sovecon
3w ago
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100%
if conciousness is fundamentally a phenomenon of matter and energy then it fits in a materialist worldview.
statin that it's immaterial is not materialist.
but thank you for quoting scripture.
sovecon
3w ago
•
100%
Materialism is a philosophy where ultimately everything is matter and energy. I don't know how you can think otherwise.
Conciousness can exist in a materialist worldview so long as it's a phenomenon of matter and energy.
Why have different views? Because there are different, equally valid ways of modelling the same thing. But some are more useful than others. You even highlight this in your next few sentences.
The reason it's bad for propaganda is because no lay person understands what the fuck any of us are talking about when we use this philosophical language and quote long dead men from the 1800s.
You also do not understand what materialist dialectics are. You have a very idealist form of them. But that's fine. It's not worth arguing about. The idea that correct thought is needed for correct action is anti-marxist.
sovecon
4w ago
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63%
There are many ways of modelling the same thing. Imagine you have a limited amount of money to fence in your yard.
An economist would say “you have a budget”. A cyberneticist or a linear programmer would say “you have a potentially binding constraint on your objective function”. A marxist might say “there is a contradiction between the size of your enclosure and the amount of fence you can buy”. A normal person would say “well there’s a tradeoff. I can fence in my whole yard or I can spend my money to go drinking on the weekends.”
All of these basically say the same thing. Marxists like to use dialectics which is a philosophical idea originally from idealist philosophers. When brought into the realm of materialist philosophy it gets called dialectical materialism.
Materialist philosophy is the idea that ultimately everything is matter and energy. Nowadays this gets called Physicalism sometimes. Idealist philosophy says that there are things which do exist but which are not material or energy. Ideas, gods, angels, conciousness, etc. Most people have a combination of these two ideas and so would accurately be called “Dualist” but internet leftists tend to use the term “Idealist”.
The simplest way to understand a “dialectic” is, I think, the following: At the start of the industrial revolution in England there were the old lords and a new wealthy business class. There was a conflict between them over the limited resources. There are only so many people to control, luxury goods to purchase, government positions to hold, etc. And these people have different interests. So a Marxist would say, when speaking in terms of dialectics, that “there is a contradiction between the aristocracy (landowners) and the bourgeoisie (business owners, capitalists)”.
Now obviously the relative strength of either side in this conflict can change. Maybe the business class start organizing and take more seats in parliament, maybe the lords begin raising their own knights and armies again, etc. A marxist would say that this change is actually not unusual but a key part of the system. They say that modelling things using dialectics and materialist philosophy means we can understand how things change and not be so surprised when they do. And when something does change they might say “the dialectic is in motion” or “the contradictions are sharpening”.
Ultimately the entire thing is fancy language from the 1800s that should probably be replaced because it’s alienating and bad for propaganda. “Conflict”, “tradeoff”, and “change” are much more sensible in 21st century English than “contradiction”, “dialectic”, and “motion”.
sovecon
4w ago
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100%
if people here can accept the CPC then they should accept the Nepalese communist parties.
sovecon
4w ago
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100%
Nepal is the first successful communist revolution in the past few decades.
Everyone here seems to demand instant perfect from every revolution and every communist movement.
sovecon
4w ago
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75%
There is literally no evidence that the Olmecs were Afrians. This is a conspiracy theory long since debunked.
There is no evidence that any African explorers ever reached the Americas before Columbus.
sovecon
4w ago
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83%
The first question is should you bother.
I am very inclined to believe the answer is no. China has little bearing on the actions one can take to strengthen the working class in the US.
Why run interception for China when it takes time away from unioning, organizing, etc.
sovecon
1mo ago
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80%
That is not what it says.
The insurgent party on the left and right, the Alternative for Germany (17-19 percent) is anti-EU and would never support joint borrowing.
sovecon
1mo ago
•
100%
Article calls AfD left wing. What the fuck is this website.
sovecon
1mo ago
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100%
I had the pleasure of speaking with some old-school Black activists from the US while on a brigade in Cuba.
