Incredibly fucking ironic that the country that constantly wanks about the Boston Tea Party is now trying to tax other countries without representation

It’s still there. It only plays once, so either open an incognito tab or clear your cookies

Sometimes his arm just does that

lmao

Yep, no message in my inbox. I’ve had past comments removed, so I know what to look for.

Someone could try VPN to outside the US and see if that changes things.

I tried it and my comment has NOT been removed after a few minutes. I’m also in Europe. Perhaps it’s only happening in US?

This makes me sad, but I didn’t expect much better from the situation

Wow that’s… an escalation, to say the least.

My opinion is that fiat money can and does do its own thing, but within certain bounds that are enforced by the law of value. Money, even by fiat, must in the last resort always point to actual value, a real commodity with embodied labor. Otherwise it cannot function as a store of value and the economy collapses. However, there is a non-trivial span of time in which this detachment can exist before a crisis. So in this span of time, the ruling class gets to set in motion more capital than really exists as money. Money becomes more and more credit money, ie expected future money. Money in hand right now is therefore temporally linked to future production and earns its character of “burning a hole in one’s pocket.” Modern monetary policy exists in that squishy, speculative space of expected future value production. Therefore money (and the economy as a whole) must always grow exponentially lest a crisis occur.

you can probably just toss Modern Monetary theory into the garbage

I don't know much about MMT, but I would pump the brakes a little bit. I don't think chapter 3 of Capital says everything there is to say about money as it exists today. Marx does a good job showing the essence of money and how money is indispensable within capitalist society. Yet this analysis doesn't constrain money from developing into an ever more complex and obfuscating form, partly detaching from value and taking on a life of its own. Capitalism did not emerge from thin air but out of older forms of society. The money form which we see today has a sort of genetic heritage which can be traced back precisely to precapitalist forms of money. Modern money is a bastardized form of primitive money which capitalism has reappropriated for its own purposes.

Money could, through the course of historical development, acquire new functions which adhere themselves, like parasites, to the relatively simple form of money laid out in Capital. This is probably what you mean by saying fiat money is like when a money commodity debases itself; the next logical question, then, is precisely how this debased form of money works, all the while understanding that money also must satisfy its functions as measure of value, as store of value, as medium of exchange, and as means of payment.

In this way there could be things to learn from heterodox theories like MMT. To what extent can fiat money diverge from real production before the law of value asserts itself and forces a monetary crisis? Why does fiat money arise in the first place? Does fiat money help capitalism, or accelerate its demise? It seems to me that, regardless of whether mass-printed money actually adds value in circulation, it might not really matter as long as people treat it as though it is rooted in real commodities. This would mean that a government could actually print new currency and stimulate the economy as though it had actually created new value. This would heighten the likelihood and severity of a monetary crisis, but can that be deferred arbitrarily far in the future with clever policy?

There's a lot I don't know about this topic. I believe Michael Hudson is a proponent of MMT — though not necessarily in all its variations — and I believe he has a pretty strong grasp of Marx, having read all volumes of Capital including "volume 4" Theories of Surplus Value.

Some of the commenting is also dauntingly sophisticated and I hope we can also casually chat about how a weeks material felt or just come in and state that it's done. Might be just me, but I wanted to voice this anyway.

Yea, I might have come in too hot with the esoteric debates in the previous threads. I’m gonna try to keep closer to what’s strictly in the weekly reading. I very much also want to just discuss the reading casually; it doesn’t need to be high stakes.

I think this week’s reading is tough, so I wouldn’t be surprised if others are struggling and that is slowing some progress.

I think that I couldn’t do better than Marx did in “Poverty of Philosophy”. Actually the reason I’m reading Proudhon is firstly to evaluate the fairness of Marx’s critique, and secondly to understand why Marx felt it was necessary to respond in terms of Marx’s own theories

You have nothing to be ashamed of. No one’s career path is linear. You draw on all experiences as you move forward, and I’m confident you can use this knowledge to provide insight that others will not have.

Most people change careers 2-3 times in their life, that doesn’t mean they start over entirely from scratch. I had a coworker who was notoriously the brilliant “numbers” guy — turns out he spent most of his career as a chef, of all things, and had only recently switched.

I studied astrophysics in college but my job is not remotely related to that. Yet it shaped my ability to analyze and problem-solve in a way that a traditional path to this job wouldn’t offer. Not that I love my job or anything, but just underscoring the point that education is always a step forward, even if you can’t yet see where you are heading.

I assumed this was fake

It comes from a broader trend of shopping hauls. E.g. someone buys clothes and shows off their outfits for social media, or you go to a bookstore and talk about the books you bought — your “haul”

SMELANIA?

Casting tie-breaking votes says nothing about the Vice President.

Most humble president

DeepL