MAP Forum

Posted: **Mon Apr 20, 2026 7:06 am**

bignavigator wrote: Sun Mar 22, 2026 8:52 am While Islam treats hetero-MAPs well, I still don't want a Jihad to win in the entire world, as every non-Muslim (be it a MAP or not) would be put to choose between:

1. Converting to Islam and joining the Ummah
2. Submitting to Muslims and paying a jizya monthly
3. Getting your head off

As a Slavic Native Believer (Rodnover), none of these options satisfy me in the end. Still Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq are based for actually improving MAP rights (even if it's just for heterosexuals by their laws).

What is this GWOT slop? I feel like I've been transported back to the 2000s when i read comments like this. Many muslims can't stop themselves from having premarital sex or drinking alcohol and you think "Jihad" is going to win the whole world? Afghanistan is literally famous for boy sex where its been practiced for thousands of years, much of this uptightness on sex in the region actually has roots in Wahabbism which is ultra-conservative. Someone on X actually pointed out that there were fucking topless bars in Mecca in the 1930s. The practice of strip clubs was one that Westerners were purporting to have imported from Asia, that's why you can still find bars that advertise themselves as an "exotic dance club" or refer to strippers as "exotic dancers"

Its ironic because Western orientalism often positioned middle eastern culture as too licentious, too erotic, too sensuous what if harems and multiple wives and what not. And now its usually portrayed as too repressive, as if people in societies with millions and millions of members are always following the rules officially promulgated by society, especially in large anonymous cities that provide social anonymity in the age of the internet.

Anyways, I don't oppose Islam and actually think Islamic movements winning have in certain cases been a good thing for us. Leftists in alliances with these forces, however critical, should be pushed to try to explain how it comports with their fundamentalism around the age of consent.

Posted: **Mon Apr 20, 2026 6:18 pm**

Learning to undeny wrote: Sun Mar 22, 2026 3:44 pm Worth noting that not everyone has to agree on everything all the time, some people will work better on their own or in different organizations, but it is important that the community find political/ideological points of agreement and unite on them when and where they can. A stance against the Iran war does not require that someone abandon or adopt feminist theory, for instance, to give an example of a trend in the community that can be controversial.

In fact, it might do good to start an organization "MAPs against fascism / MAPs for peace" or something like that, which focuses on political issues from the point of view of MAPs. The visibility it would give (although you might not care about that) is that MAPs care about other issues than adult-minor sex contact and have their own insights as a minority that no one listens to. It would also make allies among other minorities that MAPs can sympathize with, such as immigrants (which in Europe includes a lot of Muslim people). MAPs and immigrants both face being criminalized merely for existing, and I hope that would place MAPs in solidarity with immigrants, and conversely. I doubt existing orgs like this one are going to shift focus to issues like the war, although I wouldn't oppose it.

(I don't have an opinion on the twitter/tumblr thing as I didn't witness it, but from everything I've heard it appears to have hurt the community for one reason or another.)

Edit: I agree it's good to speak clearly the problems you have with other people instead of resorting to passive-aggression.

My position is that MAPs basically already live under fascism. A serious anti-fascist movement would have to address how groups like MAPs basically are already denied their legal and democratic rights under nominal bourgeois democracy. We see no evidence that anti-fascist groups are moving that way on MAPs, the opposite seems to be the case if anything, not wholly surprising, being pro-LGBT has only recently been a core component of anti-fascism. Probably was the case that outside of say Weimar Germany where gay rights was a topical issue, that anti-fascist groups prior to the 70s/80s were probably homophobic or had a majority of homophobic members. Even on the latter point, it wasn't a core priority for them afaik, the KPD was softer on the position of gays rights then say the Nazis and I assume the SPD too but it wasn't at the core of politics in the way that people who got into leftism from spaces like twitter and tumblr have made it today. The Nazis didn't even undo Weimar era legalization of prostitution, nor was being a trans woman actually criminalized, apparently even certain gender affirming surgeries were still performed in the Nazi era. In that way, the Nazis were more "progressive" than much of American liberalism in the 20th century but this had more to do with Germany being more progressive in this field and the Nazis apparently either finding it hard to rollback/not making it much of a priority.

As for immigrants/other minorities, the PNVD tried to include other marginalized groups in their banner in their party program when they were aiming to stand for elections. It did not win them enough credit with these groups/the left to prevent them from being repressed. The majority of Dutch voters thought they should NOT be allowed to stand for elections in the Netherlands.

Posted: **Tue Apr 21, 2026 5:37 am**

zarkle wrote: Sat Mar 07, 2026 12:52 am I meant to say fascism has its evolutionary roots in a strong man charismatic leader that works on the principle of loyalty in Haidt's moral foundations. Humans are biologically hardwired to be loyal to a powerful tribe leader. That's the core of fascism. I implied fascism taps into ancient neuro-circuitry in our brains that encourages us to be loyal to a alpha male tribe leader.

