Proposed California "ethnic studies" curriculum to teach that capitalism is oppressive ...

[Jarhyn]

You will both talk past each other trying to justify the value extraction or frame it as unfair, but it's actually a requirement for capitalism. If workers were paid the full value of their labor, there would be no surplus left to reproduce the cycle of production. Assuming there is a surplus leftover after the cycle has been reproduced, some of it would need to go towards taxes, interest on loans, expansion, and other necessary aspects of capitalist production (industrial or otherwise). So, it was never even a possibility for workers not to be exploited under capitalism; you (Jarhyn) recently said you're not anti-capitalist, but you can't have it both ways. No capitalist economy can possibly survive without exploiting the working class, and regulations to limit the scope of exploitation will never eliminate it entirely (and will almost always be reversed or not enforced), since it exists by definition and not because of greed--though greed certainly can exacerbate it. As long as commodities are produced by workers who do not own what they produce or the means of producing it, wages will always fall short of the value embodied in their labor output. Whether you think this is alright as long as they still have a reasonable standard of living, or you think it's an unacceptable and arbitrary constraint on the fabric of society, is a more pressing question than the matter of how high or low wages should be.

Which is a straw-man of my position, and you should know better about me by now. I don't discount that need or value. I merely present a mechanism for fulfilling that need that is not "unending": that when investment is called due by investors in the form of dividends, some fraction of that ownership is lost to labor as a function of net profits extracted: that the extraction of surplus of labor that drives continued investment is limited by regulation by an equitable society.

I understand your motivation. I actually think that it's commendable. You want to help people. I think that ultimately a far more effective way to help people is to increase their safety net, lower the barriers to success. This requires taxes. Actually, most owners used to be workers. If your goal is to increase ownership for workers, a simpler more effective plan would be to lower barriers to ownership. IOW, make startup capital easier to get, increase access to education, lower costs to education, lower regulation/costs to start ESOPs, increase funding to SBA/SBLC's, and etc.

Not all workers are equipped and/or want to be owners. Being an owner often means pledging all your personal assets as collateral. It generally means very long hours, stress, weekends at work. I work 24 hours a day. But again, I support making it easier for more workers to become owners if they have that desire.

You clearly didn't read the meat of the proposal.

 

[PyramidHead]

Better regulated than not, sure. But if you want equitable, then that has to be part of a larger struggle to eliminate the need for investors in the first place; their existence as a requirement of the system is the main barrier to an equitable society, not how much or how little they give back to labor.

The judgments as to where money is allocated have to be made by somebody. Experience has shown that the more skin the allocators have in the game the better job they do.

Irony at its finest

 

[Harry Bosch]

Better regulated than not, sure. But if you want equitable, then that has to be part of a larger struggle to eliminate the need for investors in the first place; their existence as a requirement of the system is the main barrier to an equitable society, not how much or how little they give back to labor.

The judgments as to where money is allocated have to be made by somebody. Experience has shown that the more skin the allocators have in the game the better job they do.

Irony at its finest

How is it ironic? I don't think that Loren is arguing that workers can't receive ownership in a company. In fact, companies have found that just as owners with "skin in the game" generally perform better; workers perform better when they have incentives (ownership, incentive based performance pay, and etc.)

 

[Bomb#20]

Oh, please. In the first place, one of the things that "demonstrably existed before the other did" is that the class structure and the existing system of caste and the invention of the doctrine of racial inferiority all existed before capitalism. Early capitalists inherited those cultural practices along with the supporters of every other johnny-come-lately ism that arose before he-who-must-not-be-named made racism disreputable.

There's a reason I emphasize demonstrable truths.

What part do you disagree with? Mercantilism gave way to capitalism in the decades around 1800. Class structure goes back thousands of years, along with ethnic disparagement of lower classes. Over three thousand years ago the Indo-Iranians who wrote the Rigveda describe an ethnic group they were at war with, the Dasa, in highly negative terms; subsequently, "dasa" became a Sanskrit word for servant; subsequently, the servant caste was renamed and "dasa" meant slave. Kind of similar to how in the middle ages Greek, and then Latin and Western European vernaculars, took up using the word "Slav" to mean slave.

 

[Elixir]

The judgments as to where money is allocated have to be made by somebody. Experience has shown that the more skin the allocators have in the game the better job they do on behalf of the people with the most skin in the game.

FIFY.

