Notices by HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social), page 5

Happy Birthday to Jesus, the incarnation of the Christian god on earth who came to tell rich people they were going to hell and was tortured to death for it.

@whatzaname @AlexanderKingsbury @gnutelephony @RD4Anarchy @gerrymcgovern @neonsnake

The fundamental and irresolvable tension in capitalism as an *idea* is that private ownership of the means of production a) is the product of violence and b) precludes voluntary exchange. They are irreconcilable. You can have a private property regime or you can have free trade, but you can’t have both together.

If they’re ever faced with a choice between the two, capitalists will always choose property over free markets, and whenever possible, capitalists will work to undermine free markets.

Competition? The risk of failure? Capitalists hate those!

@neonsnake @AlexanderKingsbury @gerrymcgovern @RD4Anarchy @whatzaname

Capitalism has never existed and cannot exist without the state and its violence.

@KarunaX @Ukrainenews

You do not have to take the security concerns of Vladimir Putin seriously.

Israeli forces killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza on Friday.

The hostages were apparently *trying to surrender* while displaying a *white flag.* The IDF shot and killed two immediately, then hunted down and killed the third while he begged for his life in Hebrew.

Now, we could imagine that this was a singular and unique tragedy. Maybe these soldiers were *particularly murderous.*

But it seems more likely that this incident offers a window into a more general approach by the IDF to killing men in Gaza, including men who are surrendering, and that we only found out about *this* instance because the victims in this case happened to be Israeli hostages, prompting a public investigation.

https://news.sky.com/story/three-israeli-hostages-killed-by-idf-were-holding-white-flag-says-military-official-13031567

Israeli soldiers similarly killed Yuval Castleman, an Israeli Jewish civilian who stopped Hamas terrorists during an attack in Jerusalem. Castleman had disarmed and surrendered but was still shot to death by reservists who thought he was one of the attackers.

Is this a general policy in the IDF—to shoot and kill anyone who might possibly be Hamas? Has discipline simply broken down his thoroughly?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-exhumed-to-perform-autopsy-on-body-of-hero-civilian-shot-dead-by-reservist/

It would be much easier to believe that these were aberrations rather than the general rule if so much of the reporting out of Gaza wasn’t about just the basest, pettiest abuses by the IDF.

This is what they feel comfortable filming themselves doing.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/15/middleeast/israeli-soldiers-burningfood-gaza-intl/index.html

@szczur @AdrianRiskin @jpaskaruk @Radical_EgoCom

Anarchism certainly isn’t a “eutopia” in the sense of a perfectly good place, but it’s also not a “utopia” in the sense of an unobtainable ideal. A lot of people get the impression that anarchists believe anarchism is a panacea for all our social ills, but most anarchist thought is about *doing the hard work* to create and sustain anarchism while addressing conflict in the absence of coercive authority.

Nationalism, and in particular ethnonationalism, is a deeply seductive lie. It pretends that people are members of a corporate body by accident of birth, and can exercise some corporate, collective sovereignty through a state that somehow “embodies” that community.

But a community cannot and do not exercise authority in corporate. “The people” do not control the state if only *some* of “the people” make and enforce decisions for the rest of “the people.”

At best, ethnonationalism can offer all members of some in-group a set of automatic privileges over some out-group. But it can never deliver on its promise of corporate sovereignty.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/10/19/israel-police-boss-threatens-to-send-anti-war-protesters-to-gaza-on-buses

We can thus reconcile minimum wage laws with no increase in unemployment by understanding that wages in the US are artificially low, by capitalists’ own standards.

Rather than letting workers and firms freely bargain with each other, which in a free market would include labor organizing to create collective bargaining power, the state massively intervenes to distort the market. The result is a wage level far below any kind of idealized equilibrium price, even setting aside all of the violence the state performs to create capitalism in the first place.

So when the state sets minimum wages by law, it is not creating an artificial floor below which wages would otherwise naturally fall. It is setting a ceiling on the amount that employers are allowed to exploit from workers prohibited from freely associating. Using the Danish example, we might calculate that this surplus that employers legally extract from workers amounts to tens of thousands of dollars each year for every full-time worker employer at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

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Firms can pay that statutory minimum wage without losing employment because they’re not losing any money off those employees—they’re extracting all that money *on top of* whatever value the employee would be generating if paid $16-18 per hour.

All that money constitutes a massive subsidy by employees to employers, enforced by the state, in a titanic distortion of the “free” market. Hypothetically, even taking at face value all the tropes of capitalist ideology, we could raise minimum wages to the Danish level with no impact on employment.

Of course, all of capitalism is predicated on massive state violence to immiserate people and transform them into a proletariat with no choice but to labor for wages, a titanic subsidy to capitalists that eliminates the possibility of there being a “fair” wage at all. But even ignoring all this and pretending that wages are set by market forces, we find that minimum wage laws are a a marginally corrective bandaid on the primary distortion.

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Why might this be? Why might employment stay the same or even increase when the state legislates a minimum wage, theoretically raising the price of the lowest-cost labor?

We might consider that the statutory minimum wage is not an artificial floor, but is already actually *lower* than it would otherwise be.

Let’s take a look at Denmark. In Denmark, there is no statutory minimum wage. Despite this, Danish workers earn no less than the effective minimum wage of $16-18 per hour. This is much higher than the statutory minimum wage in the US of $7.25. Capitalist ideologues promised me this was impossible—in the absence of a statutory wage floor, there would be workers employed at literally every wage, including as little as $0.01.

