For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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if you enjoy fun math and want to agitate at work figure out how much everyone would earn if your workplace was ran directly as a market socialist co-op with access to a supply chain (likely also ran as such, so assume there is a small mark up)
assuming it's seniority based and elected management gets a small bump the starting pay rate at my retail job would be like $65k a year.
then you tell people that's what having the means is if they ever ask
idk the flipside of this is that if we shot every landlord in the country + shot the grocery store price gougers + built robust public transit it would be very easy to live off minimum wage. I suppose that is harder for people to imagine in their head (pay stays same or even goes down but cost of living plummets vs an extra 30k in their yearly take home pay), but i have been reading some arguments about wages in the first world vs 3rd world (on twitter tbc lol) and i find it convincing that fighting for increased wages as a first world communist will probably just end up strengthening the LA instead of increasing class consciousness, @[email protected] could explain better, it's a little hard following discussions on twitter because i dont have a twitter account and have to manually remember the communist accounts i like on there and click around looking for stuff lol
Right, value is a measure of abstract labor embodied into commodity, right? There is a dollar amount that represents the total mass of value created in a year, approximates as Global GDP. Wages are prices paid to access that labor-power, and profit is obtained by paying less than that value of labor-power and trying to sell its precipitates closer to the real value. Wages paid, on average, are the portion of the value of labor-power that is required to reproduce said labor power. Workers in total take home about ~51% of global GDP, we can round to a half, workers take home, directly in wages, about half of global GPD. Workers on average, work about 2000 hours per year. So there is an estimate for the global value of labor per hour: (Gobal GDP/(Num Workers * 2k hours)) around ~$13/hr of labor. Since half is taken by workers directly, the global average wage is ~$6.5/hr, meaning that's on average how much it costs to produce a worker in the world today.
Globally, Capital has to purchase an hour of labor for less that $13 to make a profit. So what's going on in the US, where 94% of labor-power is purchased for more than that, where on average, USian labor-power is sold for ~$58 (2023, assuming 1800 hrs, 27T GDP, 62% labor share), where, if the US existed in a vacuum, USian labor-power is worth in wages ~$85?
What's going on?
Well, specifically, because the US Bourgeoisie, the Imperialists main bloc, are monopolists, they get to command the prices labor-power over many more workers than just those that exist in the US. They purchase many times more labor-power in the Global South than they do from US (Global North in general), and they also purchase it for cheap, duress prices, significantly lower than even the average wage (which represents 50% exploitation). They purchase so much of this labor-power at such a low price, and make such big profits from it, that they can over-pay a numerically smaller group of workers in the Imperialist countries. It makes a lot more sense to take more surplus-value from very distant workers who barely know you exist, vs the ones who live across town. If the draw from the distant workers is large enough, then even a bulk of workers near "home" for the Imperialists can be given, or exact from them, prices for labor-power more expensive than its worth, but, by keeping them close and satiated, the overall systems is more profitable than it would be if all of the workers in the world were paid below value. Since the Imperialists made commodities from the distant workers cheaper by paying them lower wages, when those commodities are transformed into other commodities, the Imperialists account the value added as created "at home", so the GDP of the US appears to be more significant than the actual value of labor-power it contains, because it is accounting the labor of the distant workers as its own. Dependent, smaller Bourgs are let in to keep them from competing with the Imperialists, by offering them the same prices as the Monopolists are able to obtain globally, so this allows Capitalists without a global labor force to match the high wages paid to the "home" workers of Imperialists. This is why doing such calculations within a US factory floor, can produce numbers that look like above.
So what does this mean for wage struggle relations between the GN and GS workers? Well, when one side struggles and gets back a proportion of profits, the Capitalists as a class have created a two-tier labor hierarchy, protected by deadly borders. They have a tendency of shifting the burden to the other workers. GN wages tend to go up, GS wages tend to go down. Real productivity gains in the collective production of humanity increase all wages, or the pool of available value, up over time. However, the gap between GN and GS wages are widening year over year. These wages aren't abstract either, they are ultimately how much labor-power workers are able to purchase. So in the end, the wage gap is what allows GN workers to consume more labor-power, in calories, cars, meat, clean water, roads, gasoline, electricity. Anyway, this balancing act puts GN and GS workers in contradiction, and ultimately, profitability is determined mostly by the ability to exploit GS labor in much larger quantities. To actually attack profits, a struggle must be coordinated internationally to ensure the GS workers aren't taking the burden for GN struggles, and that the Imperialists can't just pass on the burden to the other group. Generally, the global working class contradiction is only lessened by GS struggles, because it's the small minority of workers of the GN who are already receiving a share of profits globally.
appreciate it! there was some point you made too that raising the minimum wage actually helps the top of the LA remain entrenched thru landlordism and that by focusing on land reform (i.e. landback) it might be possible to split off some of the lesser earners of the LA or something like that correct?
