Musk makes around 30 million dollars per hour.

The average payout of the US lottery is 150 million dollars.

Which means Musk gets to win the lottery 4 times per day.

Or he gets paid the hourly wages of 4 000 000 minimum wage US workers per hour.

Anything in particular from Parenti?

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So back in the 1920s, some German, Austrian and French philosophers (for the most part) advanced what is known as The Frankfurt School, or Critical Theory.

The core idea is:

• All systems have a structure of relationship, and a collective knowledge/culture

• These relationships always benefit the dominant group within the system and allow the suppression of the subordinate groups.

• The collective knowledge/culture is curated by the dominant group to further enable the oppression of the subordinate groups.

• To change a system, one has to identify the relationships and the pillars of knowledge/culture and challenge those first.

While influenced by Marxist theory, most of the Frankfurt School main figures had declared their thought as an alternative to “orthodox” communism (and years later the “authoritarianism of the USSR”). Supposingly, their effort was to move away from the economic focus of Marxism and focus more on the social aspects of Marxism. Most of them espouse post-modernist and liberal elements in their writings.

Personally, I find them a bit too revisionist for my taste, but I wouldn’t discount them as allies in at least some important issues. I also have a problem with their methodology. The central tenet is to assume everything is wrong, ignore existing methodologies, come up with your own, see if it works. In other words, re-inventing the wheel until something sticks. As a result, critical theory has produced a lot of quite ridiculous stuff over the years, along with some useful and novel ways to think about things. I can’t deny it works sometimes, but as a scientist, it rubs me the wrong way when people try to apply it to the hard sciences. I can’t attest to this bit, but it is said that in the US critical theory is a bit like anarchism in the UK, i.e. it’s promoted as the cool alternative to Marxism-Leninism.

Critical theory is prominent in cultural studies, and critical culture theory has had some influence in the writings of the latest wave of feminism. Critical race theory has been well adapted by black liberation thinkers in the US. Critical theory writers have had some very good arguments to make about liberalism and its failures to effect social justice.

People like Jordan Peterson, Candece Owens, Charlie Kirk, Sargon of Akkad, etc, have used critical theory as a strawman to advance their own arguments. Mainly, because it’s easy to make it seem like a conspiracy theory, where The Frankfurt School had hatched a plan to destroy Western civilization by capturing its culture. When rightoids argue that their films, TV series, video games, books, etc, are being filled with homosexuality, negative stereotypes for white males, representation, etc etc, they are usually alluding to the part of critical theory that talks about challenging the culture of a system, and that this is a result of a conspiracy between philosophers, university professors and their student graduates. It’s also far easier to debunk various aspects of critical theory, than to debunk Marx, therefore they tend to spread the idea that all leftists are Frankfurt Schoolers and that this is Marxism. (NOTE: If you ever had the misfortune to witness the debate between Zizek and Jordan Peterson, you might remember well that Peterson has absolutely no idea what Marx had said about anything, despite claiming he spent his entire youth reading Marx).

On the other hand, people like Jackson Hinkle use cultural theory in a similar vein. Jackson Hinkle tries to present critical theory as the prevailing ideology on “the left”, and then pushes his own silly revisionist and reactionary rhetoric, while presenting himself as “a part of the progressive left”.

Right-wingers exaggerate its influence, interpose it on anyone who disagrees with them, and paranoically feel that it’s what convinces people to be have any other sexual orientation or identity from the one they approve of. Funnily enough, they probably know more about critical theory than the average leftist.

That’s an extremely simplistic view of what natural selection is. I would further add that they probably don’t understand it.

Biologist here.

If we were meant to be selfish and lazy and arrogant and greedy, then we wouldn’t be forming tribes and packs and groups and villages and towns and cities and governments and militaries and social groups and so on and so on. We wouldn’t have survived. We would have been living solitary lives like male lions. Instead, most people naively look at a bacterium eating until it bursts, or a cat hissing at another cat for no apparent reason, or a praying mantis eating another praying mantis that it just copulated with, and we think “oh that’s exactly how nature is meant to work, all around, no exceptions”. In truth, when you look at most vertebrate animals, we all exhibit varying degrees of cooperativeness, all powered by empathy and fear of social pressure (for when empathy fails). Most of all vertebrates, this is exhibited by mammals. And most of all mammals, you see it in primates. And most of all primates (by very few degrees in some cases by the way), you see it in humans.