One of them, who I won't name, told me that during the early days they did not know whether having members of the community inside the police would work or not. They simply had no idea. He told me they fought for it, and fought to make it work. It is only with the hindsight of having tried that they now realized it wouldn't work. Only now with hindsight is it obvious.
Many of the Black people I met on the brigade shared stories. Many of them on the receiving end of a racist power structure. A recurring theme of my conversations was that many Black people were and remain skepitcal specifically of the strategies of Marxism-Leninism. Many see power structures as problems themselves, and just like trying to make cops Black, they think trying to make a state and courts proletarian won't change anything.
Of course, Black people are not a monolith. They are people who happen to be Black. They are not automatically more enlightened and they aren't automatically more ignorant. Just as many Black people I met were more interested in national self-determination with Black courts, Black landlords, Black bourgeoisie, and with little hint of Marxism in their struggle as there were those entirely skepitcal of any power structure at all.
I was recommended Don Cox's posthumous memoir about his time in the Panthers: Just Another N-----
sovecon
1mo ago
•
100%
United $$nake$$ of Amerikkka
sovecon
1mo ago
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100%
Guy who argues mumble rap is stupid because you can't even understand what they're saying while listening to Jack Stauber on spotify.
sovecon
1mo ago
•
93%
The sad fact for Marxists in the west is that the Anarchists are more organized and do more praxis these days.
I find it very annoying when my fellow comrades respond to the actions taken by Anarchists or non-Marxists by simply belittling them.
"occupy did nothing. chaz was doomed from the start. etc."
If we think we are supposed to be the vanguard, the most proactive guardians and forward pushers of the working class's power, we need to start doing shit. Because right now we're a laughing stock of sit-around bookreaders arguing theology.
Our main attack against all other forms of socialism are that they've never won and secured a worker state. Well right now the Marxists in the west haven't even started.
Marxists who do nothing but post will come up with some horrible names to call me which are just new fancier versions of "heretic" but as it stands, (on average) even the least read anarchist in Food Not Bombs has done more to advance worker power than the most well read "Marxist" in a typical org.
The clearest example I can think of:
It was New York City Anarchists working as part of the Direct Action Network who secured the massive abolition of Third World debt owed to the IMF. And it is not exaggeration to say they also almost suceeded in abolishing the IMF entirely. Despite the most vocal opposition to the IMF coming from us Marxists, it seems right now we are all talk. We must improve.
EDIT: I misremembered: DAN was most active in NYC but the anti-IMF successes were across the US not just NYC.
Guy with a Churchill profile picture yelling at the guy with a Stalin profile picture for idolizing someone who killed millions in a famine. Guy who spells it "Amerikkka" telling the guy who spells it "Drumpf" that he's doing a pointless virtue signal for cred. Guy who says Communist Parties are authoritarian because the 9 people on the Central Committee aren't directly elected telling the guy who wants to reform the Supreme Court he's against democracy.
sovecon
1mo ago
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85%
OP, your question is touching on a great discussion between how much of our social order is arbitrary and how much is determined by material conditions (for example: having visited Cuba, a thoroughly socialist state, I witnessed racism to about the same level as would exist in progressive communities in the US despite no capitalist relations to produce it.). The dialectic between the base and the superstructure, as a Marxist might put it.
I didn't want to muddy up my comment with a long quote, but I think this one has some nice insights.
But if reading isn't one's forte then the tl;dr is from Marx: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please"
These are from a book called "The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy"
From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?
Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.” . . . This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?
To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production, the Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historical importance of the “means of destruction”: states, armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and so on. Pretending such things are not there, or can simply be wished away, they argue, has the result of ensuring that left-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.
Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and twentieth-century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially right-wing theories of power . . . in their obsession with jailing poets and playwrights whose work they considered threatening, they evinced a profound faith in the power of art and creativity to change the world—those running capitalist regimes rarely bothered, convinced that if they kept a firm hand on the means of productions (and, of course, the army and police), the rest would take care of itself.
sovecon
1mo ago
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92%
The question every leftist has been trying to answer for the past 200 years is this:
"What are the conditions that would let us we wake up tomorrow and not do capitalism?"
All political theory on praxis has been trying to answer this question.