Oh yeah. Not only landlordism, but landownerism, people who care about "property values". Half of land owners are actively workers and half of landlords came from the working class. Overall, it's like the renting LA is paying dues to the land-market so that it is valuable when they buy into it. Not like this is a conscious action of individuals, it's just how the relationship between rents and land values works in the US.
The boss was lazy and dumped food costing onto me and another guy. I know that, I know the prices and I can make a good guess at rent and bills
Only cucks don't want to own the means of productions.
But then again, if the world really works like ''owning what you work on'', Ted Cruz would be dying in the streets like a worm
Lmao I love that Ted Cruz is so much of a broken record that the one uses ‘communist’ in an appropriate context everyone thinks he’s just talking shit
I love that some of the modern McCarthyists are so bad, that when they call someone a communist who actually is a socialist of some description, no one takes them seriously.
McCarthy is rolling in his grave
You stand to obtain a lot more autonomy and fire your boss
I would like to own more things. Sounds good. Thank you.
Transcript
What the purpose is about this entire project, it's not simply to raise class consciousness but to win socialism—and obviously raising class consciousness is a critical part of that—but making sure that we have candidates that both understand that and are willing to put that forward at every which moment that they have, at every which opportunity that they're given. We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism.
There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it's BDS, right, or whether it's the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment. And what I want to say is that it is critical that the way that we organize, the way that we set up our, you know, set up our work and our priorities, that we do not leave any one issue for the other. That we do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for, but that we are doing both of these things in tandem. Because it is critical for us to both meet people where they're at and to also organize for what is correct and for what is right and to ensure that over time we can bring people to that issue.
The ramifications of victory here is the difference between life and death for so many of our brothers, sisters and family beyond the binary across this borough of Queens. It's the difference between having cash bail anymore. It's the difference between having sex work being decriminalized and not. And with every battle that we fight as socialists, we need to remember what the stakes are and ground ourselves in them and why those stakes are important and critical to us as individuals.
remembering a couple years back when they were trying out "maoist" as a new insult because they'd already ground "communist" into meaninglessness
and then they immediately torpedoed it with the ridiculous phrase "maoist bicycle" 
lmao this is like that rennaisance picture of god and adam I love it
It's a section of the Sistine Chapel painted by Michaelangelo.
The Creation of Adam Friedland
lmao people on here were calling THIS guy a lib? Fucking christ I know we are all cynical and been burned but shit folks what more can you ask for from an NYC mayoral candidate?
Lots of comparisons to AOC but I’ve never heard her use the phrase “seizing the means of production,” let alone referring to it as the end goal. I didn’t trust Ted Cruz or AG here and went and watched the video for myself. It’s phrased slightly differently but he says it and he says it casually as if it’s a given. Maybe we’re just not used to the dog whistles. Maybe people are put off, understandably, by him not wanting to say on TV in front of a bunch of normies that Israel must be destroyed. But Mamdani seems to be on a different level from the NYC socdems we’ve seen.
Bookmarking all yall for a year from now
‘You stupid fucks, how dare you be hopeful about anything ever’
Putting in quotes some shit I didn’t say. Temper your expectations
I love kicking puppies.
I can't believe you would say something like that! 
Temper your expectations
then just say that instead, "Bookmarking all yall for a year from now" is dripping with condescension and anticipation of getting to do a "i told you so" to everyone posting about mamdani
i'll take the enlightened centrist^TM^ position in that calling him an outright lib like aoc doesnt really seem accurate with his past public comments and even the campaign he ran. but even assuming once he gets elected that he wont get utterly ratfucked in some way during his term (or even he turns out to be the most brilliant demsoc ever and manages to outplay the attempted ratfuckery i would be shocked if he were not imprisoned/assassinated at that point), isnt hopium it's copium. i also think there's plenty of stuff to criticize him about and i think people have been fawning over him here a little too hard, no im not saying he should have gone on stage and shouted death to isr*el but i also think he could have been more advesarial to the media when they kept calling him an antisemite.
he could have been more adversarial to the media when they kept calling him an antisemite.