 

[Bomb#20]

Unlike you, the committee was mandated to produce a model curriculum whether it was "tricky" or not, so rather than engaging in politicking, they stuck to what was demonstrably true and sticks relatively close to scholarly consensus on these issues.

Are these claims demonstrably true?

In essence, Ethnic Studies helps improve the U.S. democracy by encouraging the participation of all students at all political, social, and economic levels.

Further, it is the xdisciplinary, loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity – as educational and racial justice.

As a field catalyzed by a righteous angst for justice and access to knowledge (rather than merely “closing a gap”), Ethnic Studies intentionally works toward helping pay this education debt.

Ethnic Studies has created a space for all students to learn about and analyze their identities and hxrstories, feel proud of them, and actualize their full humanity.​

(Excerpted from the first two pages of the draft curriculum.)

 

[Bomb#20]

From an editorial in the LA Times:

"Consider this passage on assigning students to engage with their communities:

“For example, if students decide they want to advocate for voting rights for undocumented immigrant residents at the school district and city elections, they can develop arguments in favor of such a city ordinance and then plan a meeting with their city council person or school board member.”

No problem with that per se, and community engagement is a fine way to involve students in politics and civic life. But there is no mention here — or just about anywhere in the curriculum — of students who might dare to disagree with the party line. In this case, for instance, some students might think that the right to vote in mayoral and city council elections is the prerogative of citizens, not noncitizens (that’s not a right-wing idea, is it?), and they might want to meet with the school district about that. Chances are, with a curriculum like this one, they’d be afraid to even mention it."

and

"And isn’t it possible that some students won’t agree with the curriculum’s assertion that BDS is a social movement “whose aim is to achieve freedom through equal rights and justice.” Does that perhaps merit further debate?"

California’s proposed new ethnic studies curriculum is jargon-filled and all-too-PC
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-02/californias-new-ethnic-studies-curriculum

Moving away from the 'capitalism controversy', does anyone know where I might look online to find the sources (in the Model Curriculum) of the two LA Times editorial comments above?

The first one is in Chapter 1 on page 18, at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmcpubliccomment.asp . I haven't spotted the BDS one.

 

[blastula]

I've been browsing the curriculum documents and it's simply awful, it's for once triggered the anti-SJW Jordan Peterson in me. It's so very ideological, filled with socialist/marxist/critical theory jargon, and that jargon is so ridiculous. Fucking praxis this and praxis that. Blech. Their glossary definition for capitalism includes the Marxist term "surplus value." The very first paragraph of the documents uses "hxrstory." What a joke. There is also more than a tinge of the antisemitism that is too common on the far left. There is plenty of content about Muslims and bigotry against Muslims. One file has 61 hits for the (stupid) term "Islamophobia," but had only one hit for antisemitism, when that's actually the bigger problem today, at least going by hate crime stats. They also have content on BDS in a positive light, when that's a very controversial topic. If you want to give such ideological points of view, you have to present it as such and also balance it, and this doesn't have any of that necessary context.

If this curriculum is accepted, this is no better than the Texas school board and their blatant ideological content for right wingers. I have to think it won't be accepted, it's so obviously bad.

 

[Bomb#20]

No, creating a product that has demand creates a product that has demand. At that point, the people who make the product are already the only ones creating profit.
...
I don't argue against the idea that initially, the folks who take the time to set up the machine have some entitlement to be paid for this work, and see returns on the risks they make that are good risks. However...

As a function of extracting that value, with a failure to continue meaningfully contributing to the continued function of the system, they can go...

You will both talk past each other trying to justify the value extraction or frame it as unfair, but it's actually a requirement for capitalism. If workers were paid the full value of their labor, there would be no surplus left to reproduce the cycle of production. ... No capitalist economy can possibly survive without exploiting the working class, ... As long as commodities are produced by workers who do not own what they produce or the means of producing it, wages will always fall short of the value embodied in their labor output. Whether you think this is alright as long as they still have a reasonable standard of living, or you think it's an unacceptable and arbitrary constraint on the fabric of society, is a more pressing question than the matter of how high or low wages should be.

... I don't discount that need or value. I merely present a mechanism for fulfilling that need that is not "unending": that when investment is called due by investors in the form of dividends, some fraction of that ownership is lost to labor as a function of net profits extracted: that the extraction of surplus of labor that drives continued investment is limited by regulation by an equitable society.