Humans specifically evolved to be cooperative. Our cooperative nature is what gave us an edge to survive until the beginning of history. You can find many examples and anthropological evidence, but the simplest one is how Homo sapiens (more cooperative and able to maintain bigger groups) managed to out-survive the Neanderthals (less cooperative and spread into much smaller groups).

You can observe it in our physiology. Our brains have an extremely developed system of empathetic neurons. We feel the plight of others, and our natural instinct is to help them. This would be a pretty big disadvantage if the idea is that selfishness wins the day. You can see this in action very clearly in children of all ages:

• When one baby cries, all other babies in the room start crying too. If one is in danger, perhaps we are all in danger. Let’s cry together to save ourselves.

• When a child’s toy breaks, often another child will come along and offer them another toy (free of charge too). We don’t want to see others be sad, because that makes us sad.

• If you ask a child “Would you prefer that you get ice cream, but your brother doesn’t, or would you prefer that both of you get ice cream?” They’ll almost always answer “Both”. Even if we don’t stand to lose anything, we don’t want to make decisions that make others suffer unnecessarily.

• If a teacher asks a teenager to tell on another teenager about some minor transgression, they’ll almost always refuse, even if they don’t like the other person. Mutual support is ingrained in us. We don’t want to let down other members of our group, because group cohesion is more important than individual success. Even in the most selfish sense, we instinctively fear that the rest of the group will shun us for bringing harm to one of our own.

You can also see it in adults even. Every time there’s a disaster in some far corner of the world, and the calls come for help, along with the videos and posts showing the desperation and fear, then total strangers suddenly rush to embrace the victims across the internet by volunteering, sending aid, messages of support, or even the mere act of checking up again to see how things turned out.

What happens rather is that we have built a system that systematically dismantles our cooperative instincts in favour of individualism. This is one reason we all feel unhappy at such high rates. Every time we see a beggar on the street and turn the other way, every time we hear of someone else’s problems and we choose to ignore it, every time we come at a crossroads where we choose between our careers and the well-being of ourselves and others around us, every single time we go into battle against our nature and we kill a bit of ourselves. And then we convince ourselves that the mutilated and unrecognized carcass that our psyche has become, that that abomination is how we always were and how all humans are. It makes it just a bit more bearable to live with ourselves.

Take away this system, and suddenly you can raise new generations that act perfectly well according to the human nature that brought us all the way to here. Again, this is easily observable. Travel in less developed countries away from the centers of capitalism, and see how people in a community behave to each other. Not just day-to-day politeness, but actually how their system is set up around cooperation and mutual aid. Upbringing is a key we constantly ignore when we discuss this “human nature”.

For rich people, the effects of this psychic self-mutilation are even worse. The upper classes convince themselves that they are somehow better than everybody else. That they are almost an entirely different species. That those who toil under them don’t deserve anything better. That the rich are rich because they are the smartest, bestest, gentlest, humanest humans to be around. And then they raise their children to believe this shit from birth. And then they raise their children, and so on. The result is that one way or the other, the rich and powerful separate themselves from the rest of the group. They make their own group. And then they see how small their group is, and how big our group is, and they start getting paranoid on what we will do to them for abusing us. Actually they are not afraid because they are abusing us. They are afraid because they see us the way they see the rest of the world. They are selfish, greedy and moralless and so they think we are too. They think we are out to get them and steal their stuff, the same way they operate. Which gives them even more reason to abuse us, suppress us and lie to us about a variety of stuff like “it is our god-given right to amass this much wealth” or “it’s human nature”. And that is exactly when societies break down.

Initially, Ancient Rome had a vast area around the city designated as public land. This land didn’t just belong to the state, it belonged to everyone. This was really good arable land too. So every family in Rome, be it patrician, plebeian or proletarian was given a certain lot from this land to farm and work as they see fit in order to support their family. Furthermore, another big portion of this land was kept owner-less and was tended by slaves (unfortunately) and paid labourers to produce food which was allotted to the entire population of the city. This land could actually produce enough food to feed about 200 000 people every year. Extremely big and extremely fertile land. And no family could own more than a tiny fraction of this land.

So for around 500 years this set-up was maintained, until some patrician decided to run a scheme where they’d use the names of dead soldiers to allot plots of public land to their “miraculously alive” persons, and through them he would own the land. He then wanted to acquire even more land by using gangs of thugs to convince other families to sell rights of work on their lots to other fictitious personas he created. Pretty soon all the other patricians followed suit (for fear of missing out). About 50 years later (150 BC) most of this land was in the hands of the patricians and everybody knew it. Efforts to reverse this land theft were met with brutal repression (Michael Parenti covers this in his book on Julius Caesar if you are interested). We are talking actual death squads roaming free through the city and killing thousands within a few days. Eventually this is what led to the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire about 300 years later. It wasn’t the inherent greed of all Romans that did this (EDIT: Actually the vast majority of Romans, including some of the aristocrats were constantly banding together to fight this; you know… cooperating). It was rather the greed of a select few individuals, who had set up a system where they had all the power and all the means to act upon this greed.

