If there is one thing that annoys me when seeing arguments against Communism is persistent ignorance. We’re not talking about simple ignorance where someone is not aware of a fact, but the kind of stubborn insintense on false ideas even when one has explicitly been told that they have it wrong. At this point we’re not simply talking about someone who has it wrong but about someone who is unwilling to learn.
He flies right off the bat by separating the political aspect of Communism from the economic, not obviously undertanding that this is impossible. Communism is not simply an economic system but a complete one, ecompassing social, political and economic aspects. You cannot disconnect the economic aspect of Communism from the social simply because it requires a specific type of society to work.
Communism is about having a classless, stateless society. It’s that simple. If you have a state or separation of classes, whether in the form of government bureaucrats or simple capitalists, you cannot claim to be in Communism. In any sense. It’s that simple. So by taking the economic aspect of the Soviet Union and calling it “Economic Communism”, you are using a flawed system as an example.
Next, we have the argument of how people would not join communes by themselves and they would have to be forced. Something which is of course totally away from any historical reality. If BadTux had bothered to actually read the History of the Russian Revolution he would have seen how “few” people were willing to to form soviets. The reality was that people were joining Soviets by the thousands, both the proletariat in the cities and the peasants in the armies. They were very much the majority and did not have to use any force.
He at least tries later to improve the validity of his article by talking about “modern communism” not realizing that there is nothing “modern” about it but rather that the original idea was about industrial societies. The idea for Communism was that it always required an industrialized society before it could take hold. This was the original idea from the time of Marx. The lack of a big proletariat in Russia and China was a large, if not the largest reason why the revolutions failed. A feudal peasant population is incompatible with Communism.
Then we’re treated to the impossibility of handling the modern production under communism simply by bringing up all the elements required for a product. But that’s just it. There’s no explanation of why this makes it impossible other than the inability of the author to think about it.
And with these arguments we are then told “So this, then, explains why communism as an economic system has failed every time it has been tried” and then goes on to bring the Soviet Union as an example. So he has failed to grasp what Communism even is, and then brought up State Capitalist society as proof. Incredible!
We then continue with the “other aspect” of Communism which is the political which apparently has been shown to fail…in a capitalistic society. What BadTux does not realize is that Communism does not work on an per-nation basis. Communism has to be achieved internationally so as to not have the need for standing armies or a state apparatus. Even Lenin recognised the need for International movements for Communism and this is what he was counting on. He knew that if that did not happen, the Russian Revolution was in a really tight spot.
It is no worth looking at individual communes in a Capitalist society as they are not the point or an example of socialism. Their struggle to survive in a Capitalist society is what creates contradictions among the people within. This “problem of power” that BadTux keeps referring to does not exist in a society where people can easily leave a syndic they do not like and immediately join another or form their own.
And indeed. there is no better example for this than the Free Software movement. Therein you have groups of people clustered around any specific application and you have a benevolent dictator at the top. This “leader” or group of leaders that BadTux claims would always cause problems and dissolving the group. However not only does this work our, but it works admirably. When the leaders are indeed benevolent, the group prospers and keeps them in their place due to their abilities. If the leaders misbehave enough however, the dissatisfied people simply fork the project and start a new group. What “problem of power”?
This is why such arguments from ignorants are so annoying. You end up having to refute arguments which have nothing to do with Communism at all. This is not productive at all to the Communist who does not learn anything new but rather has to waste time pointing out strawmen left and right. Argue why the Labour Theory of Value is wrong. Argue how exploitation of the worker does not exist. Argue, in short, for things that Marxism actually explains and proposes, not whatever half-truths you gathered from school and popular news sources.
The two main forms of Value theory that are in existence right now is the Labour Theory of Value (LTV) and the Marginalist Theory of Value (MTV). Usually the proponents of one, do not recognise the validity of the other in defining the value of an object. I wish to show that these two are not mutually exclusive but that rather, we have a dualistic system of value where both play a role.
First of all, I consider that each item has an Objective utility which is the intrinsic use-value it has for the vast majority of humans. For example, a potato has an amount of kcal and it can always nourish. A car has the capability to move with a number of km per hour etc. These define a utility that remains constant no matter the subjective view on them by any human.
The only way to get this objective utility ((When it does not already exist in nature)) is to create it and the only thing that creates items is human labour. Labour can be counted in hours and thus we can find out how many hour of labour ((Socially necessary labour hours to be exact but I don’t want to get into such details now)) are necessary to create a specific objective utility in the form of a product. We can call this the objectivevalue of the product.