As I discussed previously. Hitler was an extreme us vs them thinker who depicted Jews as a cosmic evil and Aryan's as all wholesome good. Showing clear evolutionary psychological basis that can be explained with Sapolsky's model. With Musolini its not as clear as he was far more nuanced but still meet the definition of a charismatic leader that people showed loyalty too. I admit I can't explain Musolini's behavior in evo psychological terms as well as Hitlers. So I partially concede

Which is something of a strong concession because Mussolini was much more physically imposing and behaved and looked much more like a "Chad" then Hitler. The series Mussolini: Son of The Century really does drive home the way that Mussolini's fascism was really more like a radical avante-garde art project, which I think places it beyond what your describing, if you know about Italian futurism which was influential on Mussolini and later was merged into Italian fascism. The other school of the futurist artistic avante-garde sided with the Bolsheviks, so I'm not sure how the vague sense that emerged at the start of the 20th century prior to WWI that we were living in a new world, everything needed to be overthrown, cars, planes, explosions, provocation and violence were cool etc. is inherently tied to the primitive primal us vs them evo-psych you describe. You actually had to be a huge nerd to be aware of it and to be into it when it was cool and to understand it. Futurism, particularly the Italian variety, may have fetishized action but it was an art project for nerds. They may have strived for combining the brutish and primitive with the intellectual, much like how the Greeks thought the ideal man was say a wrestler who was also a philosopher, and yeah, Plato was a wrestler and the name he took on wasn't his birth-name but his wrestler-name, it means broad but again this is for nerds. Nerds want to be smarter and more capable of violence, "jocks" who peaked in high school and frat boys generally aren't thinking about how they can make manifest some avante-garde art project or abstract ideological into reality, they are satisfied with their 250 bench-press, they talk about their gf/wife, kids if they have them, watch sports and slop TV. They may even be somewhat jealous of men and women who are smarter than them but it generally doesn't drive them to teach themselves Latin or German or read philosophy so they can combine intellect with their physical gifts.

Which brings me to the point that actually strong men aren't driven to manifest themselves into a Nietzschean archetype that will mould the people and world around them to match their will. Your more likely to hear from one of these guys that he's a Christian or "loves everyone and believes in doing the right thing" in a vague abstract sense. If you look at actual anthropology, the person who was chief in a tribal society was often the person who was the most generous, giving gifts to other people with the wealth he had, who people liked the most, who is competent and wise. There maybe some truth to the notion that the chief was often one of the "wealthier" people of a tribe but he was also the person who gave the most away. We have no need to assume that human beings before civilization were angels for this to be the case.

As for Mises. I agree with them on the subjective theory of value but strongly disagree with them on landlords, patents and absentee land titles. So you can understand my nuance. You are right about landlords being unthinkable to early classical liberals who showed skepticism of them. 19th century classical liberals would conflict with Rand, Mises and Rothbard here.

I mean... while that's theoretically possible, a huge factor motivating the move to marginalism was to defend landed property and passive rentier financial extraction. Jevons for instance suggested that rent was merely a function of pricing utility and helped set the stage for marginalism. But that was a very pedantic point which ignored the historical reality underwriting landownership and the fact that landlords don't work themselves either their tenants improve the property if say they own a large estate or they hire builders who build the housing, and commercial buildings they intend to rent out. On the frontier in Australia, America and other frontier settler societies in the same century land was practically worthless or very cheap, land that was far more fertile with more valuable resources than what existed in much of Europe but especially Britain. Why? Because, cheap labor wasn't readily available for a farmer to turn himself into a plantation-owner and because it was hard to either sell or demand rent for land at high prices when it was widely distributed, nor was it easy to coerce people into being peasant-like rent paying subjects to someone who doesn't work when free or cheap land is still widely available. Ruling classes have frequently lived off some form of rent-extraction since civilization arose but in ancient mesopotamia, land was practically value-less, what mattered was coercing labor to work said land. So there was ample evidence that the ideas that Jevons and other marginalists defended were false from actual historical experience that existed in their lifetime or close to it. Why does that matter?

For this reason:
"Lastly, Science, Reason and reductionism from the enlightenment clearly work and liberalism is known to reason its way out of its own bullshit" clearly, the marginalists who often were tenured professors who often came from families with substantial landed property, as professors often did in the Britain of that era, did not reason their way out of their own bullshit. What Upton Sinclair said is very true, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I maybe wasting my breath on trying to convince you out of marginalism, it seems to me like a parasite that gets stuck in men's minds, but since you seem to view yourself as someone who can reason themselves out of their own bullshit, I will try.

To start with, Walras's theory of perfect competition which undergirds micro-economics posits that in a world of truly perfect competition there will be no profit. But, what is capitalist production? It is production for profit. So either in this hypothetical we arrive in the end of capitalism, or, some of the capitalists involved in business decide its a waste of their time, so they cash out their enterprises, shut them down, splurge on themselves instead, some of the more stubborn capitalists remain in the game and eventually there is enough of a lack of competition to return the remaining firms back to profitability. So the whole thing is a tautology, when Walras proposed it when there was far more competition and lower barrier to entry then exists in business today. Therefore, the notion of profit being the result of "imperfect information" then becomes a practical necessity to keep a market-economy going, what do firms in a market economy respond to? Signals in demand that allow them to produce at profitable prices. And what would be a profitable price in an imaginary world of perfect competition or, and computers/the internet allows us to get closer to this then ever, a world where the consumer can get the best possible price available on the market at all times? Computer networks and databases do get us much closer to imagining a world without "imperfect information" in pricing. In theory, if we imagine the customer as someone who wants the best possible price for the product them having really accurate means to check prices at all times will progressively lead to a state of very low or no profit. The threshold for perfect information/competition is set up to be so high that it can't possibly be fulfilled by the real world, to a large extent, because marginalism to some extent because marginalists set up their own unfalsifiable premises but its not simple error, marginalists are generally people who do not want capitalism to end.