Your friend sounds like a very bad biologist to me. Probably a biochemist :P

Even if a country didn’t/doesn’t engage directly with colonialism (which Sweden and Norway did, just not as successfully as others), they still benefit from exploiting the global South by being part of the Western system. Their banks finance and benefit from exploitation of the global South. Their industries are fueled by cheap natural resources imported directly or indirectly from the global South. These resources are maintained cheap by constantly destabilizing and puppeteering countries of the global South. For example, if the United States does a coup in Equador to acquire cheap lithium for Tesla’s car batteries, then Finland (notorious for importing cheap metal ore, then processing it and exporting the refined product) could just as easily benefit by bidding for and buying a part of the cheap lithium, through a small “cost of imperialism” fee.

The only country that somewhat fuels its social democracy through its own means is Norway, which relies on the North Sea oil & gas operations to do so.

Norway is host to a whole slew of Western instruments, including the organization that promoted Juan Guaido to be the “interim” president of Venezuela.

is imperialism a necessary precondition for a fiat system to flourish?

Historically it seems so. Though we need to be careful when examining this, because there was a very particular course of events that led to the current world system of currency, and probably a very particular intent behind it.

In Marx’s time, the primary proponents of a fiat currency were the Americans. The US was competing with the English (and French, Dutch and Spanish to an extend) for control of the Americas, as well as colonial expanses in the Pacific and Asia. All these nations were considered to be major powers (i.e. imperialist empires), with extensive economic systems. The US was at a serious disadvantage against all others (except the Spanish who were a waning colonial empire in the process of collapsing):

• The Europeans had extensive and established economies of scale, fueled by cheap resources from their colonies and by cheap labour from both their colonies and their forced urbanization efforts in the past century, while the US was still in the process of transitioning from an agricultural and resource economy to an industrial economy. The US tried to fix this by creating its own cheap labour force through extensive campaigns to attract European immigrants (slogans like “land of the free”, “land of opportunity”, “the American dream”, etc were born in this era for this very purpose).

• The Europeans had extremely strong currencies owing to their industrialization. They were the primary sources of finished goods in most forms across the globe, and the primary recipients of raw materials from across the globe, making them the prime movers of trade. Coupled with their colonies, most trade occurred through their currencies. In addition, and in particular the English, they were the major lenders of all other minor powers. This meant they could not only easily control any inflationary tendencies of their currencies by giving out national loans and controlling trade and prices, they could also keep expanding their economies at rates and sizes the US could not hope to match. On the contrary, the US was able to produce comparable number of goods, but had no external markets to export them to. This meant that the US was plagued by constant crises of overproduction, wild cycles of inflation and deflation, and no means to recover besides lending from the very European powers they wanted to be rid of.

• The US started out with a representative currency (like was the trend at the time). For example, George Washington is known to have been particularly opposed to attempts to establish a fiat currency, because he understood that this would turn the farmers and labourers into debt slaves for a small subset of land-owners and industrialists. Not that he was abhorred by the morality of the idea, but he knew that this would doom any attempts to rapidly develop the country from a colonial nation into a self-sufficient major power. However, the US lacked the gold reserves to actually do this. They knew however that there were big gold deposits scattered all over the country (many in Indian territories) and made a concerted effort to send pioneers to such areas (like California and Colorado) to mine this gold and sell it to the government. The effort was a success, but the great influx of gold created a massive inflation that the US couldn’t really recover from until the early 1900s, when they banned free gold prospecting and heavily regulated the mining, selling and ownership of gold, as well as its use as a secondary form of transactional currency.

When WW1 happened the US managed, for the first time, to gain an economic advantage over its competitors, who were busy slaughtering each other in France and elsewhere. The US snuggled into the niche of primary exporter, as the Europeans were converting their industries into arms manufactories, and their labour forces into soldiers and then into fertilizer. Simultaneously, they started lending to the warring Europeans. There’s a whole slew of literature on how Woodrow Wilson, and others, were attempting to prolong the fighting in Europe in order to continue reaping the benefits.