If everyone were class concious, the answer would be simple: just don't.
sovecon
1mo ago
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86%
ai art is art because people are mad about it.
jokes aside, i think that machine art is going to basically just replace clip art and the like. it's like what happened to pottery. there are still artisinal potters (i love handmade pottery and the craft itself) but for everyday dinner plates you don't seek the connection and craftsmanship. you just need a plate.
some art has use-value as decoration (easily replaced with machines) and other art is about personal, emotional, or political communication (even if it could be replaced, it wouldn't be.)
People want to have it both ways.
sovecon
1mo ago
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100%
Literally a broken chain.
You could make a movie called 'The Folly of the Phallus' where a man shoots himself in the foot everytime he feels emotions and people would idolize the main characters and complain that the message wasn't clear enough.
sovecon
1mo ago
•
100%
Is there a news article about the provocation?
sovecon
1mo ago
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75%
The reason for the VAT (in the USSR it was called a Turnover Tax. They're the same thing but a VAT does not tax means of production) was how incredibly simple it was to administer. Tax fraud could be kept relatively low for any given level of administration if a VAT was used instead of an income tax, for example. Many modern governments do this today for the same reason.
The USSR was constantly in a struggle to build an effective administration (a good book on this is Origins of the Great Purges ) while fighting what we today would call Bullshit Jobs and local strongmen.
Post-Deng China basically took a hands off approach to local strongmen and corruption skyrocketed but economic growth was heightened. The USSR was trying to mitigate markets (most of which were black markets) to prevent shortages and mismanagement in its planned economy. So the Deng approach was not something it could do. The USSR was much more developed at the time and the intricate web of an economy was more complicated than in China.
China campits exist. There are fantastic sources of information about China who are not even remotely Marxist and just support China for whatever reason. I am wondering what percentage of China supporters do you think that applies to?
The biggest trick the bourgeoisie pull on the working class is convincing the working class that it doesn't exist. The second biggest trick the bourgeoisie pull is convincing us that everything we make, all the culture we do, all the progress we make, is somehow owned by them. Even many of us fall victim to this thinking. But, just because capitalism now has to pay lip service to feminism, native struggles, queer identity, and oppressed nationalities ***does not mean we have lost.*** They have convinced some of us, and we often convince ourselves, that once the ruling class start paying lip service to our struggle and use our language that the struggle is lost. **They said this in the Roman Empire.** The Roman Empire was convinced that the contradictions both internal and external would relax and that they could simply make all the barbarians Roman. The Empire would last forever because any rebels could be co-opted and made into Romans. But one day Alaric the Goth did not get a military promotion and the Western half of the Empire fell forever. Do not let capitalism tell you that because it bottles up your identity to sell it back to you that you've lost.
Hi comrades. My username is soviet entropy and the entropy part is not doomerism or a momento mori. Entropy is imo a vital part of modern materialist analysis. This post is an introduction to the concept and how it relates to political economy. ## 1. Information is Physical "Information" is often considered to be immaterial. Many definitions of it are and many definitions of it are also bad an incoherent. As marxists and materialists, what is information? Let's take a sequence. It could be a sequence of atoms or molecules or DNA base pairs. I'm going to have it be numbers for this demonstration. Here is the sequence: `[0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1]` How much information does this sequence contain? Well let's compare it to another sequece: `[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]` Now image want to perfectly re-create these sequences somewhere else. We need to store them first. If we wanted to store these sequences by compressing them, it would be easier to store the second one than the first one. We can compress the first by saying "repeat 0 four times, then 1 four times". To compress the second, we only need to say "repeat 0 eight times". **The less you can compress a sequence, the more information it has.