"Occupy" Superthread

Because you made a claim without supporting it any way.

Ah, but if it were taxed, then common people would be scared away from it, and only the rich who have no trouble paying petty taxes wouldn't object.

There shouldn't have been bailouts. And to be honest, I don't know much about banking.

1. The huge amount of speculation done would mean that these "petty taxes" would accumulate quite a bit of income for the government. The common man would not really be hit by this in a meaningful way.From another site:

2. The debt ratio is this:

The debt ratio should be less than 35%(preferably lower)
If you hadn't done the bailouts in the US you would have faced another Great Depression.

If we instead nationalized and collectivized the banks as a conditional bankruptcy instead of bailing them out we wouldnt of spent trillions to save ourselfs.

Also we shouldnt merely tax speculation, we should BAN it.

YEAH! THE ONLY KIND OF LEGITIMATE ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IS THE KIND YOU DO WITH A HAMMER AND SICKLE.

Well it's nice to see that you completely ignore my suggestion and go straight for the extreme...

The only just way to earn money is wage labor.

Wellll, that confirms it ladies and gents, LeninCat and his ideology are stuck in the 1800s.

Because obviously the vast majority of people don't earn wages or salary's.

I thought that was established?

What he means is: MOST AMERICANS ARE NOT INDUSTRIAL WORKERS! Marx theory doesn't encompass all wage earners.

“Goods” and “services” are terms from the lexicon of bourgeois economics, not Marxism, carrying with them the idea of sectors of the economy producing differents kinds of things, in the case of services, “immaterial” or intangible commodities, doing something for someone rather than making something for someone. This conception, however, confuses the mind, and clarification is complicated by the breadth of the category “services” and the muddled nature of the distinction.
Firstly, both goods and services are commodities, i.e., meeting someone else’s need to earn a living. In general, the kind of labour may be the same; what differs is the manner in which the exchange is effected.
For example, if I make a pizza and it goes into the supermarket, I have manufactured a good. But if I work as the cook in a restaurant and make exactly the same pizza to be handed over the counter, then I have become a “service worker”.
If you buy a car, that’s a good; but if you lease the same car, that’s a service. The line between “hire purchase” and leasing is hard to draw. It may be that additional labour (regular servicing for example) is combined with the manufacture of the car by socialising labour which would have been carried out by the owner themselves, but hire remains simply a means of effecting a sale.
Socialisation of labour may involve replacing activity formerly carried out outside the market with manufacture, but then later the manufactured labour is incorporated into a “service”. For example, during the second half of the 20th century, cooking in the domestic environment was largely replaced by manufacture of food products, and increasingly take-away, fast food and the restaurant trade – services – supplant the sale of prepared food. Thus manufacture and service here mark stages in the process of socialisation of labour.
The growth of what is called the service sector sometimes takes place through the break-up of enterprises, with separate firms, which would previously have been divisions of the same enterprise, instead of simply collaborating with each other, selling their services to each other. For example, clerks doing the salaries in a manufacturing company, may find themselves as employees of a firm selling salary services to the manufacturer. Exactly the same work, first manufacture, now a service. In the case of labour hire firms, workers doing good old fashioned factory work are magically transformed into employees in the service sector!
Whether I buy a meal off you, as a producer in the manufacturing sector, or ask you to bring the ingredients into my kitchen and cook the meal for me, as a producer in the service sector, does not affect the nature of your labour.
“For example, when the peasant takes a wandering tailor, of the kind that existed in times past, into his house, and gives him the material to make clothes with. ... The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity. I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me. The difference between previous, objectified labour and living, present labour here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labour, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present.” [Grundrisse, part 9. Original accumulation of capital]
There is a difference however, if I hire you as a kitchen hand (so to speak) to work under my direction in my kitchen, and pay you by the hour. In this case, I do not buy your labour, but your labour-power, which I use according to my own will, and transform you from an independent contractor into a servant and wage-worker.
“If a capitalist hires a woodcutter to chop wood to roast his mutton over, then not only does the wood-cutter relate to the capitalist, but also the capitalist to the wood-cutter, in the relation of simple exchange. The woodcutter gives him his service, a use value, which does not increase capital; rather, capital consumes itself in it; and the capitalist gives him another commodity for it in the form of money.” [Grundrisse part 5., Capital and labour]
If my aim is not to satisfy my own hunger, but to sell the meal to someone else, then I become your employer, and you are transformed into, not only a wage worker, but a productive worker!
“a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” [Capital, Chapter 16]
Nevertheless, there are changes taking place in the labour process and changes in the consciousness of the workers involved which arise from the relationships through which the labour process is organised.
“Goods” and “services” are confusing categories for grasping these changes. The category of “services” embraces banking and insurance, health and education, sex and gambling, labour-hire and contracting in the building trade, food production, maintenance and repair, personal care, transport, both public and private, entertainment and retail, all in a mish-mash of confusion.