Then after WW2, the US found itself the nation all its allies (and the defeated too) would rely upon to rebuild them. Everybody’s nation (and industry) was in ruins, vast portion of their population was dead or incapable of work, and their economies were in tatters. The US had a large and capable labour force, proven itself able to be the factory of the world, had a vast merchant fleet ready to carry goods across the globe, and was holding every other country in massive debt. A debt they quickly tried to grow by devising such schemes as the Marshall plan. This is when the first foundations were laid for a fiat currency.

As US dollars became more prominent in world trade, the English pound was falling rapidly. Eventually in the 1970s, the Americans were able to cut a deal with every other major nation in the world, to transition to a fiat currency. Nobody could object, because if the Americans decided to go ahead at it alone, they would all be in trouble due to their massive debts to the US, and their reliance on trade with the US. Soon everybody followed along, with very few exceptions.

But this is where things get complicated. Because immediately after this, the Americans established a deal with the Arab states (and through them with OPEC), that all oil sales from now on would occur in dollars. Meaning, if the French wanted to buy oil from the Arabs, they couldn’t do it with francs anymore. They’d have to exchange their francs for dollars, and then go to the Arabs to buy the oil with the dollars they got. Meaning, that the dollar fiat currency was no longer so much fiat. It was backed by the price of oil. Which the Arabs controlled through rate of production. For which the Americans paid with military and diplomatic protection of the Arab states. This is why the dollar became a reserve currency of the world. As the world needed to always have dollar reserves to buy the oil it needed, this meant it became convenient to conduct all trade of all other goods in dollars too. And what do you do with all these dollars you now have sitting in your vault? You could exchange them back for your own currency again (by paying fees to do so), but it would be more profitable to go into the US and use them to invest in US bonds, US stocks and US businesses (without paying any fees because you are already using dollars to do dollar things). Which solved the problem that Marx predicted: Inflation was no longer an internal problem for the infinite money printing in the US, because the dollar itself became a commodity to be exported.

In summary, yes you need to be a pretty strong imperialist force to establish a fiat currency. But we should recognize that the US doesn’t really have a fiat currency as such. Everyone else does, with all the problems it entails. But the US has a sort of a mixed commodity/representative currency. The dollar itself IS a commodity that is exchanged for other commodities worldwide. No other currency can claim that achievement. At the same time, it is backed by the world economy, as its price depends on the price of oil, which affects the price of everything else. Which is why the US is so intent on two things: Global dominance of trade and economic output, and oil.

Marx talks more about fiat currency in the (unfinished) Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, which is more or less his notes for writing Capital later on.

Fiat currency is money backed by nothing, except a decree by the local government that the bills have value. This is the system the world uses today (known as the Bretton-Woods system).

Back in Marx’s time, most nations, and especially the major ones, used representative currency, which is money that represents a government’s physical gold reserves (or other similar commodities, like silver, but usually the main commodity was gold).

Theoretically, in a representative currency system, you can only print as much money as your reserves. If you want to print more, you need to either go into debt so you can buy more gold, or you will need to debase the value of your currency (i.e. say that 1 pound = 1 gram of gold today, but from tomorrow onwards 10 pounds = 1 gram of gold). In a fiat currency, you don’t have to worry about the value of your gold reserves, so you can just print money when it is needed. For example, if you want to stimulate the economy.

In Marx’s time, the economists supporting the fiat currency system would argue that since people still mined for gold, the amount of gold was constantly increasing, and its price was decreasing. This created a naturally increasing inflation that was hard to control. With a fiat currency you wouldn’t have to worry about that at all, since the government could control inflation by just deciding not to print more money (at least that was the general idea). And it would make the economy more robust and able to deal with quick crises demanding quick influx of cash, like a crop failure. There were also some arguments about easier trade, etc.

As usual, Marx correctly predicts that, because fiat currency is backed by nothing except a government’s decree that it is legal tender, then there is no limitation on how much currency can actually be printed/minted. In fact, this is precisely the reason for which a government creates a fiat currency. Hence, as governments won’t be able to resist the urge to print in a nigh unlimited fashion, inflation will rise perpetually, causing an equally perpetual increase on the cost of food, products, housing, clothing, etc, as well as the source of resources, machinery, labour, etc.

This will affect both the proletariat and the bourgeois, but in different ways.

The proletariat will see the value of their wages diminish every year, and will face an increasing need to enter into debt in order to survive. On the other hand, the bourgeois will see the value of their investments and deposits also diminish every year, and will demand constantly an expansion of the economy, so as to minimize the effects of inflation.

