1925, [Korean] public works offices within city and regional governments carried out their construction projects by contracting out to sub‐contractors. […] The more complex the division of labor and the network of primary and secondary sub‐contractors, the more the real wages fell below the nominal wage.’ — Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan
2. Standard of living means the accessibility to goods and services that promote a healthier, happier life. Due to technology and some concessions to the lower classes, such as social security and the rarity of child labor, I’d say that overall there has been some increase in the standard of living for those of us in Imperial America.
3. Fewer hours reduces profits for the capitalists, whereas more hours increases profits for them. ‘Koreans […] did not work in capital‐intensive, large‐scale factories, but rather in labor‐intensive, small‐ and medium‐sized factories (chūshō kigyō) that employed fewer than 30 workers, and often in factories with fewer than 10 workers (reisai kigyō). These factories had little capital to invest in advanced technology; profits therefore stemmed from the workers’ long working hours and cheap wages.’ — Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan
4. Yes, and so is the inequality between white and black proletarians.
5. Profits come from selling more and more crap while giving the workers less and less. For example, ‘[i]n May 1940 the ghetto governor Hans Biebow ordered that factories be set up, where the workers would be paid soup and bread. The Lódz ghetto turned a profit of about 350 million Reichsmarks ($140 million). It made so much money for the [Fascists] that it survived the longest of the ghettos under [Fascism], for even the [Fascists] were sometimes prepared to defer mass extermination of Jews as long as it remained profitable.’ — Adam LeBor, Schicklgruber’s Secret Bankers
6. See the introduction of the Krupp–Renn process in the Empire of Japan. ‘Sometime before the autumn of 1938, [Krupp] sent Voss, a chief engineer, to Chongjin, and his job was to guide facilities construction and the start of operations. He was followed by two fitters and one kiln foreman, whose job was to give guidance regarding the start of operations and the handling of equipment thereafter.³⁴ Separately, Remag, a German subsidiary of Österreichische Magnesitwerke, sent one bricklayer.³⁵ Remuneration for the fitters was based on a rate written into the technology introduction contract and was paid in accordance with the number of hours worked, while the wage for the kiln foreman was fixed at a daily rate of 4 pounds sterling (about 70 yen).’ — Kudō Akira, Japanese–German Business Relations
7. Labor‐intensive industries favor the use of manual or ‘blue collar’ workers, whereas capital‐intensive industries focus on finances and favor ‘white collar’ workers. ‘[T]he Mitteleuropäische Wirtschaftstag aimed to shift Southeastern Europe into more labor‐intensive cash crops for export, such as soybeans. […] German economists similarly saw Serbians, Croatians, and Romanians as capable of “bearing any burden,” perfectly suited for producing the labor‐intensive goods like soybeans and wheat that Germany’s capital‐intensive economy so desperately needed in the 1930s.¹³’ — Stephen G. Gross, Export Empire
8. Laborers striking en masse for better wages. Because they put a halt to production, eventually the capitalist must accede to their demands.
9. ‘Although minimum wage increases are expected to increase prices, the magnitude of price increase depends on several factors such as the demand elasticity and competition degree (Aaronson 2001). A strong effect of minimum wages on inflation is not always found in empirical studies.’
10. The struggles for higher wages relates to socialism (that is, capitalism’s negation) in that the goal is to enhance the standard of living for ordinary people. Equating the struggle for higher wages with the accumulation of capital is a false equivalence because higher wages are necessary for living the modern world, whereas capital is doomed to disappear because it inhibits the lives of the proletariat.
11. For workers paid on the basis of products or services finished rather than time, their wages may be a little closer in value to the products or services, but still inferior. (I know that this is a simplistic and inadequate reply, but at this point I’m exhausted.)

I feel dissatisfied with this comment, but I hope that it is better than nothing.

I’ve never majored in anything. I study Fascism a lot in my spare time, partly because I feel like we need a better understanding of the subject, and partly because I admittedly have a rather morbid fascination with the phenomenon. Reapplying Marx’s analysis to capitalism in decay helps me remember his analysis better.