What's the alternative to this? Profit itself is built right into the system. A factory worker works an 8 hour day, let's say two of those hours he's working he's working for himself functionally to produce the paycheck he needs to survive, four of those hours goes into reproducing the overhead of the firm he works in, the building, the machines, inputs etc. what of the remaining two? Those would be the hours he works for the capitalists who own the firm. Its well-known for instance that companies generally make a product and sell it for more than it costs to produce. This is the difference between the cost-price of the commodity (what it costs to produce internally) and the value of the commodity (its price on the market). So there you go, profit is built right in, we don't have to invent scenarios where a glass of water is more valuable in a desert to a thirsty traveler then it is to someone lounging in a fresh spring. We're talking about average and aggregate experiences here and not really an exception like that. Of course, one could imagine a more pedestrian scenario where a cut of ham has more value to a hungry customer then a pig farmer but the inverse is true to, everything the farmer wants or needs besides pigs is produced by someone who "wants it less" than him because they have more than they need for personal use but this doesn't really explain how society gets any richer by trade on net because all that is happening here is people are functionally scamming each other by selling a thing for less than they value if they simply produced it for themselves. A very close analogue to this was actually addressed in the first chapters of Vol 1, if not the very first, along with the "mudpies" argument.

Could it be society gets richer because we all want more things that so we're working harder to make more things for trade and then eventually we found out a way to make more of those things faster? The problem is we live under capitalism and we don't work for things, we work for money and while it may feel this way to a consumer, especially in in a expansionary phase of the industrial cycle, they trade their labor for money which they use to buy commodities. The firms they work for produce more things sure but to make more money and where does that come from? We addressed exploitation as surplus labor time but there is another component and that's gold, which allows for the expansion of the money supply which produces more demand and higher/more profitable prices. And the underlying source of expanded money supply is gold, which is why I would submit that those marginalists who favor the gold standard have absolutely no idea why they truly do. Money could be anything which is why Keynes and Friedman's anti-gold standard stance is not some betrayal. Strangely, they think as if they live in a socialist economy where people exchange labor for good with money being only an intermediary. But, here is gold's role in the system: because it takes an extreme amount of labor to produce a single ounce of it, it becomes a medium for universal exchange not merely because its scarce but because it takes an extreme amount of labor and constant capital investment to produce it. Its role is to be the ultimate commodity that labor is used to metabolize into existence. That's how it becomes a store of value.

Here's why it works, under a classical gold standard, gold simply is money, so the prices of commodities directly reflect this. When prices fall, this acts to spur gold production as the commodities the producer and his workforce need to undertake production fall in value and gold appreciates. When commodity prices rise, usually after a renewed upswing in gold production and/or a long-sustained depression, that means gold is devalued against commodities. The gold mine owner produces money directly and so what he actually trades gold for, whatever he thinks he's doing, is for non-gold commodities. During a boom phase, the production of gold is typically disincentivized during a depression phase its incentivized. This is also how labor value manifests as a equilibrium produced through disequilibrium. During a depression there's a fall in prices under the gold standard and commodities are often sold at a loss, those producers still producing eke out low profits, break even, or even go into the red provided they can staveoff bankruptcy. And the converse, high gold production produces higher prices and higher profits but the "gold break" is part of why full-employment and full-industrial output is never reached. Now, I don't have time to explain how it works on nominally fiat systems but I would argue we are under a de facto gold standard of sorts regardless.

Another point against marginalism is the notion that the interest rate is determined by the scarcity of capital against the need for it but this goes against actual experience, when capital is most in oversupply at the height of a boom that's actually when interest rates are highest, which in itself indicates high demand for it, but when interest rates are lowest is in a depression -- precisely after a large quantity of capital is typically destroyed and pressing need for capital, to say nothing of pressing human needs, is greatest.

Says Law is false because commodities become overproduced relative to money not because there's no pressing human need for more things. That is why a generalized crisis of overproduction is not only possible but regularly recurrent since the early 1820s at the latest.

You might also be interested in how Sraffa, who wasn't Marxist but rather a neo-ricardian, refuted marginalism at the academic level in the 1960s:
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.com/wher ... omy-going/

Lysander Spooner took classical liberal ideas and used them in unthinkably radical ways during his time such as abolition of slavery

I mean Robespierre abolished slavery in the French Empire in 1793 and then the British empire abolished it in 1833 with chattel slavery finally ending in 1838 according to the passage of the law.

I don't fully agree with his anarcho communist gift economy.

Gift economies have a long history, worth reading Graeber's work on Debt here though the really revolutionary stuff was cribbed from Michael Hudson. The anthropological data on gift economics as a form of redistribution is rich but doesn't really explain much in itself. Lords pariticipated in gift-based economics when dealing with each other and with the lower classes in medieval Europe but the reason they had so much to give was they were at the apex of the feudal social hierarchy. A lord throwing a feast for his peasants and gift economics within the context of a hunter-gatherer tribe are not the same thing, though it may have been a practice that functionally stemmed from European tribal roots that was conserved socially and doctrinally in Christianity particularly with the focus on charity.

