Comments by "Kim O\x27Brien" (@kimobrien.) on "John Anderson Media" channel.

@OJB42 Once again from the manifesto: The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism. When the Cuban Revolution occurred. An almost completely new leadership developed with the ideas of Communism that rejected those of Stalin, Mao and the second international. The leaders of the revolution for national independence came in conflict with Imperialism and their own capitalist class of collaborators and end up taking it on the path described in the manifesto, by Trotsky in the permanent revolution and Lenin in the April Theses. The Cuban's did not make the mistakes of Stalin and Mao. No forced collectivization or need to engage in purges of scapegoats for bureaucratic policies. Fidel spoke about how the Soviets never properly dealt with the injustices of the Stalin Era and how lucky they were not to have to rely on an ally 10,000 km away to defend themselves from an invasion. That they had to rely on their own strength and were able to prevent their party and cadre from becoming disconnected from the masses by privileges. Fidel and Che always saw and made internationalism part of the revolution and not something one talks about on the May day holiday as future goal. Is Cuba some kind of utopia? No but to say they have failed considering what they have accomplished in 60 years 20 without Soviet help and despite the blockade would be a sign of ignorance of what has been going on in not just the United States but the world as a whole. . .
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@Beauloqs He made one of the most important discoveries for Republican and Democrats alike. The 1960 US Labor Dept. was not under Communist Control. I'm surprised he doesn't get a nobel prize for it.
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@barrysherwin3297 Very good at beating around the bush and never using that dirty word that gets so many bosses hopping mad. "Socialism."
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You also love being told what you want to hear.
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@sabejreid2072 The very beginning statement is utterly ridiculous. A $50 smart phone supposedly means one can not be oppressed. The cell phone has become so ubiquitous that they illegally circulate inside prisons. Fifty dollars will not even come close to buying a $50 gold piece. Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the US.
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@Xanderbelle How come you do all this with the "Great writers of the past." but don't do it with the Marxists?
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@PlaidPenguinGaming If he's so smart why'd he name a daughter after Mikhail Gorbachev the last Stalinist leader of the Soviet Union? He's just another intelectual who sways about in the winds caused by the underlying class struggle.
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@PriyamChauhan-bc6tp As Marx stated the goal of the communists is to abolish private property the property used to exploit others. The Cuban revolution shows what can be accomplished where a true communist leadership is acting in the internationalist manner required. No need to engage in suppression of capitalist ideas since they will be rejected by the great majority having confidence in leaders who have always told the truth no matter how good or bad it was. This is something that capitalist politicians can never do because maintenance of their system requires telling lies and half truths about themselves and the workings if their system. Fidel Castro never had a problem creating enough educated people out of those willing to stand and defend the revolution. When the revolution came to power no one was told they couldn't be an administrator what they were told is that they couldn't use their position to exploit others.
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@willyreeves319 Don't you need to use the word Socialism if your going to talk about it being absurd?
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@soulcapitalist6204 The most absurd of all things is cryptocurrency which Petersen saw no problem with just a few weeks earlier. Only the money fetishism of capitalism would find the mining of special numbers by use of computer (the machine) algorithm and electricity to be creating something of worth.
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@coolioso808 Why stop their should a campaign to canonize a Christ like savior of capitalism who comes down from heaven like Sowell get underway before he becomes completely forgotten or despised like all the others?
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@coolioso808 Plenty of statues were erected to Confederate civil war heros also. The rising tide floats all boats theory ended in 2008 when the tide went out and left the small boats inexplicable stranded. But ya I can see Sowell's wealthy upper class California community of bi racial liberals in Concord building a monument to a new Savior they will probably put up a statue of Obama and Hillary Clinton in Wellesley MA also. Afterall you going to need all the saviors you can find.
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Ask Marx and he'd tell you Capitalism is just a stage in human history that was born in the belly of feudalism just as socialism is born in the workings of capitalism with the class struggle between the two most important class. The proletariat and the capitalist.
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@quintrankid8045 It still cost you in labor time to make it just as Ben Shapiro's mud pies do. Whither you can get any exchange value for it depends on the market. What is the cost of labor time but the cost of the laborer who must reproduce his labor power for the next pay period. If i come to work and the mill is broke down it still cost me to show up and wait around while management decides what to do. Just because your mill broke down doesn't change the fact that I have to eat, drink and sleep. Those are the laborers costs. How skilled the painter is determines how fast he can produce paintings along with his ability to work in general.
