*I am a socialist of the heart.*

Ah your first mistake Passy. The heart pumps blood, nothing
more. :)

Clearly you have done well by capitalism, by what you write, you are
in your mid 50s and ready to retire. Life is a breeze!

Yes, capital can be destroyed in market economics, but capital
can be created too. The most permanent thing in life is change,
get used to it.

Look at it this way Passy. If you make say bottle tops and you
are pretty useless at doing so, others can do it better, faster,
cheaper, why should consumers subsidise your enterprise?
For that is essentially what you want and look how well state
run factories went in China. Even they have turned to market
economics, despite their communist ideology. The reason is
quite simple, it works.

If profit rates fall, so innovate or shut it down. One of the
things that competition creates is the need for innovation.
I constantly marvel at new products, where some guy has really
thought through the design to the last detail, unlike some of
the shoddy rubbish we'd be sold, when we had high tariff barriers.

Consumers are winners and workers are consumers.

*They are driven by profit to the exclusion of all else.*

Actually not so. Look what the worlds two richest men are doing,
after having made money. Gates and Buffet are giving it all to
charity! What you have in humans is still a deep hunter-gatherer
instinct. 500 grandmothers back, we still lived in caves.
Going out to make a killing was our way of life. Today people
play and follow sport for the same reasons, or make money for
the same reasons. $ is simply the way they measure how well
they are doing. But when the challenge is gone, there is nothing
more to prove, those people often become huge philanthropists.

Passy “Look, I am not trying to be disrespectful, but this appears to me to be a dialogue of the deaf. I can say as many times as I want that stalinism is not socialism (with a set of arguments to justify that) and Col will reply that it is.”

My point is not that Stalinism is Socialism, it clearly is not

BUT

Socialism has, CONSISTENTLY fallen under the jackboot of tyranny, from Stalin and a myriad of others all the way to Mugabe,

To the matter of deafness, are you ‘signing’ for yourself in that statement?

However, I do respect your passion Passy.

It is something we share (despite our differences) and the world would be a far less interesting place without it. My values respect your right to choose your passion, socialism would ultimately see mine outlawed as anti-social.

If we are having a ‘show and tell’, I was an art student at 17 but “switched” and became a qualified accountant by 22 (5 years which shaped me) and have worked for myself for the past 20 years in the area of financial advise, systems and financial prediction, helping in steering the energy of people who want to achieve better outcomes.

I believe the most effective “driver” in this world is personal energy, be it expressed as self interest, passion or whatever.

The old adage “one volunteer is worth ten pressed men” sums it up perfectly.

You will achieve a lower level of output results (monetary or otherwise) with the same resources when they are collective directed by “representatives”, compared to when they are “managed with a personal interest”.


The passion of self interest (volunteer), is lacking in “representatives” (pressed men) who are distracted to jockey for political power, unauthorized or unwilling to take the bold risks needed to achieve excellence.

Passy, focusing on the “equitable distribution of wealth” misses the point that

Government is a supporting / enabling process, subordinate to the electorate;

not something designed to direct the electorates freewill and energy.

Yabby and Col Rouge

You make the valid point that from the point of view of individual capital, the drive to innovate, use better technology etc can be profitable. But from the point of view of the system as a whole it is this very drive that creates the conditions for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

I think there are two aspects here. one is the boom/bust cycle (something Marx identified many years ago). Becaase capitalism is unplanned and decisions are made by unelected people who own and or control the means of production, when an area becomes very profitable investment flows into it. Since this investment is unplanned, the result is over-investment and this drives down profitability in the area and there is over-production. The boom becomes a slump.

The second feature is the periodic crises which grip capitalism. I remember last year stirring in the ATO and talking about Krontiev long waves - which I think are not valid - and ended up arguing (to make people think outside their comfort zones) that we were heading for a major slump some time around 2010, give or take a few years. The evidence?

1890, 1930, 1970 (to some extent)so another forty years on was 2010.

Leaving aside the fortuitous forty connection it seems clear to me based on historical evidence that capitalism does experience cataclysmic economic (and military) crises regularly. The question economically is why, and I think stagnant profit rates explain the present crisis, as my article tries to argue.

The show and tell stuff was trying to understand where people's views come from but not in a crude deterministic way (since Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Marx and Engels were not workers but intellectuals, and in Engels case a boss.)

The guiding principle here to my mind is Marx's comment that it is not consciousness which determines being but being which determines consciousness.