And yet, there it is.

3/

But US workers can’t organize freely the same way that Danish workers can, despite the pretenses to freedom of association. The US has mostly moved on from the practice of outright murdering union organizers and deploying the army to attack striking workers, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a legal regime that is immensely hostile towards organizing themselves.

From the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947—which outlaws all sorts of strikes and lets states ban union shops—to Janus v. AFSCME in 2018–which blocks unions from entering into exclusive supplier contracts with firms—the US legal apparatus is deeply, profoundly hostile to labor organizing. (This legal regime makes a mockery of the idea that Americans enjoy a “free” market, so to maintain the friction, ideologues are employed to convince everyone that labor unions are little cartels rather than the simple equivalent of labor-selling firms.)

Add on top of that the enormous (and often formally illegal) efforts by private firms to prevent the formation of unions, and we see how labor unions could represent such a small number of US workers despite the large and growing popularity of union organizing.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2022-in-review/as-pro-union-sentiment-reaches-a-fifty-year-high-us-law-remains-pro-management

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One major difference between these two labor markets that could explain this discrepancy is in their differing levels of labor organization. In Denmark, about 70% of workers belong to labor unions, which are so large that they can bargain not just with individual firms but *sectorally,* setting wages and working conditions for entire sectors of the economy at a time.

In contrast, only about 11% of US workers are unionized—and only about 6% of private sector workers, down from about 35% during the 1930s. As I discussed last time, divided and atomized workers, forced to bargain one-by-one, lack the power to negotiate for wages that their unionized peers do.

We could imagine US workers unionized at the same rate as their Danish counterparts and collectively bargaining for an *effective* minimum wage that is dramatically higher than their *statutory* minimum wage. Maybe the lowest collectively bargained wage would be $16 or $18 or even higher.

4/

Following from my last thread on unions and wages, I wanted to address that other capitalist shibboleth, the minimum wage.

AS EVERYONE KNOWS, prices are set by the market. When the state sets a wage by fiat that is higher than the equilibrium price, firms can’t afford to hire as many workers as they had previously intended. This creates both unemployment among the least productive, lowest paid workers, but also reduces the productivity of all those firms—ie, deadweight loss.

The real minimum wage, as I’m sure you all know, is $0.00. That is, there is some poor benighted or desperate fool willing to work for literally any price N, and some firm might be willing to employ them at that price as long as the worker can produce N + $0.01 worth of value for the firm. But minimum wage law sets those wages arbitrarily high, and firms can’t afford to hire and pay this worker if that wage is higher than N.

This is all VERY BAD.

1/

But something strange happens when governments set minimum wages: employment tends not to decrease. Sometimes, it even increases! This is from The Economist, that stalwart capitalist rag:

“The empirical study which revitalised the debate on minimum wages in the 1990s was by David Card and Alan Krueger, both then at Princeton University. In 1992 New Jersey increased its hourly wage floor from $4.25 to $5.05. Neighbouring Pennsylvania kept its own at $4.25. Thrilled at the prospect of a naturally occurring case study, the two economists gathered information of employment at fast-food restaurants in both states before the April increase and again several months later. Fast food seemed to offer the ideal conditions for a study, as a homogenous sector employing unskilled workers.

The increase in the wage floor did not lead to jobs being lost in New Jersey; employment in the restaurants they looked at went up. Nor did the authors find any indication that the opening of future restaurants would be affected. Looking at the growth in the number of McDonald’s restaurants across America, they saw no tendency for fewer to open where minimum wages were higher.”

http://reparti.free.fr/sminharm820.pdf

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We could return to our medieval merchant with his hospital and ask: was he behaving egoistically or altruistically? And the answer must be: yes.

Yes, he was gaining some personal satisfaction. Yes, he was doing it by giving away vast amounts of wealth to the poor. We routinely seek personal satisfaction through generosity, kindness, sharing. There is no contradiction, because humans are not one-dimensional robots who have to choose between psychopathic selfishness and Ayn Rand’s caricature of altruism as destructive selflessness.

The tension is purely artificial. If we remove the fictional divide between value and values, between the social and the economic, and recognize them are inseparable parts of the same whole, then we experience no contradiction.

Socialism is not impossible because of some imagined human nature of greed. We do not have socialism today because of violence by the state and the capital class, but also because of stories about ourselves that so many of us have been convinced to believe.

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ADDENDUM:

A few people read this thread and took away from it the conclusion that many people are generous and altruistic, but some people are greedy, and that it’s this latter minority that’s the cause of our current predicament.

I would encourage everyone to consider that we are all “greedy” and all “altruistic.” That is: we all contain competing motivations to selfishly self-aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others and to cooperate generously to the benefit of all. Some of us might have inclinations towards one or the other, but we all contain both motivations.

The distinction between altruism and greed also breaks down when we recognize that generous cooperation *also* benefits the cooperator. In many important senses, the distinction between greed and altruism is false and illusory.

The problem we face is not one of individual motivation. It is one of systemic and institutional constraints and motivations. Under capitalism, generosity can be a *death sentence* if giving away your possessions or labor freely costs you your own access to sustenance.

10/9 (the end for real, for now)

PS: if you enjoyed this thread, you can always buy me a coffee here. Everyone gets a little everyday communism, as a treat.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/heavenlypossum

9/end

@KevinCarson1 @josh

Millions of people over which the Israeli state exercises sovereignty have no political role in the Israeli state. We can accurately call that “apartheid,” not democracy (even in the denuded sense of electoral democracy).