It is this kind of value that the LTV attempts to define.
Now each item also has a Subjective utility which is the use-value any specific human individual assigns to it. This utility is almost never the same for any two individuals and further fluctuates for the same individual based on marginal utility. So I value a single potato when I have nothing to eat much more than a single potato when I have another 1000 of them in the warehouse. And I value a car when I have to drive 10 km every day to work, much more than a neighbour who works in the same building he lives in.
This subjective utility can only be abstracted based on the average demand for any type of objective utility. There is no other way to quantify it as each human simply thinks in a matter of priorities. For the starving, the potato is more “valuable” than a car. We can call this averaged demand the subjective value of the product.
But how do these two merge? The objective value lets us know how much work a product requires. This work needs to be repaid with an equal amount of work (in the form of another product) if one is to part with it. Thus it defines the minimum exchange value of a product. The subjective value lets us know on average how much people value a product. As a person values another product more than what they produce themselves (due to marginal utility), the subjective value tends to be higher than the objective value. Thus it defines the maximum exchange value of a product.
If there is a demand for the product then we can assume that the subjective value is higher than the objective. The higher the demand, the higher the subjective value. We can consider this difference between the number of labour hours a product requires to make and the number of labour hours we can get in exchange for it, as an objective measure of the subjective value.
In case the subjective value is below the objective value, then it means that this product will not be made as nobody will wish to make even the necessary minimum exchange for it at the objective value.
So what does this all mean? I’m not certain yet. For me, it is an obvious fact that the LTV is true but that also the MTV is also true. Neoclassical economics have used the Subjective Theories of Value as an unbeatable boogeyman to prove that Marxist theories were inherently flawed. But the Labour Theory of Value is still a very real important aspect of the value of a product as it is the only thing that can be used as a basis for the price. Certainly, Subjective Theories of Value play an important part but it is a much lesser role which only helps to show why exchanges happen and why prices fluxuate. It can in no case be considered the only way to define value.
The most common theme one finds when listening to free market proponents is how they (the markets) are the only way to judge what is valuable to someone. The way to discover that is simply to see if someone is willing to pay money for something. As long as someone pays for it, it is understood that it was valuable for that person. It provided a utility.
I always found this implication flawed but I couldn’t really put my finger on the why. Until today, where a post on the growing popularity of alternative medicine came to my attention. This immediately presented me with an example of the obvious contradiction between what the markets consider as valuable or useful and what truly is.
For any skeptic, alternative medicine and other woo-woo are obviously worthless, not only do they not provide any health benefit (over the odd placebo) but they can be overall harmfull by making people avoid taking scientific medicine and reducing the funds and thus the research that would have otherwise been spent on scientific research. These effects are already obvious today, as the article above points out.
But for the free market proponent, it must be obvious that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) provide value since people are paying for them. And the more people pay for them, so goes the thinking, the more valuable must they be. And more so than anything else, the CAM success is based on deregulation of the medicine industry, allowing the free market to define what is useful rather than the experts.
The rise of CAM popularity then aptly displays where the free market mentality directly contradicts reality. CAM do not provide any value ((This post is not going to be about proving that CAM don’t work. I assume that this is understood by skeptics and I will not argue this point. If you’re a free market AND a woo-woo proponent then all hope is likely lost for you)) and yet they are rewarded by the free market as if they did.
Ans this is the complete failing of the free markets where any and all value is decided on a truly subjective basis, lacking overview or foresight. Because they deny that objective ways to judge value exist, they can easily lead the world to become a worse place. And this is not only limited to medicine but to almost anything esle which can be decided via the markets.
Lets take another example: Coal and Oil VS renewable and clean energy. While we can objectively see that using the former types of energy creates major environmental problems, the markets judge oil and coal as more valuable. The result? (Too) Many free market proponents are Global Warming deniers.
When Reality and Free Markets clash, it is the later which we are told must heed.
However one question remains. What is causing this problem? Would this be resolved if people simply followed scientific evidence? If people learned to trust in the scientific method, wouldn’t the markets represent that view? And herein lies the problem. Money.
The reason why the objective reality fails to be represented by the markets is because it is not reality that drives them. It is money. It is not reality that drives businesses. It is money. The main ingredient for the use of the free markets is the one that distorts the whole recipe.