** This is sometimes called **Shannon Information Theory**. Imagine we have a completely random sequence. Well if there is no pattern to it, then the smallest way we can store it is simply writing the entire thing down. There are no patterns or anything. Sure it's not information that is useful to humans, but it's information. But what does this have to do with Entropy or Materialism? ## 2. Entropy Entropy is a simple concept that physicists have made difficult to understand. I think this is because they are often idealist or dualist and not materialist. Imagine we have a six sided die that is perfectly fair. The numbers 1 thru 6 have a perfectly equal chance of coming up. We're gonna roll it a bunch of times. Now, how surprised would we be if a 2 comes up? Not very surprised. If we roll it again and a 3 comes up, again we are not surprised. If we roll it 4 more times and only get 2 and 3, then we are going to be more surprised. We can say that our surprise is inversely related to the probability of something happening. And indeed this is a concept in statistics called "surprise". If something has a 1/10 chance of happening,we would be less surprised of it happening than something with a `1/100` chance. We define surprise as the logarithm of the inverted probability. So for the `1/10` and `1/100` things, they have a surprise of log(10) and log(100). We only do this log thing to make something with a chance of 100% have 0 surprise. Otherwise it would have a surprise of 1. Now image we knew the chances of events happening. Say we know that a die is fair or we observed a process for a long time and now the typical things it does. We could have an expectation for our surprise. The surprise of each event that could happen weighted by how likely it is to happen. All of this added up is our total expected surprise. This is what **Entropy** is. Let's go back to the sequences. Remember, these could be numbers or atoms of a metallic crystal or DNA base pairs. Let's say we have the sequence: `[0,1,0,0,1,1,1,1]` The probability of getting a 0 is `3/8` (we count the number of 0's). So the surprise is `log(8/3)`. The probability of getting a 1 is `5/8` so the surprise is `log(5/8)`. The Entropy of this sequence is therefore: `3/8 * log(8/3) + 5/8 * log(8/5) = 0.66` If we do it for this sequnce: `[0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]` We get `8/8 * log(8/8) = 0` Take a minute here if you want. Something might be about to click! Sequences with low information, like 0 repeated eight times, ***also*** have low Entropy! That's because ***Entropy is Information***. They are the same thing. The amount of entropy in a sequence is how much information it contains and also how difficult it would be to compress it. ## 3. Increasing Entropy and Production So why does Entropy increase? This is not from some hand of God or a mystical force. Here's why it happens. Imagine a sequence of random numbers that you get from rolling a six sided die. Maybe we get `[1,4,3,1,1,1,1,1]`. Now, of all the possible sequences we can have for numbers rolled from a die, how many of them have that many 1's? Not that many. If something causes some of those numbers to be re-rolled, there are way more outcomes where there are fewer 1s. In fact, the most likely outcome would be one where the sequence gets more random. There are way more sequences of 8 numbers from a die where there are a relatively equal amount of each number. And these sequences ***also have higher Entropy***. So with random change over time, Entropy tends to increase. But how to we remove Entropy? Well that takes energy. And it's what production is. Let's say we have a sequence of aluminum atoms in a big sheet of aluminum. This is a very, very low entropy/low information material. To make it useful, we in fact want to put out own information into it. We use a big press to stamp a pattern into the alluminum and turn it into a car body. But in order to do this, we first needed to remove all the entropy that acrued over time from the random movements of matter and energy in the earth's crust. Aluminum ore has tons of entropy because of all the other atoms bonded to the aluminum and the other rocks and things in it. There are way more ways for 1kg of aluminum atoms to be in a hunk or ore than in a sheet of metal. So we first take out information and then put our own information in. We use energy to decrease the entropy and then increase it again toward what we want. The same goes for printing a book, or for making a chair, or printing semiconductor chips, or building a cargo ship. ## Finale I hope you all found this interesting. Materialism is not just a belief that the universe is governed by rules or anything like that. Materialism means that the physical world of particles and energy are the only things that are real. Information is often thought of to be a human construct but it is not. It is a real, physical, material thing. The relevance to modern political economy and marxist analysis can be gone over in more detail in anyone wants. One of the most important results is that in a situation where production and distribution are mediated by money and markets between equals, the maximum entropy situation is the same as the distribution of energy in a chamber of gas molecules. Meaning that over time there will be a large mass of very poor people and a small mass of ever wealthier and ever smaller people.