Mr. Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL of text...

Bourgeois did do some cool art, I don't know why you made an entire ideology trying to get rid of her.

I can't believe I never asked you, probably because I forgot you are from around Vancouver, but were the Stanley Cup riots really bad? If Vancouver will riot over a game of hockey, I'm sure they would be in open fucking rebellion if economic conditions were that bad.

Not likely, people just tend to take sports WAY too fucking seriously.

Well the Occupy protesters aren't drunk.

Lenin Cat's long post:

I still disagree, and really have no idea what all that stuff proved, other then "goods and services are different" and "The way labor works has changed since Marx". But bravo dude, nice post.
Still, on a more serious note, the "service" side of labor is a large part of any capitalist society, especially in the US, where commerce is the name of the game. By and large, the whole sense of a capitalist society is the relationship between the employer and the worker, who exchange various "commodities" as you would call them (appropriately).
Now, the wage or salary of either the employer or the worker is dependent on what each "produces" (not in the traditional sense of the word). The worker produces capital. Example: a stock boy stocks shelves at a supermarket, which allows goods to be sold, which produces capital. For his work, he is given a proportion of the business’ overall capital in the form of commodities (wages), which is also proportional to the amount of capital he produces. The worker then takes his wages and uses them to keep in working condition (this does include recreational expenditures). Now, the employer produces labor and administration in the form of hiring workers, procuring loans to start a business, hiring service workers (which will be discussed later), securing premises, and managing the budget, wages, etc. For his work, he is given a portion of the business’ capital in the form of commodities, which he will use on his or her business, workers included.
However, there is an obvious gap in the amount of commodities received by the worker compared to the employer, which has to do with each of their “products”, explained above.
The workers product is capital, initially, however, it is only theoretical capital. Lets say that a worker produces automobiles, which will be sold for $100. He can make seven a day; so theoretically, he produces $700 of capital a day. It is only theoretical, however. For it to become capital, the worker’s product must be advertised, transported to market, and finally sold. This is where the manufacturing worker gives way to the service worker. The service worker does not produce his capital in the same sense as the traditional manufacturer does. He transforms the theoretical capital of the initial manufacturer into real capital. Thus, both he and the service workers (which include transportation, marketing, R&D, etc.), who take the theoretical capital and turn it into real capital, share the initial capital produced by the manufacturer. Through this relationship are wages for all workers made: the $700 capital is split among the initial manufacturer, the marketer, the teamster, and the salesman as commodities. This accounts for the wages of workers.
Here is where the exchange between the worker and employer comes into play. While the workers, service or otherwise, obtain commodities according to the capital produced, the employer, as stated above, does not produce capital. Where, in capitalism, do his commodities in this exchange stem?
It is quite simple: as stated above, manufacturers produce theoretical capital and service workers collaborate with the manufacturers and each other to turn theoretical capital into real capital, from which wages and businesses are sustained. It is from this collaboration that employers derive their share of capital. Employers produce the collaboration of service workers and manufacturers through management, facilitating real capital. This is the essential relationship: workers are allowed to collaborate to make real capital, and employers are given capital from this collaboration. Unlike workers, who only share the capital of some of the manufacturers as individuals, the employer shares the capital of all the workers, through his facilitated collaboration. So, unlike the workers in the previous example, who only share in the $700 capital of a single worker, the employer in that case would share in the $700 capital of any number of workers. The proportion derived from the capitals of all of those workers contributes to his wage. Still, why is the employer’s wage larger? It is because the employer, unlike the worker, must take risks. He must gain negative capital in beginning and running a business, putting the cost of business against his or her commodities. It is this risk, as well as the rational that the employers are the keystone in creating real capital, that allow employers to have higher wages in a capitalist society.

By the way Observer, i like your sig. Why can't anyone in his family run faster than a slow moving truck? Swing Hiel!

You need to watch Swing Kids to get the reference.

any comments about occupy WS getting shut down? well the main campsite anyways.... I'm actually in NY and visited the occupy WS 1 day before they closed it down but it was a bit looney out there... they had the entire park surrounded (tiny 1 block park) and the protesters were these really weird brand of hipp-iesh folk playing drums and offering me granola bars and asking for money...