Money is what that allows people to avoid starvation and cold. Starvation and cold are of a higher priority to humans than ideology. So when a human is faced with the choice of lying or starving, it is obvious what they will choose. Thus people will lie and misguide others in their attempt to make money. They will use scientific-looking evidence to muddle the waters for most humans. They will use the money that they make to hammer on, with more and more advertisements and misdirection. As long as there’s money to be made, it’s worth it.
It is not reality that rewards (with money) the valuable actions. It is money that distorts reality.
Debate Link’s David seems to find the suggestion that one should not support a party which goes against everything you believe in, is wrong. He argues that it is mistaken not to give my vote to someone who will use this power to do harm because if I do not do so, the other guy will do even worse than that. He argues that I become morally condemnable for supporting movements who have a chance to do real good because I may allow the really bad guys to do more harm.
But this is simply caving in to a threat. It is not much different than paying caving in to a captor’s demands. The Captor threatens that I should give him what he wants or else the hostage will be harmed. In our situation, the captor is the “lesser evil” party. People like David threaten that we become morally responsible for whatever happens to the hostage (the USA and the world) if we do not give the Democratic party whatever they want, even though we know that caving in will simply give them the incentive to take hostages again. Hell, very often we know that the hostage is going to get it whatever we do.
Further to that, when TBB says that it is worse to keep voting the “Palliative” it is not because we are not curing the disease, it’s because we are making it worse. Dave argues that taking the Palliative is better than letting the disease hurt as much as it would because in the real world, not taking the “Palliative” (ie voting Democrats) means more people would die. But what David fails to see in this example, is that in the long run, taking the “Palliative” will have even worse results than not. Specifically, the patient will die as a whole. In the real world that translates to much more people dying because a Democrat rule did not allow the necessary revolutionary cure to take place when there was still time.
Continuing to vote Democrats instead of struggling for revolutionary communism means that eventually it might be too late for even that. And the suffering people will have then will be bigger than whatever bad shit a revolution would require.
In all of this, it seems that David is desperately trying to spread the blame to everyone regardless of the choices they made. He is not interested in whether Communism is indeed the right choice to take but claims that even if it is, simply because people consider it a fringe ideology, striving for it makes us as much culpable for any deaths as is doing the deed ourselves. In essence a failed attempt to do the right thing should be considered as bad as doing the wrong thing altogether. The only correct action for David is compromise. Do just a little of the bad even though you always have to increase how much bad you do progressively anyway.
And for David, if you’re not a compromiser, you’re as bad as the opposition.
But what me and TBB is for people to stop compromising. To stop caving in to the “captors” demands. We want to charge the captor and free the hostages and we want the hostages to bite and kick to help us. Certainly some of us and some of the hostages may suffer in the process, but it will certainly be less than the number of hostages who would suffer in the future if captors figured out that taking hostages is a risk-free proposition for getting what they want.
The priest said he had never intended to hurt anyone, but it was his duty to distinguish the reality of Jesus from the story of Father Christmas which was a fable just like Cinderella or Snow White.
I got the idea from Ιδιώνυμο of Plagal who is asking people to post their own hooded pictures in opposition to suggestions for criminalizing anonymity through disguise. I do not know how true these suggestions are as no references are provided but I liked the idea nonetheless and decided to join and spread the word.
Personally I’m doing it in solidarity to the Hoodies in the Greek riots who are demonized by the mass media as mindless vandals, violent fringe elements and whatnot. This act, is miniscule by itself compared to all those people who were and are on the streets, in the schools, in the occupied building etc, but it is something I can do from another country.
We are asked from the outset to come up with a flawless system, to guarantee that things will work this way and not that, without mishap or error. If learning to live had to be done this way, then our apprenticeship would never end. Nor would the child ever learn to walk, nor the youngster to ride a bicycle.
This is a classic gripe I have with people inquiring or criticizing communism with me. They ask me to provide a perfect answer for every question they have, and when they can think of holes in my replies, they ask more. If I refuse to keep playing this game, they point this out as proof of an obviously poor-thought system.
Bebook is an e-reader that is capable of reading a vast amount of formats and has a lot of capability. What follows is my review of this product based on my own use and experience with it.
Bebook with a pen for comparison
So it’s been more than a month now since I bought my first e-reader, a Bebook. I was triggered to this purchase when a colleague brought in his Sony Reader to work and happened to bring it to the resident geek (me) to showoff. Needless to say I was blown away as to how far the technology had progressed and I knew immediately that I had to have one myself.