Spooner, Proudhon, and Kropotkin and others bring useful stuff to the table. All Marx brings is a silly story about oppressed vs oppressors and violent revolution and it leads to about 66-70 million deaths excluding tsar, nazis and naturalistic famines. So maybe we can learn from history to entirely reject Marx and take other radicals serious.

yeah you don't really arrive at those numbers by making those exclusions but okay. I'm not even going to argue with that methodologically plenty of people have, all I can say is that low key killing people is kinda goated. You got the British, American and French Revolutions that created liberalism in the first place by killing people. And to the point, you say you don't like stories about oppressors and oppressed. So does that mean the antis are our brothers? are the hateful parents? are the pigs, prosecutors, prison guards our brothers and sisters as MAPs? This is actually why Marx won out against Weitling and Prodhoun's supporters at the meeting of the league of the just in 1847. Weitling, who was a Christian, preached that all men are brothers while Marx and Engels told the working class activists in attendance that that was a bad slogan because the bourgeoisie and the workers aren't brothers but enemies. Also, here's another thing, Marx and Engels actually showed up whereas Prodhoun and Weitling didn't even bother to attend.

So, there's a lot in that, I didn't make this thread to defend Marxism but Marxism is apparently the ideology of radicals who have enough discipline to show up to things.

And there's no doubt that if MAPs were 1. more disciplined 2. more pushy, more angry, more vocal, meaner to enemies and yes, more violent but strategically so, such as in the realm of self-defense, then MAPs would be a lot freer than they are today. And that's just a fact.

That, in addition to a capacity for systemic and theoretical thinking, is what MAPs could learn from Marxism.

Posted: **Tue Apr 21, 2026 8:06 am**

Anonymous_Lover wrote: Tue Apr 21, 2026 5:37 am
zarkle wrote: Sat Mar 07, 2026 12:52 am I meant to say fascism has its evolutionary roots in a strong man charismatic leader that works on the principle of loyalty in Haidt's moral foundations. Humans are biologically hardwired to be loyal to a powerful tribe leader. That's the core of fascism. I implied fascism taps into ancient neuro-circuitry in our brains that encourages us to be loyal to a alpha male tribe leader.

As I discussed previously. Hitler was an extreme us vs them thinker who depicted Jews as a cosmic evil and Aryan's as all wholesome good. Showing clear evolutionary psychological basis that can be explained with Sapolsky's model. With Musolini its not as clear as he was far more nuanced but still meet the definition of a charismatic leader that people showed loyalty too. I admit I can't explain Musolini's behavior in evo psychological terms as well as Hitlers. So I partially concede
Which is something of a strong concession because Mussolini was much more physically imposing and behaved and looked much more like a "Chad" then Hitler. The series Mussolini: Son of The Century really does drive home the way that Mussolini's fascism was really more like a radical avante-garde art project, which I think places it beyond what your describing, if you know about Italian futurism which was influential on Mussolini and later was merged into Italian fascism. The other school of the futurist artistic avante-garde sided with the Bolsheviks, so I'm not sure how the vague sense that emerged at the start of the 20th century prior to WWI that we were living in a new world, everything needed to be overthrown, cars, planes, explosions, provocation and violence were cool etc. is inherently tied to the primitive primal us vs them evo-psych you describe. You actually had to be a huge nerd to be aware of it and to be into it when it was cool and to understand it. Futurism, particularly the Italian variety, may have fetishized action but it was an art project for nerds. They may have strived for combining the brutish and primitive with the intellectual, much like how the Greeks thought the ideal man was say a wrestler who was also a philosopher, and yeah, Plato was a wrestler and the name he took on wasn't his birth-name but his wrestler-name, it means broad but again this is for nerds. Nerds want to be smarter and more capable of violence, "jocks" who peaked in high school and frat boys generally aren't thinking about how they can make manifest some avante-garde art project or abstract ideological into reality, they are satisfied with their 250 bench-press, they talk about their gf/wife, kids if they have them, watch sports and slop TV. They may even be somewhat jealous of men and women who are smarter than them but it generally doesn't drive them to teach themselves Latin or German or read philosophy so they can combine intellect with their physical gifts.

Which brings me to the point that actually strong men aren't driven to manifest themselves into a Nietzschean archetype that will mould the people and world around them to match their will. Your more likely to hear from one of these guys that he's a Christian or "loves everyone and believes in doing the right thing" in a vague abstract sense. If you look at actual anthropology, the person who was chief in a tribal society was often the person who was the most generous, giving gifts to other people with the wealth he had, who people liked the most, who is competent and wise. There maybe some truth to the notion that the chief was often one of the "wealthier" people of a tribe but he was also the person who gave the most away. We have no need to assume that human beings before civilization were angels for this to be the case.