I’m glad we agree.
I’m pretty sure hexbear is aware of the pitfalls of electoralism.
Half of us on the site are 1 major life event from deleting ourselves, just let us have undue optimism for once ffs
You wouldn’t know it given the reactions on this site. And I’m just happy we agree on “undue”. This is verbatim how people we doing AOC on r/cth however many years ago
Personally, I'm mostly excited about a potential new wave of radicalized liberals after a likely ratfuck by Democrats (like they did to India Walton, when they worked with Republicans during the Buffalo general election). This would further damage the reputation of an already highly unpopular Democratic Party among young people. I've already seen a few of them being ready to give up on the Dems, as they see Zohran as some sort of last attempt at trying to "convince" the party to move left.
I’ve been looking at this race that way as well. Although my more pessimistic side thinks it’s starting to feel like the cycle in America is:
“new age cohort enters the electorate —> tried electoralism, gets fucked over —> a certain percent radicalise, a certain percent give up on politics, a certain percent surrender to the status quo —> a new age cohort enters the electorate”
Obama 2008, Sanders 2016, (potentially) Mamdani 2025… are these moments of disillusion radicalising more and more of a percentage of the whole population against electoralism? Or is it just a succession of new generations learning the same lesson over and over again?
Call me old fashioned but it’s probably deteriorating material conditions that are going to radicalise more people in the long run.
Call me old fashioned but it’s probably deteriorating material conditions that are going to radicalise more people in the long run.
Definitely true, however you're going to want a portion of the population "pre-heated" by these electoral defeats so they can do some vanguardism when the time is right. This is true even if it is stagnant and cyclical, like you propose. I don't think I fully agree myself, but I could see it.
The true revolutionary action will happen at the periphery of the empire. If some Demsocs create internal strife and discontentment in the core, it allows for more opportunities for our comrades on the ground in the more materially impoverished areas to make some moves.
Don't worry, this is the election that'll do it
Some of us are hopeful to watch the dreams of us who are more liberal than us get crushed right in front of us. Obviously the situation with AOC and Bernie was radicalization fuel for many of us. The higher Zohran rises, the harder he falls (or succeeds somehow). This is exciting to see!
I think there’s a difference between people hoping for radicalization and those cheering on the campaign and holding onto the hope that he “succeeds somehow”
There isn't, as far as our community is concerned, it's a win-win situation even if one is more likely then the other. I am confident that people on Hexbear did not decide to forget about the weaknesses of electoralism last week. Maybe in other "leftist" communities or something that's a problem, but I have faith in our comrades to have a balanced perspective, even if there's a lot of excitement built in to what's happening in the immediate term.
Also important is that even though he is not the most anti-zionist perspective out there, his victory represents an electoral rejection of Zionism by the NYC electorate, which bodes positively for the continued decline of popular support for Israel in general. Anti-zionism is only going to continue to gain momentum as they use it as a cudgel to attack a candidate that has a lot of popular policies.
We know the US has and will support Israel in the face of its unpopularity among its population, but the process is in motion already. Force the state to respond and shut it down! Or, once again, if they fail to shut it down, maybe LA or someplace shits out an even more outspoken local/state level candidate.
No question that the propaganda machine is incredibly effective, but it can't stand up to "you want a candidate who runs on/lies about materially beneficial policies and wants to actively resist trump? Well you're a bunch of communist antisemites" from the establishment. Once again, the higher Zohran rises (and Zohran 2.0 wherever that person comes from), the harder he's going to fall with a ton of liberals looking on (60% of whom favor an overhaul of Democratic Party leadership).
It's an effective propaganda opportunity to gas him up to liberals and get it he attention on him. It's a fantastic learning experience!
Disagree, but so it goes. I hope you’re right
ML(AR/S)M(PM) doing a PPW, anything less is liberalism.
Best I can do is MLM3W doing a PPB.
don't threaten me with a good time
TFW "good luck" is a curse to anyone but the capitalist class.