While my first contact with an e-reader was the Sony one which looks very spiffy, I knew I wasn’t going to get that one as I don’t like to support a company which treats its customers as criminals. Instead I looked around to see which system would fit my budget and be as open as possible, which means that it wouldn’t try to lock me in to their own stores and it could read as many formats as possible.
I was initially considering the Iliad but I gave it up due to the hight price tag, my other choice was between the Amazon kindle and the HanLin Ebook but I quickly turned down Amazon once I figured out that I would have to basically only read what I could buy from Amazon. HanLin with its wealth of supported formats and low cost was the obvious choice for me. Bebook is simply the brand of this model I chose as it comes from many different distributors.
So I bought mine for €325 (Which was a bit more expensive than the price displayed on the MobileRead wiki) from the main site for the product and to my surprise it was at my place in less than a week.
So now, after quite a bit of using it, I feel I can provide an informed review from my perspective.
Bebook displaying a pdf page
Reading in General
For someone who reads a lot, reading on the monitor screen is a bit of a pain. It’s not too comfortable for the eyes and it’s not very easy to read when you’re not at your desk. As I like to read on trips, outdoors and on the bed, using a laptop was out of the question. Not only is it not comfortable in all situations, but the battery barely lasts. Not only that, but with bright enough light, you can’t read at all.
The bebook (and anything based on e-ink and e-paper technology like all e-readers these days) allows you to carry a portable book which has most of the benefits of paper, like the ability to read it in the sun, lack of glare and portability and the added benefit of the gigantic amounts of space that are available for electronic storage.
For the casual or avid bookworms among us, it means that you have a book-sized device which can contain thousands of books and you can still read them as you would any other book.
Organization and Use
The books in your Bebook are organized in folders as per a normal hdd. Indeed, when you connect it to your machine, the contents are displayed as a normal USB drive which allows you to use the device without needing any special software or specific OS. The later fact, that I can use my Bebook on my GNU/Linux without any issues whatsoever is a very big plus for me.
Other than your folders and subfolders, the Bebook provides you the ability to look through the recent books you had opened so that you can easily return to what you were reading in case you were navigating elsewhere. And finally since you can put an SD card in, you have the ability to have multiple SD cards for multiple book collections (as if one 16Gb card wouldn’t be enough that is).
Displaying the Chapter Menu
Within books, if they are created properly, you have the capability to jump to chapters and subchapters. Most file formats other support such a function and this means that if you have a book with, say, multiple stories, you can easily use the navigation to jump to the exact one you wish.
As you read books, you have the capability to set electronic bookmarks which allow you to not only save a position you were in so that you can return to it if you need to go out (which is done automatically when you enter a book anyway) but you can also use them to mark specific locations in the book so that you can find the in the future (say to mark a good quote and such). Unfortunately at the moment it does not support highlighting or anything similar which would have been a very useful feature.
You have also various other capabilities like 3 levels of zoom and the ability to jump to the front and end of any book but these are not things you use very often in my experience.
Display and filetypes
The bebook supports quite a lot of filetypes for displaying content but I can’t say that at the moment any of them is perfect. To some degree I’ve discovered issues with most of them, but fortunately they are minor enough to not create a big issue with reading. I’ll list some of the types I’ve tried out and the various problems I’ve encountered.
PDF: A well constructed pdf ebook in displays perfectly and this is the reason why I use this format the most. With the Capability of Open Office to not only export documents to pdf format but also construct metadata such as chapters and comments, I have the ability to create documents for perfect reading pleasure ((I will write up a guide for this so stay tuned if you wish to see my method)) .
Reading in max zoom (landscape)
Unfortunately at this point PDF documents still have an annoying bug where differently formatted text is not displayed if it was not in the page the document opened. This means that If you open a document in a page with no bolded text and later on you find such a text in the document, you will instead be looking at a blank space. There is a workaround but we’re still waiting for the devs to fix this once and for all.
A thing that you should be aware about pdfs in Bebook however is that A4 pdfs (Which is what you will most likely download from non-ebook specific sites) will be displayed with very very small text size, which is practically unreadable. That is because Bebook tries to fit one page of text, into one page of the bebook shrinking the text as appropriate. This is why you need specially prepared pdf documents in order to read comfortably. If you are stuck with A4s however, you can still read them by making use of the the zooming function at maximum. You will need to hold the bebook in a landscape position but that’s all.