As for Mises. I agree with them on the subjective theory of value but strongly disagree with them on landlords, patents and absentee land titles. So you can understand my nuance. You are right about landlords being unthinkable to early classical liberals who showed skepticism of them. 19th century classical liberals would conflict with Rand, Mises and Rothbard here.
I mean... while that's theoretically possible, a huge factor motivating the move to marginalism was to defend landed property and passive rentier financial extraction. Jevons for instance suggested that rent was merely a function of pricing utility and helped set the stage for marginalism. But that was a very pedantic point which ignored the historical reality underwriting landownership and the fact that landlords don't work themselves either their tenants improve the property if say they own a large estate or they hire builders who build the housing, and commercial buildings they intend to rent out. On the frontier in Australia, America and other frontier settler societies in the same century land was practically worthless or very cheap, land that was far more fertile with more valuable resources than what existed in much of Europe but especially Britain. Why? Because, cheap labor wasn't readily available for a farmer to turn himself into a plantation-owner and because it was hard to either sell or demand rent for land at high prices when it was widely distributed, nor was it easy to coerce people into being peasant-like rent paying subjects to someone who doesn't work when free or cheap land is still widely available. Ruling classes have frequently lived off some form of rent-extraction since civilization arose but in ancient mesopotamia, land was practically value-less, what mattered was coercing labor to work said land. So there was ample evidence that the ideas that Jevons and other marginalists defended were false from actual historical experience that existed in their lifetime or close to it. Why does that matter?

For this reason:
"Lastly, Science, Reason and reductionism from the enlightenment clearly work and liberalism is known to reason its way out of its own bullshit" clearly, the marginalists who often were tenured professors who often came from families with substantial landed property, as professors often did in the Britain of that era, did not reason their way out of their own bullshit. What Upton Sinclair said is very true, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I maybe wasting my breath on trying to convince you out of marginalism, it seems to me like a parasite that gets stuck in men's minds, but since you seem to view yourself as someone who can reason themselves out of their own bullshit, I will try.

To start with, Walras's theory of perfect competition which undergirds micro-economics posits that in a world of truly perfect competition there will be no profit. But, what is capitalist production? It is production for profit. So either in this hypothetical we arrive in the end of capitalism, or, some of the capitalists involved in business decide its a waste of their time, so they cash out their enterprises, shut them down, splurge on themselves instead, some of the more stubborn capitalists remain in the game and eventually there is enough of a lack of competition to return the remaining firms back to profitability. So the whole thing is a tautology, when Walras proposed it when there was far more competition and lower barrier to entry then exists in business today. Therefore, the notion of profit being the result of "imperfect information" then becomes a practical necessity to keep a market-economy going, what do firms in a market economy respond to? Signals in demand that allow them to produce at profitable prices. And what would be a profitable price in an imaginary world of perfect competition or, and computers/the internet allows us to get closer to this then ever, a world where the consumer can get the best possible price available on the market at all times? Computer networks and databases do get us much closer to imagining a world without "imperfect information" in pricing. In theory, if we imagine the customer as someone who wants the best possible price for the product them having really accurate means to check prices at all times will progressively lead to a state of very low or no profit. The threshold for perfect information/competition is set up to be so high that it can't possibly be fulfilled by the real world, to a large extent, because marginalism to some extent because marginalists set up their own unfalsifiable premises but its not simple error, marginalists are generally people who do not want capitalism to end.

What's the alternative to this? Profit itself is built right into the system. A factory worker works an 8 hour day, let's say two of those hours he's working he's working for himself functionally to produce the paycheck he needs to survive, four of those hours goes into reproducing the overhead of the firm he works in, the building, the machines, inputs etc. what of the remaining two? Those would be the hours he works for the capitalists who own the firm. Its well-known for instance that companies generally make a product and sell it for more than it costs to produce. This is the difference between the cost-price of the commodity (what it costs to produce internally) and the value of the commodity (its price on the market). So there you go, profit is built right in, we don't have to invent scenarios where a glass of water is more valuable in a desert to a thirsty traveler then it is to someone lounging in a fresh spring. We're talking about average and aggregate experiences here and not really an exception like that. Of course, one could imagine a more pedestrian scenario where a cut of ham has more value to a hungry customer then a pig farmer but the inverse is true to, everything the farmer wants or needs besides pigs is produced by someone who "wants it less" than him because they have more than they need for personal use but this doesn't really explain how society gets any richer by trade on net because all that is happening here is people are functionally scamming each other by selling a thing for less than they value if they simply produced it for themselves. A very close analogue to this was actually addressed in the first chapters of Vol 1, if not the very first, along with the "mudpies" argument.

Could it be society gets richer because we all want more things that so we're working harder to make more things for trade and then eventually we found out a way to make more of those things faster? The problem is we live under capitalism and we don't work for things, we work for money and while it may feel this way to a consumer, especially in in a expansionary phase of the industrial cycle, they trade their labor for money which they use to buy commodities. The firms they work for produce more things sure but to make more money and where does that come from? We addressed exploitation as surplus labor time but there is another component and that's gold, which allows for the expansion of the money supply which produces more demand and higher/more profitable prices. And the underlying source of expanded money supply is gold, which is why I would submit that those marginalists who favor the gold standard have absolutely no idea why they truly do. Money could be anything which is why Keynes and Friedman's anti-gold standard stance is not some betrayal. Strangely, they think as if they live in a socialist economy where people exchange labor for good with money being only an intermediary. But, here is gold's role in the system: because it takes an extreme amount of labor to produce a single ounce of it, it becomes a medium for universal exchange not merely because its scarce but because it takes an extreme amount of labor and constant capital investment to produce it. Its role is to be the ultimate commodity that labor is used to metabolize into existence. That's how it becomes a store of value.