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@quintrankid8045 Where did the money come from? Did it fall from trees? Or is it just numbers spit out of a computer? Gold and Silver in the ground? Money was invented as a medium of exchange. It has to be recognised by both parties to a transaction as having value. The defeat of the South in the civil war made their paper money worthless but not the silver coins they minted. The original paper money was issued as receipts for gold or silver on deposit in a bank. Anyone who runs a business knows that labor cost and application is the most controllable of all expenses. Your investing in three things capital equipment, materials and wages in anticipation of sales in a market. Unless you intend to cheat your workers you need to pay a total wage in a pay period that will get them to return for the next pay period. Assuming its a full time production job the bosses want us for the longest hours at the lowest wages at the quickest pace to make the biggest profits from the surplus value our labor produces after that which is needed to reproduce our labor.
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@quintrankid8045 American money is issued by a combined actions of the US Treasury which sells bonds to pay for debts incurred and money loaned out by the Federal Reserve Bank at the prime rate to the national banks. The federal reserve also bought up junk bonds in a process called quantitative easing to bailout banks who had taken on bad debt. Now all the original Robber Barons are dead as are most of the people who mined the gold sitting in Fort Knox and the cellars of the New York Federal Reserve. When a company issues stock or the transit authority tokens that is also a form of money since it can be used in trade. For the capitalist system to "work" trading or buying and selling must always be going on. This is why banks became the center of business activity including the need for a central bank. It becomes necessary to manage every last detail to exert ever greater control and enforce ever more petty rules to extract and keep up the rates of profit for industries without more markets to expand into. The government must more and more take on the role of settling all the disputes created over what can and can not be subsidised or taxed or untaxed and what must and must not be regulated in where the interests of private profit, big capital and incumbents always come first with corruption and monopoly just being a way to conduct business not yet found to be illegal. .
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@quintrankid8045 Water and food have value and people existed before money was invented by people. A chimpanzee knows what to do with a banana and water he need lessons from a man who labors to know what to do with money. "Labor transforms nature." John Locke. Now the modern bourgeois has been trying to escape that very basic idea to justify and to mystify value and profit. This is why Sowell says trade is not a zero sum but can be beneficial to both parties and big risks can produce big rewards. He is like you trying to get around that the basis of human life is social labor to make life possible for a social group. It is unnatural for us to stray very far or for very long away from other people. Our hands are shaped by the complex tasks that hunting, gathering, fishing and fire making required. Our voice box for communication. Our eyes for observation. Cooking to help with digestion of food. We are part of the natural world and governed by its laws. It might be nice to build John Gaults perpetual motion machine but so far the laws of the universe for reasons we don't understand preclude it. It was the reports of English sea captains who wrote about how people who lived in other parts of the world in a more primitive way without the use of money, marriage and hereditary property like the cultural practices of the Europeans. Culture is only created after out animalistic needs are meet.
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@quintrankid8045 I'm fairly certain that when one or more workers tries to keep the results of his collective labor the police will be called. Or in the case of Bill Gates when he had charges pressed for theft of intellectual property for coping software that was promoted as being free the only charge that stuck was the coping of a Microsoft logo. No sympathy from Microsoft the big promoter of everything innovative and good though the guy still went to prison.. I'd like to be able to legally work on my car without the threat of eviction. I don't know where you live just being allowed to work is a problem. Companies want to monopolize everything and control your access to parts and the ability to repair everything you own. They have all kinds of laws and license requirements to keep everything under monopoly control.
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@quintrankid8045 Like I said people engaged in socal labor for centuries without money and if the distaste for labor has become a problem it is the capitalist with their constant demands for more work at the same or lower cost. They disconnected money from the value of gold because they had overspent on the Vietnam War and wanted to make the rest of the world pay. France wanted gold for dollars and Nixon said no provoking the inflationary economic crisis that followed. All that flowed out of the months of Sowell and Friedman was how government social spending and not the endless war spending and preparations for war for which not a peep was heard from either Sowell or Friedman, was the problem.
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@S0me0ne353 "Socialism on Trial" was the court transcript of the first Smith "gag" Act trial by FDR. Socialist Workers Party vs Attorney General put the FBI secret police on trial and resulted Jimmy "Human Rights" Carters AG Griffin Bell being held in contempt of court.
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@tom2659 Sounds more like its about college students who are spoiled brats. What does that have to do with say "The Militant" newspaper or the Socialist Workers Party?
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One day he likes Gorbachev the next is about Solzenitzyn. He's foolish enough to think bitcoin is producing wealth with computer nubmer miners for numbers that have no intrinsic use or value in the world outside of the worship of money and trade by the fetishism of capitalist money value.