Although the relative technical merits of expropriating investors incrementally versus wholesale are no doubt of considerable interest, enforcing conformity to the observance requirements of one of the local endemic religions isn't really a legitimate function of an equitable society's government. If a popular religion taught its adherents to disapprove of their gay neighbors' lifestyle, on account of gay sex stealing straight people's Qi, and they were arguing about whether prohibiting gay sex outright or alternately merely taxing it heavily enough to get their gay neighbors to not bone each other so often was the more appropriate way for straight people to preserve their Qi, you'd ask them if they had any empirical evidence for the existence of Qi, wouldn't you?

Do either of you have any empirical evidence that "value extraction" is a real thing?

 

[PyramidHead]

Irony at its finest

How is it ironic? I don't think that Loren is arguing that workers can't receive ownership in a company. In fact, companies have found that just as owners with "skin in the game" generally perform better; workers perform better when they have incentives (ownership, incentive based performance pay, and etc.)

Just the best kind of irony: when the speaker of a phrase does not know that every word he says implies the exact opposite of his position. Worthy of a chef's kiss.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Irony at its finest

How is it ironic? I don't think that Loren is arguing that workers can't receive ownership in a company. In fact, companies have found that just as owners with "skin in the game" generally perform better; workers perform better when they have incentives (ownership, incentive based performance pay, and etc.)

Exactly.

I have a problem with stock options because they're one-sided (there's no penalty for failure, thus favoring risky behavior) but I like the management team to own stock. In fact, I've gone as far as proposing a different take on a salary cap: Any compensation above $1M/yr must be in the form of stock with time based restrictions on selling it. (Get $2M? You get $1M normal, $1M in stock that you can't sell for a year. Get $10M? $1M normal, $9M in stock you can't sell for 9 years.) While you are restricted from selling a stock you are also restricted from engaging in any transaction where you benefit from the stock price going down. If you do so by means outside your control (you invested in a mutual fund that shorted the stock) you forfeit any proceeds from such a transaction.

I don't believe worker ownership of stock helps matters, it's too dilute. You get the same problem that the communist collectives had.

 

[Bomb#20]

The judgments as to where money is allocated have to be made by somebody. Experience has shown that the more skin the allocators have in the game the better job they do.

Irony at its finest

How is it ironic? I don't think that Loren is arguing that workers can't receive ownership in a company. In fact, companies have found that just as owners with "skin in the game" generally perform better; workers perform better when they have incentives (ownership, incentive based performance pay, and etc.)

I think PyramidHead is pointing out that you guys are using "skin" metaphorically, to refer to money, and it's kind of discordant to imply that ordinary employees don't have skin in the game when their actual literal skin is right there in the office or factory. If the operation goes south, that's going to cost the line employees plenty whether they're investors or not.

 

[Harry Bosch]

How is it ironic? I don't think that Loren is arguing that workers can't receive ownership in a company. In fact, companies have found that just as owners with "skin in the game" generally perform better; workers perform better when they have incentives (ownership, incentive based performance pay, and etc.)

I think PyramidHead is pointing out that you guys are using "skin" metaphorically, to refer to money, and it's kind of discordant to imply that ordinary employees don't have skin in the game when their actual literal skin is right there in the office or factory. If the operation goes south, that's going to cost the line employees plenty whether they're investors or not.

I don't want to get into an endless debate of one side is good, the other bad. Again, many workers are in the ownership group. Regardless. Ask yourself this, all things being equal, do you think that a there would be a lower rate of default on loan made to a guy buying a car with zero down; or a guy buying a car with 30% down? The more skin in the game, the greater the motivation to succeed.

BTW: skin in the game isn't just cash equity down. It's also putting up all your personal assets as collateral, it's years of working for no pay (sweat equity); it's signing personal guaranties, It's borrowing from mother and father in law, it's spending weekends at the office rather skiing with kids, and etc.

Anyway, it seems like most people's beef on this forum is with mom and pop passive investor.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How is it ironic? I don't think that Loren is arguing that workers can't receive ownership in a company. In fact, companies have found that just as owners with "skin in the game" generally perform better; workers perform better when they have incentives (ownership, incentive based performance pay, and etc.)

I think PyramidHead is pointing out that you guys are using "skin" metaphorically, to refer to money, and it's kind of discordant to imply that ordinary employees don't have skin in the game when their actual literal skin is right there in the office or factory. If the operation goes south, that's going to cost the line employees plenty whether they're investors or not.