Here's why it works, under a classical gold standard, gold simply is money, so the prices of commodities directly reflect this. When prices fall, this acts to spur gold production as the commodities the producer and his workforce need to undertake production fall in value and gold appreciates. When commodity prices rise, usually after a renewed upswing in gold production and/or a long-sustained depression, that means gold is devalued against commodities. The gold mine owner produces money directly and so what he actually trades gold for, whatever he thinks he's doing, is for non-gold commodities. During a boom phase, the production of gold is typically disincentivized during a depression phase its incentivized. This is also how labor value manifests as a equilibrium produced through disequilibrium. During a depression there's a fall in prices under the gold standard and commodities are often sold at a loss, those producers still producing eke out low profits, break even, or even go into the red provided they can staveoff bankruptcy. And the converse, high gold production produces higher prices and higher profits but the "gold break" is part of why full-employment and full-industrial output is never reached. Now, I don't have time to explain how it works on nominally fiat systems but I would argue we are under a de facto gold standard of sorts regardless.

Another point against marginalism is the notion that the interest rate is determined by the scarcity of capital against the need for it but this goes against actual experience, when capital is most in oversupply at the height of a boom that's actually when interest rates are highest, which in itself indicates high demand for it, but when interest rates are lowest is in a depression -- precisely after a large quantity of capital is typically destroyed and pressing need for capital, to say nothing of pressing human needs, is greatest.

Says Law is false because commodities become overproduced relative to money not because there's no pressing human need for more things. That is why a generalized crisis of overproduction is not only possible but regularly recurrent since the early 1820s at the latest.

You might also be interested in how Sraffa, who wasn't Marxist but rather a neo-ricardian, refuted marginalism at the academic level in the 1960s:
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.com/wher ... omy-going/

Lysander Spooner took classical liberal ideas and used them in unthinkably radical ways during his time such as abolition of slavery
I mean Robespierre abolished slavery in the French Empire in 1793 and then the British empire abolished it in 1833 with chattel slavery finally ending in 1838 according to the passage of the law.

I don't fully agree with his anarcho communist gift economy.
Gift economies have a long history, worth reading Graeber's work on Debt here though the really revolutionary stuff was cribbed from Michael Hudson. The anthropological data on gift economics as a form of redistribution is rich but doesn't really explain much in itself. Lords pariticipated in gift-based economics when dealing with each other and with the lower classes in medieval Europe but the reason they had so much to give was they were at the apex of the feudal social hierarchy. A lord throwing a feast for his peasants and gift economics within the context of a hunter-gatherer tribe are not the same thing, though it may have been a practice that functionally stemmed from European tribal roots that was conserved socially and doctrinally in Christianity particularly with the focus on charity.

Spooner, Proudhon, and Kropotkin and others bring useful stuff to the table. All Marx brings is a silly story about oppressed vs oppressors and violent revolution and it leads to about 66-70 million deaths excluding tsar, nazis and naturalistic famines. So maybe we can learn from history to entirely reject Marx and take other radicals serious.
yeah you don't really arrive at those numbers by making those exclusions but okay. I'm not even going to argue with that methodologically plenty of people have, all I can say is that low key killing people is kinda goated. You got the British, American and French Revolutions that created liberalism in the first place by killing people. And to the point, you say you don't like stories about oppressors and oppressed. So does that mean the antis are our brothers? are the hateful parents? are the pigs, prosecutors, prison guards our brothers and sisters as MAPs? This is actually why Marx won out against Weitling and Prodhoun's supporters at the meeting of the league of the just in 1847. Weitling, who was a Christian, preached that all men are brothers while Marx and Engels told the working class activists in attendance that that was a bad slogan because the bourgeoisie and the workers aren't brothers but enemies. Also, here's another thing, Marx and Engels actually showed up whereas Prodhoun and Weitling didn't even bother to attend.

So, there's a lot in that, I didn't make this thread to defend Marxism but Marxism is apparently the ideology of radicals who have enough discipline to show up to things.

And there's no doubt that if MAPs were 1. more disciplined 2. more pushy, more angry, more vocal, meaner to enemies and yes, more violent but strategically so, such as in the realm of self-defense, then MAPs would be a lot freer than they are today. And that's just a fact.

That, in addition to a capacity for systemic and theoretical thinking, is what MAPs could learn from Marxism.

Your economics on why marginal economics/subjective theory of value goes way over my head. I don't understand enough to reply adequately. I'll just say when it comes to the labor theory of value vs subjective theory of value and all the hybrid models that try to reconcile/hybridize the two I lean in the direction that both of them have pros and cons. Labor feels more ethical to respect workers but subjective seems to match real life.

>So does that mean the antis are our brothers? are the hateful parents? are the pigs, prosecutors, prison guards our brothers and sisters as MAPs?

No it means we look at things from a naturalistic perspective. We should not look at things like a all encompassing historical conflict between two sides with intentional bad actors, unless their is direct evidence of intentional malice. Most antis who hate us are brainwashed by child protection instincts. Most "evil" can be explained by neuroscience as bad biology. Turning the world into a fight between two sides tends to kill nuance. So your academic theory of Marxism and Critical Theory will turn into a simple binary battle once it reaches the general public's consensus. Naturalistic processes unfolding just happen to create extreme inequality and social injustice. There is rarely top down conspiracy from a ruling class. Problems are a mix of culture, nature and the ruling class all interacting together not just one culprit. It is absurd when leftist blame all problems on capitalism alone. Or tie racism, sexism, homophobia towards capitalism. That does not seem to be supported.