This is from John Fischer's book "Why They Behave Like Russians". He is not a communist but spent a lot of time in Ukraine directly after WWII. This book came out in 1947. "There's a Tavern in the Town" is the original tune of "Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes"
Hello comrades. I'm a former USonian and I've been politically active most of my life. I thought that it might be fun to share some of the weird legal technicalities that I've learned over the years. These may be useful, these may not be useful. The USonian legal system is very much a secular version of ancient clergies with its fancy language, recitations, robes, and holy texts for judging moral matters. But maybe some of you will find these quirks interesting! ### 1. Patents are not property A mild one to start out. Patents are something called a government franchise. Altho they are traded as tho they were property, they have a quirk. The federal government of the US is the one issuing the franchise, and it can thus revoke it at any time *without compensation*. The government can actually revoke any property at any time (especially land) but it has to give compensation. But if the federal government wanted to make certain technical innovations (refridgerants with low warming potential, vaccines, medicines, etc.) it could do it literally at zero cost. ### 2. The Constitution does not want a permanent army. Sometimes this is called a "standing" army. This one is also very fun for any technicality lovers. Article I of the US Constitution is about Congress and Section 8 of Article I is about its powers. Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 says Congress has the power: "To raise and support armies". Compare this to Clause 13 which says it has the power: "To provide and maintain a navy". Raise and support vs provide and maintain. So what? Maybe they just worded it differently. Well I'm being a bit of a trickster because the full text of Clause 12 says "To raise and support armies, *but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years*". The Constitution did not want a permanent army. This is why, to this day, that military spending is done in the Discretionary Budget each year. It's not technically automatic, technically all the soldiers have to re-enlist, and so the army is in line with the Constitution. (See what I mean about the legal system being a secular clergy lol). ### 3. National Guards are not state militias. The original meaning of the 2nd Ammendment is even weirder than the modern interpretation that private citizens are allowed to own guns. The original meaning is that private citizens can form their own paramilitaries. This is the right that is actually protected. Now that makes sense in a settler colony originally conceived as a confederation of separate rural settler colonies, but it remains there to this day. This one is actually the most useful for us leftists because militias are not only legal, they are Constitutionally protected. Having independent militias of the proletariat being armed is protected in the US Constitution. This is a fact that basically no other leftist movement has had and could very easily be leveraged if any leftwing militia is legally challenged. The public legitimacy would be more easily justified and even non-leftist legal system members would defend it. But that's not the only thing. Many people think that the National Guard are the State Militias that the 2nd Amendment talks about. They are in fact, not! Only 20 of the 50 states have these militias. They are often called "defense forces". [Wikipedia has a list of them here if you want](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force#List_of_state_defense_forces). Another weird thing is that the President likely has the authority to call these state militias into service under their command. 10 U.S.C. 251, 252, and 253 state that pretty clearly. So then, what the hell are the National Guard? The National Guard use the other technicality of that Clause 12 from Article I Section 8. It does not say "army" it says "armies". Not only does Congress raise the regular army, it raises ***armies***. The National Guard is raised under Congress's power to "raise and support" armies. [Source 1](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/496/334.html) and [Source 2](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246). The states are just given special control over what are essential local units of a federal army. And lastly, perhaps most bizarre of all, here is more proof that the National Guard are actually not members of a militia but actual soldiers in the army. This is the case of Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (2d Cir. 1982). Here's the backstory: Attica is a state prison in the state of New York. A prisoner uprising occured in 1971 against inhuman treatment of prisoners. Around half the 2200 prisoners took part in the uprising. The prison eventually took back control of the prisoners but were forced to begin implementing changes. Racial integration of staff, more humane treatment, etc. But the prison guards' union refused. So they went on strike. The governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller. Yes, that Rockefeller family) activated the National Guard to run the prison during the strike (and also to scab but it was against racist cops so fuck both of 'em). And this is where the court case happened. The 3rd Amendment prevents housing soldiers in homes during a time of peace. The prison guards took the state to court and won. The National Guard members were soldiers and members of the army and were housed in lodgings the prison had where some prison staff lived. This was deemed to be a home that the soldiers had been illegally quartered in a time of peace. ### 4. The reason party delegates don't have to vote in line with their citizens is the 1st Amendment. I'm sure many of your know that voting for President in the US is not done directly. You vote for a candidate but that is merely an opinion poll. Each state is given a number of "electors" who are unelected people and usually party insiders. These electors are the ones who actually vote for the President and they do so "in their respective state capital on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday of December". Then the results of these meetings are brought to Congress on January 6th and tallied up and the new president is officially confirmed. But the political parties themselves *also* have a similar system. This is what the national conventions are. And each state is given electors but they are often called "delegates". These delegates do not have to vote for who the state voted for and the reason is the 1st Amendment on freedom of speech and association. So even tho states could pass laws requiring electors to vote in line with the state's population ([or with the national vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact)), there is nothing they can do to prevent the delegates from voting however they want. #### The End I hope you all found those interesting! I might do another one of these if people found it fun. Feel free to share any other strange quirks you know of.