Money is the most common form of skin in the game, but it actually refers to the more general case of adverse consequences from a bad outcome. The skin can be very literal--consider the army's solution to poorly-packed parachutes in WWII: Require riggers to jump randomly picked chutes they packed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't want to get into an endless debate of one side is good, the other bad. Again, many workers are in the ownership group. Regardless. Ask yourself this, all things being equal, do you think that a there would be a lower rate of default on loan made to a guy buying a car with zero down; or a guy buying a car with 30% down? The more skin in the game, the greater the motivation to succeed.

And the greater the motivation to minimize failure if success isn't possible. It's very unlikely that guy with 30% down will be foreclosed on--if things go south they'll sell before the bank forecloses as they won't be hurt as bad that way.

 

[ruby sparks]

Better regulated than not, sure. But if you want equitable, then that has to be part of a larger struggle to eliminate the need for investors in the first place; their existence as a requirement of the system is the main barrier to an equitable society, not how much or how little they give back to labor.

Ideology at its finest.

 

[Jarhyn]

... I don't discount that need or value. I merely present a mechanism for fulfilling that need that is not "unending": that when investment is called due by investors in the form of dividends, some fraction of that ownership is lost to labor as a function of net profits extracted: that the extraction of surplus of labor that drives continued investment is limited by regulation by an equitable society.

Although the relative technical merits of expropriating investors incrementally versus wholesale are no doubt of considerable interest, enforcing conformity to the observance requirements of one of the local endemic religions isn't really a legitimate function of an equitable society's government. If a popular religion taught its adherents to disapprove of their gay neighbors' lifestyle, on account of gay sex stealing straight people's Qi, and they were arguing about whether prohibiting gay sex outright or alternately merely taxing it heavily enough to get their gay neighbors to not bone each other so often was the more appropriate way for straight people to preserve their Qi, you'd ask them if they had any empirical evidence for the existence of Qi, wouldn't you?

Do either of you have any empirical evidence that "value extraction" is a real thing?

Ok, so, you keep asking for proof value extraction is a thing, and we keep pointing out the fact that people who do no work are taking the surplus labor from people who do work. It happens. We don't accept the paradigm wherein the people who made a decision of who gets resources may be said to "own" both the resources and the value of things made by them.

We are human. ALL these rules about ownership and what "belongs" to whom are made up. They didn't exist until someone decided to try doing things that way and it kind-of-worked for some of them.

What do you not get about "workers have a right to be part of the conversation as to the meaning, implications, and permanence of ownership"?

 

[PyramidHead]

Better regulated than not, sure. But if you want equitable, then that has to be part of a larger struggle to eliminate the need for investors in the first place; their existence as a requirement of the system is the main barrier to an equitable society, not how much or how little they give back to labor.

Ideology at its finest.

Right on!

 

[ruby sparks]

...people who do no work are taking the surplus labor from people who do work.

Can I just check who you mean. Presumably you aren't talking about people on unemployment welfare. You must be referring to the greedy capitalists who do no work. The thing is though, I'd say most business owners don't qualify as that; they're the sort of hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs that Harry Bosch has been talking about.

What do you not get about "workers have a right to be part of the conversation as to the meaning, implications, and permanence of ownership"?

I get that it's as much a made up rule as the others.

 

[Jarhyn]

...people who do no work are taking the surplus labor from people who do work.

Can I just check who you mean. Presumably you aren't talking about people on unemployment welfare. You must be referring to the greedy capitalists who do no work. The thing is though, I'd say most business owners don't qualify as that; they're the sort of hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs that Harry Bosch has been talking about.

What do you not get about "workers have a right to be part of the conversation as to the meaning, implications, and permanence of ownership"?

I get that it's as much a made up rule as the others.

Except that it isn't.

First, might does not make right. Nor does "having been there first".

First, we need to examine basic justification. On a fundamental level, basic justification is the idea that "I exist therefore I may". There are two ways of operating on this justification: social and solipsistic.

In the solipsistic mode, one ignores all others. I exist therefore I can do whatever the fuck I want (and so can anyone else). This paradigm is how serial killers and warlords happen. It is the fundamental basis for theft, conflict, parasitism, and all manner of behaviors we see in nature as fundamentally detrimental.

The other mode is "I may only do as others may do; if I prevent others I ought prevent myself." This invokes a restriction on self in the interest of peace. It is a treaty with the universe. But it also means a war between this mode and the solipsistic mode.

In the latter mode, the decision to deny others a seat at the table of decisions as to social paradigms is itself solipsistic on some level. It means a war, and an abandonment of this treaty.

This is not a made up rule that we have social inclusion, it is a direct requirement for peace to exist between people for the benefit of everyone.