As for Marx I can never except him for the reason of supporting a strong centralized transitional state that Proudhon and Bakunin warned out. I do not believe that a strong centralized Government represented by workers can wither away into a stateless classless society. We seen that fail every time its been attempted like the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, Mao and yeah I know it was cancelled by Stalin who made the case a state is needed, but that's the point real power never voluntarily surrenders and it just proved Prouhdhon and Bakunin right.

Proudhon was a deeply flawed man with the most extreme anti semitic private writings. He had a extreme "us vs them" mentality against Jews but that didn't seem to influence his work on decentralization, large scale worker co-ops, interest free credit, anti patent and truly free markets from monopoly. If anything Proudhon's ideas were like open source software in a world without computers and Marx's ideas were more appealing to the desperate poor public, but ultimately we know what happened.

1) Proudhon got lost to history (though loosely mutated in C4SS, Rothbard's "anarcho" capitalism, stateless society projects, free and open source software, decentralization crypto currency)

2) Marx's ideas went viral and turned into dictatorships that failed. Marx's ideas also mutated into unrecognizable forms like critical theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, colonial theory and more.

3) Capitalism started to actually become more stable and free market mechanisms did partially lift people out of poverty. But without safety regulation I agree it was brutal

4) But it was also FDR, Progressives, Franklin DeRoosevelt and the welfare state through democratic means, building railroads across America and educating children and safety regulations. That improved quality of life even though they broke the rule of voluntaryism. What the progressives did worked more then all other 3.

5) Democratic Socialist and Progressive Liberals clearly show the strongest evidence of working policies in real life and I say this as a Mutualist who disagrees with them for ethical reasons of it not being voluntary.

I am a Mutualist adjacent thinker and I believe in decentralized free markets and voluntary trade and worker co-ops over government force but I look at it like a north star not something that can be achieved overnight. My hope is that in the future liberalism can slowly reason its way into making Government functions 100% voluntary instead of mandatory taxation payments, my goal as a mutualist/classical liberal/progressive hybrid is not to abolish the state aggressively but rather one of two options

Option one (risky and cut throat)
1) peacefully opt out of the state and build an alternative crypto economy. It can work in small scale but I'm skeptical it can upscale.

Option two (more safe and realistic)
2) let the dem socs get there way and then try to reason with them to make taxes 100% voluntary. (progressive "anarcho" capitalism) making the state 100% voluntary like Aubereon Herbert wanted but with a progressive twist where welfare programs and mutual aid and public schools are present but 100% voluntarily funded instead of forcefully mandated. This argument assumes that Democratic Socialist might eventually be convinced through reason that fraud, theft and coercion is always wrong even when the State does it.

So I suppose someone could say that I Zarkle hold very unorthodox political views because I see a hypothetical future where democratic socialism with tolerance for market competition transitions into a 100% voluntarily funded system where taxes go from mandatory to optional. That way we still have public welfare and education and we can get the best out of markets lowering prices, peaceful trade, anti monopoly mechanisms and giving consumers the most options. I use to hold agorist style views and in a way still do but I think opting out of the government via peaceful black markets and building a crypto economy would only work on small scale - not large scale. The best path is to convince DemSocs of the future that it is progressive to make the Government functions 100% voluntary.

Sorry I could not respond to your long post about labor theory of value vs subjective theory of value. I don't understand enough to comment.

Posted: **Wed Apr 22, 2026 7:25 am**

zarkle wrote: Tue Apr 21, 2026 8:06 am Your economics on why marginal economics/subjective theory of value goes way over my head. I don't understand enough to reply adequately. I'll just say when it comes to the labor theory of value vs subjective theory of value and all the hybrid models that try to reconcile/hybridize the two I lean in the direction that both of them have pros and cons. Labor feels more ethical to respect workers but subjective seems to match real life.

So, to recap, you told someone in this thread who challenged your knowledge of Marx that you knew more than they thought. But, you don't seem to know the basics of Marx's Labor Theory of Value or the theoretical basis of the marginalist doctrine you claim to follow. What I wrote should be explicable for someone who understands the basics of either of these things. Then you are going to accuse Marx and Engels of oversimplifying reality when their theory is above what you can currently comprehend. There are good reasons why LTV and marginalism can't be reconciled. Marx's work, which you clearly aren't familiar with, is basically the apotheosis of the classical economic tradition you claim to champion. And when you say subjective theory matches with real life, I have no idea what you even mean, the biggest expense of almost any business is payroll and Paul Cockshott has good empirical work showing that the cost of labor is the input that is the most predictive of prices of a given commodity and this includes many particular input from steel to concrete or numerous other material inputs to even faux frais overhead costs like rent and interest. I think to an unbiased observer this explains a lot about why capitalists are obsessed with cheap and plentiful labor. Cockshott even argues that its predictive power is strong enough that simple labor values (what workers are paid) is enough to predict prices which elides the "transformation problem" debate.

We should not look at things like a all encompassing historical conflict between two sides with intentional bad actors, unless their is direct evidence of intentional malice.