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@paulpicquigny4494 The bankruptcy of the neo liberalism of the consevative Milton Friedman came to a jarring end with the crisis of 2008. A world capitalism in crisis is not going to have the friends it did in the post war period of growth for the western imperialist economies. You all though you won the cold war when all that happened was that the Stalinist revealed themselves to be liars and cheats just like the Imperialist ruling classes. Bush was talking about a "New World Order" where neo liberal hypocrisy ruled the day. Turns out that four Presidents of both parties did nothing but waste 5 trillion dollars on wars that did nothing but destroy the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. You throw people out of work and then wonder why you need a bailout? Marx stipped capitalism bare in Das Kapital and showed that it could only lead to economic crisis and war. That is all that worlds capitalist ruling classes are capable of. The greed that drives them in the end leads to the twin evils of fascism at home and Imperialist war abroad. The workers will have their say before this is over with. History already proves that. We are well over do for another socialist revolution somewhere in the world today much like the Russian and Cuban of the last century.
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@TheGreatRepeller Climate change has become an excuse for the problems caused by the decline of the world capitalist system. I have no confidence in Democratic Imperialist governments or the petty bougois left to accomplish anything.
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@82fdny97 No you don't understand surplus value. We began creating it since we began to understand the need for it when we realised the need for a store of food in times of need. The creation of a surplus has been the goal of every great civilization not the realization of scarcity for when have we not found more uses of what is already exists in nature. The pessimistic capitalist ruling class is the ones who see scarcity in the midst of plenty The reasoning being is their profit system is not a true measure of human potential. Instead it is crisis ridden because of the greed of the ruling classes who halt production when ever the profits stop flowing. The whole reason the profits stop flowing is the constant shift back and forth between using them to expand production and using the to spectuale on a riise in capital value. Since they can't stop overproducing for markets that become saturated at the prices need o turn a profit the halt production only deeping the crisis which is cased becaue the workers can not buy back all that is produced and the rising capital value begins to ciolapse as production stops. This leds to only a few solutions like either destroying capital so primitve accumulation a can begin again or write offs on paper and restarting production by foating more debt. That just prepares the system for an even greater crisis.
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@LibertyOverDeath-27 Of course because people like you have everything handed to them on a silver platter.
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The absurdity of these fools will be seen as capitalism continues down its path of economic crisis and Imperialist War.
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"You've got a chance that's all your suppose to have in life." What a marvelous defense of capitalism!!! We let you play high roller at the casino what more do you want? Tired of a rigged game? Read Karl Marx.
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@michaelbullen4146 What does this have to do with the word that is never used or discussed in the video "Socialism."?
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@jeffforsythe9514 No the more import thing to learn is their is more where that came from.
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Sowell ever give credit to a liberal socialist or communist for anything positive? Or is t just his tribe of conservatives politicians that are responsible doing everything good?
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@theveryworstluck1894 I was wondering why they never used the word Socialism or Socialist?
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The problem for world capitalism is that it goes into crisis of its own making after it achieves primitive accumulation. Once this happens the capitalist can not get out of their self made crisis without resorting to Imperialist War to redefine ownership of world resources and markets amongst the thieves of the ruling classes and fascism the drive against the trade unions who are fighting back against capitalist austerity measures. Only the victory of world socialism in a final victory over the ruling classes can achieve peace among the different nations of the world. That is because the world is one economic unit and the ruling capitalist have no interest in anything but exploiting labor ad resources for the growth of private profits. This is why Marx said the workers must raise upon their banners abolish private property.
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@wstavis3135 He loves to do cherry picking and battling the evil Karl Marx and "Socialism" he sees behind every bad Capitalist Democratic Party Liberal policy.
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What the constraint?
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@gordonmurray3153 During the whole talk the words Socialism or Socialist is never used. Apparently the talk concerns the definition of oppression and Rubin clams that a $50 dollar cell phone in the back pocket ends oppression. Now we know what that the way to end the problem of oppression is with $50 cell phones in the back pocket. Too bad Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Fidel Castro didn't realize the value of $50 cell phones in back pockets. We now know the key tp ending all problems is with $50 cell phones in the back pocket.
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@gordonmurray3153 We aren't catering to the "general public". Since the crisis of 2008 our paper sales reach workers beyond just the national minority communities.
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@gordonmurray3153 You've had plenty of attempts to go past capitalism in Europe and so far all you've produced long term is Social Democracy and Stalinism. All that prosperity of Social Democracy is based on Imperialism which is capitalism's highest stage. The ruling classes of Europe are rearming and squabbling just as they did before the two previous world wars. The America workers have never suffered the historical defeats created and brought on by the Social Democracy or Stalinism either. We've had one small and modest Socialist Revolution in the America's and so far it's out dene anything anyone has done outside of the actual early years of the 1917 Russian revolution in terms of revolutionary internationalism and anti Imperialism. Once you can breakout of the thinking of the Scottish clan system and realize you live in a world economy with problems that no single country can solve than maybe you will understand why socialism is the necessary solution to Imperialism and not Social Democracy.