For a nation without colonies, dependencies, protectorates, and spheres of influence, expansion of the economy means national indebtedness to other bigger powers, so as to have the funds to actually expand the economy. For a major power, expansion of the economy means using its military and diplomatic leverage to expand its influence, invade, colonize, so as to open for itself more markets, and acquire cheaper resources.

For all nations, expanding the economy means finding ways to squeeze even more profit from the productive processes, which means putting more pressure on the proletariat, forcing them to work harder, while compensating them for even less.

Simultaneously, inflation will negatively impact banks the most, as banks rely the most on the value of their currency reserves (which is diminishing due to inflation), and on the value of their assets, i.e. debts (which is similarly diminishing as inflation rises). Hence, banks will enter a perpetual cycle, where their lending fees (interest rates) become ever-more increasing, while their clients’ interest rates on deposits will become ever-more decreasing. This will lead into an even bigger increase in the price of products, compounding the same problem perpetually.

Therefore, eventually, a nation employing a fiat currency scheme discovers that, even though in theory the fiat currency is backed by nothing than the government’s word, in reality the fiat currency is backed by the entire nation’s economic output. Any efforts to limit inflation, including limiting the previously unlimited printing of money, will wreak havoc on the economy. Any efforts to return to a representative currency (e.g. backed by gold) will cause the economy to contract massively, which is against the bourgeois’ interests.

Whatever, the outcome, the result is the same: The economy’s biggest commodity becomes debt. Debt owed by the proletariat to the bourgeois, nationally. Debt owed by minor nations to major powers, internationally. Thus, the bourgeois is further alienated from the product of its labour, while nations are alienated from their own economies.

This is not to say that a representative currency system won’t cause the same effects. According to Marx it does. But a fiat currency would skyrocket debt, causing even more severe effects.

This is analyzed further by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

He’s a sheepdog propagating empire. He wasn’t even the main author for the work he is most famous for.

Read.

Seriously, pick up a book and read it up until you start getting distracted by other things/thoughts. Incorporate that in your daily routine, even if it’s just for a few minutes. After a while, you’ll find out that reading becomes easier and faster for you, and you’ll want to spend more time with a book.

Things that can help:

• don’t set yourself up for failure. You might hear people saying they set a goal for reading 100 books in a year, or some other crazy milestone. You say, great, that’s what I’ll do too, then you realize it’s unachievable and quit. Instead set a goal to read for like 1 hour per week, or get through 1 chapter per day, or read 10 pages a day. You just need to be consistent, you don’t have to go in hard. Also, don’t make yourself reading lists or start with big book series. Just pick up something interesting, and when you are done (whenever that point comes), pick up something else that’s interesting, etc.

• don’t stick with reading a book to the end. If you don’t like a book, put it down and start reading something else. Don’t feel guilty about it, even if everyone else says it’s an amazing book. You can always come back to it some other time when you feel it.

• you can start with reading light and entertaining books, such as fiction, as that is generally easy to get into, particularly if the book is a short novel, or has a flowing and simple writing style. Short story collections can be even more convenient, as you can set yourself the goal of reading one per day, which is easily achievable and doesn’t require much time commitment. Sherlock Holmes compendiums are pretty good for this kind of reading.

• find ways to include books in your routine. Like reading for a few minutes before bed, or taking a book with you in the pooper. You can also listen to audiobooks while commuting to work or doing house chores.

• avoid going straight to the “classics” and instead read things you know you’ll like and be engrossed by.

• reading is like a muscle. It gets better with practice. It gets weaker with neglect. Working it is harder at first, then becomes easier with training.

Don’t forget articles citing each other as sources

I would recommend Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin. It does a very good job in outlining the economic situation of Europe before the war, as well as the economics of colonialism.

A more focused (and easier to read) book is The Crimes of British Imperialism.

Critical question, how much are they into reading history? On a scale from Youtube video to academic essay?

Sometimes uBlock Origin doesn’t block all ad trackers, particularly if they are new and not on its lists yet. Privacy Badger is a good back-up to have running alongside it.

Essentially translates to “little American children”

Reddit Enhancement Suite

Also Privacy Budger for additional tracking prevention.

Cuba can’t retaliate the same way that China can.

Simply put, China has a formidable navy, long-range airforce and most importantly, nukes. Cuba doesn’t.

Merz also has Nazi roots

And Annaleena Baerbock of course, who tried to hide it for years

Communication satellites - soviet invention

Cell phones - soviet invention

Unbreakable glass used in touch screens - east german invention

Yeah… Capitalism made iPhones