jwiggler

Happily -- I hope you have a great day:)) thanks for engaging, I'll see you when the great appropriation occurs

Look at how upset you are! lmao. bro we're in political memes, take a chill pill.

It's pretty apparent your questions aren't in good faith, or you wouldn't be so combative. It's clear you're not actually interested in answers, just in getting a "gotcha," which is pretty lame. Also, I wouldn't call any of the questions you've asked actually tough, because they're almost all the first, second, or third questions he typically answers in the book. They're fair questions, for sure, but they're the ones Kropotkin anticipates while you're reading, which is part of the fun of reading Kropotkin.

Then you go on to completely mischaracterize his view of the Paris Commune based on a single chapter of his book, while also insulting people who call you out. It's totally cool if you disagree and don't like Kropotkin's ideas -- I mean the dude wasn't right about everything. But you're just being a dick about it, sorry to say.

If you actually read the book, you'd know how silly most of the things you just said are, especially about the Paris Commune. But I appreciate you sharing your opinion :)

edit: btw, its called conquest of bread. good stuff, check it out. you dont need to agree with it, but its a great intro to learning about some of the moral philosophies behind anarchy and communism and why they surged in the late 19th and early 20th century

Most of your questions are answered in the chapter I linked. It's a good read, check it out. Obviously, the whole ordeal Kropotkin describes would require ingenuity, and patience, and M U T U A L A I D.

The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers--in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.

Moreover--and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring--the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.

A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day--a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.

Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/conquest/ch6.html

If people can't handle the word shit, they probably shouldn't be looking at shit on Lemmy. Lmao

Appreciate you actually inputting your view.You're right in that I was mixing colloquial terms with technical ones, and thus my statements were wrong, or at least misleading. A market is not a resource, but a marketplace can be a factor of production, the owner of which is paid a rent.

When I referred to the online marketplace of Steam as a resource, I was comparing Steam to a marketplace, like a business complex, which is a capital good and a factor of production for businesses operating out of the business complex. Those businesses operating out of the complex pay a rent to the owner of that business complex. We don't see traditional production in the games industry, wherein if you as a business have produced X amount of output, you have also created X amount of income. With cars or grain or tangible products, when you turn inputs into outputs, you own the value of the outputs. That's not true for a videogame, whose value comes from the sale. In that sense, Steam is a factor of production in that value-creation process -- it is an input -- and as such, game devs pay a rent to Valve for that.

I'm not saying there are no operational costs for Steam. All I'm saying is they charge a form of rent to the creators of videogames. That rent may encapsulate other benefits, like being put on the front of the Steam store (marketing), analytics, tools for devs to interact with customers, etc. But it is still rent, since it comes in my opinion before the value is created.

I mean, there is a reason the individual in the article, and Valve's own former resident economist Yanis Varoufakis refer to Steam as a digital fiefdom. It is a digital equivalent of peasants paying a rent to work on an owner's land. In this case, Steam as a factor of production is not land, but capital.

Then again, I'm not an economist. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Thank you. I don't think I'm being stupid, but you have made me think about it a lot, so I appreciate that. You are right that the online marketplace is not a fixed resource, that's not technically right at all. I was thinking for a long time, "did I misunderstand that?" I certainly didn't think about the input vs output aspect of production. This led me to do some more reading and here's what I've got.

I do still think Steam is factor of production in that it is a capital good, like a business complex. The problem with your outputs argument, I think, is outputs are the quantity and quality of goods or services produced in a given time period. Well, for the devs, there really isn't an output in the traditional productive sense. They didn't produce a bunch of cars, creating X amount of value through their labor. The value is only created when copies are sold, and in that sense Steam,, and other game stores are inputs in the value created by a game dev. I think one could even make an argument that publishers provide a service and Steam is involved in that as a factor of production, but I think that speaks more to the strangeness of the software market in general. Anyways thanks for actually taking the time, I got to learn some cool stuff and feel a little humbled in the process so that is good