ComradeBobRojavakian [he/him]

Marx against the MMTers.

I think it is a "for Dummies" version of the much more expansive and detailed work of Prof. Anwar Shaikh, who has a video on Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPMoESXe4x8&index=27&list=PLB1uqxcCESK6B1juh_wnKoxftZCcqA1go

Money is the universal equivalence for all commodities, as Marx spells out in Das Kapital. There is nothing magical about it, anything can be used for money in practice, but people tend to choose to base money around something with a relatively stable value- like Gold or Silver, or, in the modern era, the USD. If people did MMT magic with the USD, then other nations will simply abandon it in favor of whatever seems more stable, so the usual MMT argument that we can fuck with the USD however we like and not run any risk since it is the world reserve currency is silly.

The traditional account of money is generally more correct than that MMT nonsense.

All adherents to any religion think that their critics "don't have any real knowledge of MMT", which is, ironically, what makes MMT the Austrianism of the left.

https://cosmonaut.blog/2019/06/01/the-grey-tree-of-post-keynesianism-and-monetarism-the-classical-account-inflation-and-unemployment/

I agree, which is why I started with the Assad meme.

But bad economic analysis will lead to terrible economic policies, and terrible economic policies would mean the failure of all the left.

And they are wrong about MMT. What do you know, Marxist economists can be wrong about Marx and about economics as well. As to people who predicted the Great Financial Crisis, a lot of people get credit for it- the vehemently anti-MMT Anwar Shaikh, who I think is probably closer to Marx than either of these folks, also predicted the GFC, so did a bunch of Austrian Loons.

Graeber wrote an entire book on "Debt", where he claims that the basis of all money, regardless of whether it is fiat or not.

He also boosted that dumb ass MMT debt is all in your imagination and inflation, what inflation shit that has poisoned the left.

MMT is just a social democratic fantasy based on a false notion of how money actually works, and jumping onto this Magical Money Theory will only hurt the left

Assad: Who must go?

Graeber: passes away

Assad: smile

(1) Lol, can't believe there are still actual Khmer Rouge denialists. Suppose that he tried the same thing for the Holocaust (and he certainly went on to defend a Holocaust Denialist, another of Chomsky's absolute fucking idiocy in his pedantry), people would rightly vilify him today, and not hold him as standard bearer of all that is left. Instead, you try to pretend that Chomsky has a point here, when his own arguments are extremely specious- for example, he cites an unnamed "Thai intelligence officer" for proof that the photos are faked- certainly damning for a guy that claims to like "facts". So, where does that leave Chomsky and Herman, but still in the wrong, and you still a genocide denier in your quest to defend them. Fuck off.

(2) Name another anti-War figure who came out in favor of Pol Pot like Chomsky here? As to the US aiding Pol Pot to get back at the Vietnamese, that is completely irrelevant to Chomsky supporting Pol Pot, if anything, it shows how much of an Imperialist American stooge Chomsky was and has always been.

(3) You are trying to obfuscate and equivocate.

(4) Of course, you are not even a Neo-Con, you are just a Social Fascist.

Duck Duck Goose is actually American Training to hunt down and kill unarmed people in whatever country we are gonna invade next.

"Postmodernist" I'm not even sure you know what that word means.

That might be how others here have tantrums but not me.

No, it is definitely you.

Do you think its fine to conflate different death tolls and fake photos in Thailand? Do you think its fine to do this to implicitly blame the anti-war movement and absolve America for its actions in the region? Do you think its fine to focus on something you cant change while ignoring something you can change?

Lol, let's focus on what you are doing here, you are trying to absolve what Chomsky is shown to be completely wrong about for several decades now, trying to whitewash the supposed "anti-war" movement, when almost no one else decided to come out in support of Pol Pot like ol' Chumpsky here, and then focus on some sort of weird parochial attitude where "I don't need to be correct about another country or give a shit about being accurate, because I'm an American, and what matters to me is America".

Is there an adherence to the truth we should aspire to do or can we just say whatever feels good and right no matter how dubious the claim and evidence?

I love how your "adherence to truth" makes you still defend Chomsky being entirely wrong about Kampuchea.

That’s your response to being reminded the whole point was to compare the outrage to the silence on East Timor. Wonderful. 200,000 people dead out of a population of just 700,000. Occupied for 24 miserable years. And all you can do is this lousy lameass tactic.

No, that's my response to you still defending fucking Chumpsky over Pol Pot. Like you don't need to fucking cast doubt over fucking genocide in Kampuchea and also criticize the silence of East Timor. You fucking miserable piece of genocide denying shit.

In 20 years you’re gonna be a neocon.

That gives me twenty years to get to where you are now.

There is no such thing as "facts" or "truths" that exist innocently and "pre-ideologically" because "ideology" is, itself, how the human mind structures and make sense of the world.

(1) When someone else who is mildly progressive endorses biden, it is a sign of them being craven and unprincipled in "leftist" but when grandpa chomsky does it, "we need mountains and mountain of context just so I can pick two or three words to equivocate over".

(2) Re-read the entire article, think about Kampuchea losing a third of its population, and reconsider whether defending some shitty bullshit media analysis that cast doubt over the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge is really worth it. Like, try to look back with what is one of the worse genocide in human history, and think of how morally feeble it is to defend some dumbass fucking assholes' dumbass fucking media analysis bullshit.

Maybe grow up, and do material analysis instead of media analysis.

(3) It hurts because you are a liberal...a genocide denying liberal.

No, I actually read what Noam has to say about his own fucking work himself. I'm never heard of Tom Wolfe's book.

When I got to college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. I was in linguistics then, so I figured, “OK, I’ll write about Hebrew. It’s kind of interesting.” I started the way I was taught to: You get an informant, and you do field work and take a corpus. So I started working with an informant, and I realized after a couple of weeks, this is totally idiotic. I know the answers to all the questions. And the only thing I don’t know is the phonetics, but I don’t care about that. So I just dropped the informant and started doing it myself. https://chomsky.info/20101112/

Lol, imagine me going to Japan as an anthropologist, say, "fuck this fieldwork bullshit, I know everything about Japan from being a Weabo" and then write a thesis on Japanese culture based solely on my consumption of Japanese mass media.

Everything Ben Shapiro says can be "factually true" and he can still be completely wrong, because no "fact" or "truth" exist pre-ideologically.