Firstly, apologies all. Still haven't slept, hallucinations starting, apologies for dragging you along the bipolar ride.
I don't suffer from bi-polar, but I did have chronic insomnia from the ages of 20 to 30, used to sleep about 2 hours in 24 in a handful of 20-30 min blocks unless I took a large dose of temazepam (which I avoided until I was so mind-fucked that I had no choice).
Yeah, I get that VP. But I'm a scientist who deals strictly with things that can be measured and manipulated in the real world. I don't really do words and can't grasp abstract concepts unless you can tell me what it means in practice.
You're a scientist, so think of abstract political and ideological constructions as models of a system - you design different models in order to assess how a model copes with the variables inherent to your experiment. You pretty much
have to do so, because to experiment upon populations would be somewhat unkind..
I've been asking elsewhere for people to explain to me how a world without money works in concrete terms, not because I wouldn't fucking love to live in a world without money, but because I want to know what I'm letting myself in for before I can tell if I want your revolution. Money is a man made object, and all of its evils are ultimately the product of mankind. All I want to know is, can I have world without money and no rationing? And if so, how. Because (in evil money terms), global GDP is about £5k/capita and I don't think happiness abolishes either scarcity or greed, or child abuse or bullying or any of the things that make human beings act like shitheads. I can guarantee you, for example, that I will still have a sleep disorder and occasionally (or always, according to taste), act like a shithead.
Well, first you need to quantify what you mean by "money". Do you mean an exchange medium alienated from the use-value of what it is exchanged for, or an exchange medium related to the use-value of what it is exchanged for?
I ask, because the former allows accumulation, while the latter theoretically limits (but doesn't eliminate) it.
There will always be exchange
per se, in that the mass of people in an anarchist utopia (yeah, right!) might exchange their various labour skills for the means of shelter and sustenance (and a society with "no money" is, indeed, predicated on the assumption that a majority will engage in the sort of self-interested "altruism" mentioned above).
I see what you propose as a system that might function quite well, but to do so would need to be imposed and enforced
totally, and my gripe with that is that mechanisms and apparatus to enforce such a total imposition would, as a concomitant of their existence, have the strength to overthrow the system that required it. It would also allow for the accumulation of capital, and while you might say "fair enough, if you've saved the dosh that you've earned from your (limited by ymu statute) salary, then so what?", it would still be the higher earners (even with their upper earnings limited to 4x that of their lowest-paid worker) who would have the advantage in accumulation, and this
could eventually lead to a widening of the gaps between the social strata. Not as invidious as the current "wealth gap" and it's accompanying issues, to be sure, but we'd still have that pesky "class" thing going on there!
I'm basically saying, I don't even know what you want me to believe in and I simply cannot devote time I haven't got to reading words I'm not going to understand properly with a translator anyway.
I don't want you to
believe in anything. Faith is the refuge of people too lazy to think for themselves.
I hazard that part of the problem with your recent threads is that you appear to have dived into the deep end when you should have been setting up your experiment and defining it's various components, along the lines of "Capital is...", "use value is..." etc. It's how we all learn, believe me. You don't just (unless you're a
savant of some form) open a book on abstract economic theories and understand it, you have to (unfortunately) build your knowledge from the ground up.
I will probably be too embarrassed to ever go back to see what shit I wrote, but the personal stuff is just my attempt to try and make sense by putting it into terms that I can understand. What happens when the sleep goes is the judgement goes and I start typing my increasingly random thought processes without a competent editor available to sort the mess out.
Apologies again. I adore almost all the Trots on here, and all of the one that give good insight. I can't tell you how gutted I was when PT couldn't tell me how I get to a world without money without entering a bureaucratic nightmare. Bureaucrats are why I'm in this mess right now - they literally hound me for not being normal until I have to quit another job just to retain a shred of sanity.
Which is why I'm going to try and sleep now or Channel 4 will be goading me with their adverts and I'll lose another year of my life to a worthless shithead bully. Or I'll go and annoy the shithead board where trying to explain Keynes gets you called a dangerous revolutionary and we don't want no Trots round here.
People ignorant enough to quantify Keynes' economics as "Trot" aren't really worth engaging with, frankly.
My partner would be more likely to use my computer to beat me up.
You're the tops - there weren't nothin' to put up with yer nutter. You had me in full on mania and you coped. Not many people can say that. The boy says he wants tips. 
) that some of those "interest groups" will feel keenly enough to lobby, informally, those the gaining of whose ears might serve their interest. 