I don’t have much experience accepting compliments, but…I thank you. I appreciate it. It reminded me of the time when my therapist skimmed my page debunking the ‘Nazism was socialism’ myth and he called it a ‘master’s level thesis’.

1. Labor is work put into something, whereas labor power is how much and what kind of work somebody can do. For example, employées at the Mauser factory at Oberndorf put labor into a weapon by testing its sight alignment, and a Kar 98k in the July of 1944 required, it seems, sixteen hours of (unskilled but machine‐assisted) labor power.
2. If you’ll allow me, I would prefer to use another example from history: Silesian peasants in the Weimar Republic labored by milking cows and vending the milk—the labor—directly to customers for twenty‐two pfennigs a liter, but then had to vend his labor power to a Fascist monopoly organization for fourteen pfennigs or fewer.
3. He said that the fluctuations are what force the price to conform to the production’s cost. When the Allies bombed the Kingdom of Romania’s oil fields, oil’s production cost increased and thus so did the price.
4. A decrease in demand is likely to make the scarce commodity decrease in price. Modern art in the Third Reich decreased in price during the 1930s because the demand decreased, and I’m assuming that individual works had far fewer copies back then.
5. The cost of production falling causes wages to fall, because now it is easier to produce a commodity. A trained marksman (expensive) was required to test sight alignments, but the joint Mauser/Zeiss shooting machine allowed unskilled workers (cheap) to do that instead.
6. The ease in training a worker reduces her wage. It was easy to train somebody to use the Mauser/Zeiss shooting machine, so she must have had a low wage. This must have decreased demand for the trained marksman, lowering his wage, too.
7. Introducing free public education would make training workers (slightly) easier and therefore reduce wages. Giovanni Gentile strived to inculcate Italian youth with fascism and to select and promote only the élite so as not to overload the market for intellectual labor.
8. The introduction of Jewish neoslaves into Axis‐occupied Poland, who had to live in very cheap, substandard conditions, most likely reduced the demand for the labor power of unenslaved Polish gentiles, whose standard of living was less awful and thus more costly. The disposal of humans must have been inexpensive because the inventions of carbon monoxide and other poisons were cheaper and more efficient for deployment than the firearms, which presumably reduced the Wehrmacht’s wages somewhat. Erstwhile, eliminating the socialist unions was necessary for Fascism’s mastery over the lower classes; as Daniel Guerin said, ‘To paralyze working class resistance will henceforth be the role of the fascist “unions,” which have become organs for “political discipline.”’
9. Slavery and capital are merely social constructs. Capital needs instruments and other resources in order to exist, otherwise it is meaningless. Fascist capital in particular needed oil, ball bearings, wolframite, tungsten, iron ore, and elsewhat to wage war, but they did not need capital to exist, nor did they constitute capital (when left alone).
10. Saying that capital is a social relation acknowledges the human interaction that it requires for its production. Gustav Krupp’s laborers had to agree to toil for his business with the capital that other laborers elsewhere agreed to produce. Capital needs social interaction to be meaningful.
11. Useful, valuable things are not capital when there is no labor power to convert them into capital. The Polish forests were—I am presuming—mostly unmade through labor power, so they were not capital, and since the Fascists wanted to keep them as hunting grounds, they went unused as capital.
12. The prefascist generations made the materials that were crucial to the Fascist empires—factories, tools, machines, farms—which they used to preserve and multiply their exchange value.

I have a feeling that my answers are either inaccurate or lackluster, but I hope that this is at least better than nothing.

Excellent expansion on Dr. Parenti’s original lecture. In fact, I am going to edit the Parenti sticky on /c/capitalismindecay to make this the URL (while inserting the original audio in the description as an alternative).

I did have a few minor issues with the video: there were a few parts where the audio felt almost muffled or oddly monophonic, and I’d hesitate to classify Pinochet as a fascist (strictly speaking), but I certainly don’t blame anybody for calling him one. Overall, though, this video is great. It was also very considerate of the authors to keep the music volume lower than the rest of the audio. (Bes D. Marx’s otherwise great videos suffer from that issue and it makes their videos harder to understand.)

Loss of appetite is already a common symptom of depression, so nobody needs to give the lower classes this advice; it is redundant.