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@soulcapitalist6204 Foreign investment backed by military force is Imperialism. American Imperialism is the most powerful capitalist empire in world history but it is in decline. Capitalist only produce for a market and the workers can't buy back all that can be produced causing periodic crisis of overproduction. To drive profits their way capitalist replace more higher paid skilled labor with less lower paid unskilled labor and machines. Because commodity prices tend towards the cost of production so too the rate of profit by which the capitalist judge success must also fall because the amount of labor needed for exploitation goes down. Capital tends towards monopoly and profits go towards the most parasitic of capital's finance capital which demands a guaranteed return on investment. All of society is enlisted in the drive to halt the declining profit rates. The capitalist have themselves convinced they are creating value out of capital alone and so a giant fiction becomes foisted upon society until the value of capital collapses like a house of cards built in a gambling casino called the stock market. To defend their world wide investors Empire they must invest in more and more military spending and destruction of other nations to keep their crisis ridden system going. Because the capitalist who are nation state based compete must compete in the world market they are driven to the ultimate competition Imperialist World War.
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@GardaOrban Petersen doesn't know what he is talking about most of the time. He is easily confused and sees communism as reincarnation of the devil.
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@MrSmegfish Those two things are highly unlikely.
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@albertclarke2826 On might also collect the sayings of Chairmen Mao and put them next to Sowells and Jesus for moral fortitude.
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Now that you have Putin's capitalism in Russia are you still happy with your "Peaceful Imperialism" of German Social Democracy?
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@Alberto-te5fj In the capitalist world each ruling class has its own self interests. They can't help come into conflict because capitalism develops the world in combined and uneven ways. Capitalism goes into decline as profit rates naturally go into decline in giant industries. The bosses waged world war twice to redivided the spoils of capitalism among the hyenas. Can you afford a third world war over who get to be the king of the profit makers.
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If only trade offs were possible and we were not creating a surplus starting with agriculture than we would still be living like hunter gatherers. That is just one of the professors attempts at mystifying economics by waving his hands and inserting popular but untrue notions. Like the accuracy and assurance of price signals.when bosses see sales declining with profits falling the begin halting investment in expanding production realizing they have overproduced for markets that can sell more goods at a profit they go to driving up the price of speculation in contracts and fictitious capital until the market gets so out of wack with the law of value it collapses causing an ever widening economic crisis as workers get fired and can no long buy back the goods and pay the housing costs for the products they produced to buy back from the market.
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@scatton61 Some things yes but usually he paints us with the broad brush of Republicans who are the opponents of the Democrats. We aren't part of the Democratic Party. Nor are we interested in reforming the capitalist state apparatus or expanding the administrative state. Nor are we conspiratorial as he seems to think..We seek to change the government with completely Constitutionally legal means. We've only really scratched the surface if your talking about minerals. Do we know whats beneath the ocean? The deepest hole is only about eight miles down in Siberia. We have lots of Gold doing nothing but sitting in vaults. We can probably replace U 238 with thorium which is much more plentiful. Platinum is somewhat rare and has industrial use as a catalyst but I'm not sure what the rest of the heavy metals are useful for. Anything with an atomic number less than iron we are going to have lots of because only stars like our sun were necessary to create iron. I have an agenda? Yes I do to set the record straight. We put the FBI on trial for all the things they accused us of doing in Socialist Workers Party vs Attorney General. They couldn't prove a thing they claimed about the Russian revolution. They did break ins, Black bag jobs, wiretaps and used informants as agent provocateurs encourage marijuana use for possible arrest and disruption along with whatever minor reason they could use for harrassment like liquor laws at social gatherings and missed payments of spousal or child support. Gambling is no different than risk taking. Both are governed by the laws of probability now just because you might not be able to calculate it correctly or down to the penny doesn't change what you are doing. It has nothing to do with the morality of it but no you don't create anything by doing it anymore than trade does. It may only appear that it does because of the way the capitalist system works but that is a false appearance. Big risk can produce big rewards says Sowell. What a discovery!!! Is it any different than with gambling? Both parties might be happy or unhappy with a trade also but that doesn't mean the trade produced or lost something. It he case of Professor Sowell he seems to think it does and that may explain his believe that the subjective view answers the supposed paradox of the diamond and water.along with his and others anti materialist view of value in economics. Nor does he say anything about the accumulation of a surplus. He also talks about alternatives rather than uses. A use value for gold in microelectronics certainly trumps it use value in bank vaults or as jewelry. But saying alternatives masks the difference as if it makes no difference how something is going to be used in economics.
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@RandoTark The origins of slavery arose with agriculture and class society. People were captured during wars were used as slaves. Before that war captives were used for dinner when food was scarce.
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@jeffforsythe9514 Nice of your thinking of my dad but he passed away a while ago. Did you meet him during one of your trips back from the dead? Can you take a message in case you get back to heaven before me?
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