RTF: Many people in the fora swear by this format since it does not have the annoying disappearing bug as the pdfs do and you have many more options for zooming. However I do not prefer it since it has another bug which removes all empty lines (making paragraphs hard to distinguish), it does not display images and it does not support chapters.
Still, it’s the easiest format to create files for so it’s certain to remain popular.
Selecting among document types under lamp light
HTML: It is a great benefit that one can easily save a page from the internet into a native html document, tranfer it to his e-reader and then read it at his pleasure. I admit that a major reason why I selected the Hanlin model was that it could read html files without hassle and thus it would allow me to read my rss content on the go.
Of course it’s not without its share of problems. Bebook still has difficulties displaying apostrophes and some other special characters but not everywhere. Some documents I can read without any hassle at all. At the moment, html displaying still needs some ironing but they are generally readable.
FB2: This is a newer format pioneered by Russian science fiction fans. To this day, this is the one I’ve found to be displayed the best of all and giving the most features (many zoom levels, chapters, images and more). It would have been my choice of format but unfortunately it has a major disadvantage for me: I’ve yet to find a decent file converter and most instructions about it seem to be in Russian. As such, I only have to wait until it has matured a bit more and more options exist. Still, as a fan-initiated option, it is certain to get a lot of features that are useful for the reader.
EPUB: This is really what I’d like to use most, as it’s an open format which is aiming to become a standard for ebooks. As a result it has a lot of data included in its XML which can be made use of for the benefit of the reader and it’s certain to remain free from the interests of a corporations, unlike say pdf files.Unfortunately, for all those benefits, the parsing of epub files still needs work from the developers as it seems to have similar problems with html files. Special characters are screwed and text seems to acquire and lose empty spaces seemingly at random. Once this is fixed I’ll certainly start using it though as not only does it support a lot of features like fb2, but I also have an platform free open source convertor and excellent library software available.
Other Tidbits
Look ma. No hands!
Among other things, Bebook stands out for its amazing battery life. Due to the page display technology, no energy is required to display a page once it has been drawn. This means that as long as you don’t perform any functions with the device, it consumes no energy at all. And this is why the developer does not count the battery-life in hours but in page-turns, of which the Bebook can achieve over 9000 before it requires a recharge. Of course, with the pages holding less text than usual due to the size, this does not easily repressent normal books pages but from personal experience, I can say that that means usually about a month of constant use.
One of the things I love with having an e-reader is that I can actually read a book without using my hands. I simply lay it on my feet or blanket in a comfortable position and then I only need to use my arm to switch the page when I’ve finished. Compared to a normal book which you always have to keep in an open and upright position forcefully, this avoids getting tired after a while (as I know I do) from simply keeping your arm in a non-relaxed position.
Another loved feature is how I can now easily put down a book without having to worry about marking my page or accidentally closing it and losing my place. I can either simply put it down and know that when I pick it up, it will simply be waiting for me or, if I’m afraid of pushing a button accidentally, I simply press the key-lock button and put it in my pocket. I can’t explain how much I love that I don’t have to fold page corners or hunt for the bookmark.
Conclusion
For me the Bebook is a perfect tool, especially since I wish to read a lot of texts that already exist in free form online and see no reason to pay for something that is public domain. Add to that the number of interesting online essays that I come in contact with on a daily basis and for which I simply do not have the will to stay on the desk in order to read them, and you can see why it’s practical.
By choosing the Bebook among others, I now know that I can have access to literature without having to appease the manufacturer of my device. I can make use of the best format that fits me and if the original developers prove to slow in improving the firmware, I can simply move to free software alternative which already looks very promising.
Even though this was a generally expensive purchase, I haven’t regretted it for an instant. Each week I discover a new thing that I love about using an e-reader and it has already made me start reading much more.
Hopefully this review has given you a good impression of the device and all the benefits it can provide. If you are considering buying the same model as I have, then you can simply use my email address mail@dbzer0.com as a promo code to get a €25 discount. It’s a bit late now for a Christmas gift, but it would make a great gift (even to yourself) nonetheless.
Just as the wildebeest can scent a lion, the markets can scent the imminence of a recession. The prospect of a recession is the real cause of the panic. Once this happens, nothing can stop it. All the speeches, all the interest rate cuts, and all the handouts to the banks, will have no effect on the financial markets. They will see that the governments and central banks are afraid, and they will draw the necessary conclusions.
The rest of the article is interesting to see the Marxist perspective albeit a bit too propagandistic for my tastes. Still this quote was quite insightful.
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