No big deal. Everybody makes mistakes.

I don’t understand why everybody is downvoting you. It’s a well known fact that throughout its 247 years of existence, the United States has literally never committed a single atrocity. I’m not saying the United States is perfect; maybe it committed an atrocity or two a couple of times, but nothing that was a big deal.

https://asawinstanley.substack.com/p/when-israel-recruited-nazi-war-criminals

Not to defend the anticommunists, who certainly contributed to the famine, but the causes of the 1930s famine were primarily environmental. Drought, infestations, and wheat rust had more devastating effects than the petty bourgeois terrorism.

I checked and was mildly surprised to learn that it was real. I was expecting a propertarian to be subtler than that.

I should have seen it coming.

Fine by me.

If you want an explicit example of psychotherapy being used to breed conservatism, you should look at Therapeutic Fascism: re-educating Communists in Nazi-occupied Serbia, 1942–44. The author released a lengthier edition titled Therapeutic Fascism: Experiencing the Violence of the Nazi New Order in Yugoslavia, and the similar Psychoanalysis and Politics: Histories of Psychoanalysis Under Conditions of Restricted Political Freedom looks quite promising, but I have not yet read either.

My penultimate therapist (and probably my ultimate one as well) was a social democrat whom I distinctly remember admitting to me that he couldn’t offer me a miracle, but I always left his sessions feeling better and we agreed far more than we disagreed. He was the best therapist that I had, but after a year or so he had to retire and I switched to another therapist, who wasn’t as memorable but she still helped me most of the time. Then she had to quit, too, only in her case it was because the institution wasn’t paying her enough. I could have continued seeing therapists, but I decided not to.

My last two therapists were my best, and they certainly helped me, but even so I have to be honest and say that, much like my medication, what they provided was only some temporary relief; something to dull the severity of my symptoms, not address the causes. I still have to deal with traumatic memories and other intrusive thoughts, sometimes to the point where it almost feels like there is a war going on in my head, and no matter how peaceful I seem on the outside, I am hurting on the inside nearly every day.

One of the reasons that I want us to abolish capitalism is that I want somebody to publish a cure for depression, something unlikely to reach the market since that would result in fewer returning customers for the pharmaceutical industry. I have been suffering for nearly a couple dozen years now and I can only think of one way to finally stop it. You can imagine what that way is.

Source?

That’s another one. Leftoid nubs and self‐identified anticommunists usually see governing communist parties as highly élitist and exclusionary institutions (which is pretty dubious, to say the least).

I am guessing that their response would be ‘the bureaucracy’ (which would be inaccurate).

I’ve talked about this before, albeit the topic was about self‐identified anticommunists, but I am sorry to say that it applies to a lot of leftoid noobs as well. Anybody who poses obviously loaded questions like ‘why is it being a “lib” to say that governments who repress the human rights and civil liberties of minorities are not practicing leftism in good faith? the same governments who have horrifically and violently crushed workers rights movements?’ does not need to be dignified with a serious response. You can’t make these bipeds educate themselves no matter how good your evidence is; it simply isn’t a matter that’s within your hands.

Do something else: unionize, agitate for better working conditions, exercise, train with a weapon, do some volunteer work, contribute to volunteers (like Food Not Bombs), or engage with communists or communist sympathizers who are very clearly asking in good faith. Personally, I spend my most productive time studying modern history, and I’ve amassed a respectable répertoire of knowledge. I can confidently say that you’ll learn more about capitalism in decay from me than you’ll ever learn from any horseshoe theorist or dullards saying ‘red fash’ unjokingly.

If the Chinese government should be fully responsible for starving millions, then it would be no less logical to give it credit for saving millions, too:

During the Difficult Three Year Period the state also expended large amounts of money and materials carrying out famine relief in the heavily stricken areas. Spending on relief funds was increased, the basic food supply for disaster victims was guaranteed, large teams of medical care workers were sent to provide medical aid in the disaster-stricken areas, and so forth. With mobilization and direction from the CPC and the state, the entire nation fought together against droughts, floods, locust plagues and other natural disasters, using a variety of production and self-rescue activities.

(Source.)