i'm sure you've all been hearing about the recent moves in the stock market. almost every stock in the US is overvalued almost all the time and stock prices basically never reflect material reality. the basics of what happened are this: 1. Japan had really now interest rates. So you could borrow money in Yen at like 0.5% 2. To fight inflation, the US raised interest rates very high very fast. So the US would pay you maybe 5% if you bought treasury bills 3. Investment banks would borrow Yen at 0.5%, convert it to US Dollars, then buy treasury bills which paid 5%. When the treasury bills matured, they would then convert the money back to Yen and pay off the interest and be left with 4.5% returns. 4. Japan recently raised interest rates and this made the exchange rate between Yen and US Dollars change. Now the last step of converting back from US Dollars to Yen might not give you enough money to pay back the loan. 5. Investment banks start selling other assets to try and get cash to pay their loans. Tons of stocks are put up for sale so their prices get lower and lower.
Hi comrades. I was in a discussion last week about socialism (like I usually am) and I think we can do some self crit. I think it's important to remember that multiple modes of production can (and almost always do) exist in a single soceity at once. There is a dialectic between the systems along with within them. So when we discuss the social democracies, the soviet states, and modern communist projects like China, we should keep that in mind. There are capitalist, socialist, and communist sectors in many countries now. One of them will dominate, however (Marx says this in the first sentence of Capital). When looking at the USSR, is had basically no capitalist sector, a very large socialist sector, and a big communist sector. But communist sectors are not unique to the USSR or a DotP. Denmark and the UK both had small communist sectors in things like their healthcare. The period before Thatcher actually saw a UK mix quite similar to post-Deng China--a large capitalist sector, a big socialist sector, and a sizable communit one. (This is likely why the economic performance and worker gains were so high during this time comared to other waning empires like France). Modern China is very similar. And we should not be ultra leftists and ignore that these are all states in transition. We as communists, and Marxist Leninists do not deny that socialist sectors and communist sectors can appear in other societies. We simply state that unless there is a DotP established, the capitalist sector will erode them away. Note: The definition of sectors here is whether production is governed by exchange value or use value. Capitalist ones have commodity production i.e. their productive forces are guided by exchange value. Communist sectors are governed by use value (to each according to their need and from each according to their ability). This means Communist sectos don't have commodities. Socialist sectors are ones where commodity production does exist but exchange value takes a secondary role in governing production. UPDATE: Two comrades said they did not agree with how I defined socialist here. I don't think the definition of what true socialism is effects this argument. Feel free to replace "socialism" with whatever word you would describe for a sector where production is not entirely governed by exchange value but still is to some degree. I hope you all gain something from this. Everyone in our discussion did. I look forward to any other perspectives. I'm originally a USonian so I know I may be narrow sighted.
The history of post war Japan and the US involvement setting up the regime there used as an explainer for why the same can't happen in China.
I found a much longer version of that classic AI meme. "And now you have these capitalists, this is their new hoax: they take, they buy a brand new shiny means of production. a bit beautiful new machine. and they have these workers--who are totally not being treated fairly in this county folks, ok. totally exploited--they pay these workers a certain amount. could be 10, could be 20, could be 15. and with their labor they build the product. but the capitalist turns around and sells the product at a huge markup. they call it a profit. and they call it a profit."