We see direct evidence of malice though. Pedo hunters and pedo toileting are excellent examples, the point is not to save any particular kid, in the case of pedo hunters and various pig entrapment schemes a real kid doesn't even exist, not even one "groomed" from behind a computer screen but never having direct interaction. Its about hurting pedophiles. Laws that force therapists to disclose pedophilic thoughts of patients even without evidence of a crime or intent to commit one are about hurting MAPs and not saving anyone. Even the therapists office must not be a potential place of solace even for a person who has no intention of offending, they want us to kill ourselves. The sex offender registry and medical confinement are also direct violations of the US constitution regarding punishing criminals after serving their sentence. Chemical and surgical castration of offenders is an extreme form of cruel and unusual punishment. I'm sorry but your just uneducated on reality and clearly out of your depth. I've even had antis tell me as a front line activist that trans genocide is fake but MAP genocide is real and say its a good thing. The evidence of intentional bad actors working to hurt MAPs is massive.

Most antis who hate us are brainwashed by child protection instincts. Most "evil" can be explained by neuroscience as bad biology.

Wrong. In many cases, they don't care about children at all and actively despise them. They don't have a problem with parents treating their kids as property. They don't have a problem with them being forced to go to school or numerous other things that children are forced to do by the bourgeois state and other people in positions of authority.What they have a problem with is kids being allowed to say yes to sexual activity, not only with MAPs but also to do things like watch porn or have sex with each other. This is about control rather than protection. You know a funny thing? During the pandemic child suicide dropped to almost nothing bc kids weren't forced to go to school. We hear so much moralistic claptrap "if X proposal protects even ONE child its worth it" so why didn't that get discussed at all in media? Why wasn't it a hot topic on social media? Because people would rather there be child suicides than to reform the school system. Reasonable reforms to the school system that don't involve wholly abolishing it are possible. Whether MAPs,AAMs, and YLs who consider themselves revolutionaries wish to pursue reform rather than abolition in this area is an open question. We've known for a while that making children get up to go to school at 8am is bad for their health (this doesn't include time spent getting ready, not uncommon for kids to be at 6:30am or earlier) and somehow it never changes. Its about control and what's convenient for adults not "child protection instincts" they could give a fuck about that. You even have whole online subcultures like /r/childfree that appear to be premised around hating kids calling them things like "crotch goblins" and the like. Its merely a more extreme expression of an ingrained disdain for youth that its hard to find any other word for than adult supremacy or child hatred. I noticed that adults at school seemed to hate us when I was in late elementary/middle school, at times it felt almost like there was a conspiracy that all the adults were in on against us, but its really just a shared ingrained attitude of adult supremacy. Since I consider myself a MAP activist first and not any other sort of activist this is not my primary focus, many YLs are viciously anti-MAP. They fail to consider that preventing minors from forming relationships with adults is part of maintaining the structure they criticize and anti-MAP laws are designed to protect parental/familial/state supremacy over children.

So your academic theory of Marxism and Critical Theory will turn into a simple binary battle once it reaches the general public's consensus.

And that would be a good thing. If antis are censored, fired from their jobs, jailed, or even killed that would be quite a victory and their just desserts. Somehow allowing them to control the narrative has led to them doing all those things to us. Funny how that works, they simply do not agree with you and will kill/put you in prison if they have the opportunity. So apparently they are quite conscious of the fact that there are two sides, two worldviews, you are either with them 100% or they try to socially ostrascize you, fire you from your job, kill you etc. I saw Chibi reviews defending loli with the standard "its just a drawing" arguments. For having the temerity to publicly defend loli using the most weak sauce anondyne arguments an internet nazi threatened to dig up Chibi's deceased brother's grave and turn him into a chair and used AI to place himself with a shovel in a convincing manner above his brother's gravesite. Many were saying he was "based", even people who think they are nominally progressive. Is this internet nazi acting out of child protective instincts? Considering that he came from soyjak.party or sharty, where users regularly spam pictures of dead black babies/children ("DNB" as they call it) it seems very doubtful. He is using the social shield this taboo gives him to act out violent fantasies, as many antis do, some far more dangerously and deadly than others. So they don't believe there's room for nuance, there's simply two sides, two groups, two ideologies and there's is the only correct one. Maybe its time that MAPs do the same. MAPs need to start acting like they are in a war, are engaged in a struggle as a group, because we are.

Naturalistic processes unfolding just happen to create extreme inequality and social injustice.

And yet no hunter-gatherer society has been documented with material inequality as extreme as a modern capitalist one. Graeber even makes a convincing argument that its not merely the result of a lack of enough social surplus to have large inequality (although that is true) but that social codes within these societies work to keep inequality lower than it might otherwise be. You do a lot of appeal to nature fallacies which is indicative of a mindset incapable of historicization or seriously lacking in a systemic capacity for it. For instance, the writers of the Quran and the Bible just happened to fail to write down that pedophilia was wrong, if its just so natural to think so then why did they do that? Muhammad even married Aisha at 9 and even dressed down some fellow muslims for not being willing to play (sexually) with prepubescent/pubescent girls.

Whatever facets of the age-related sex taboo that existed in pre-modern society is not nearly as extremely manifested in modern society. That means the prejudice is historical, whether one agrees or disagrees with it. Pederasty and adult-child sex/marriage was widely practiced in the Roman Empire and in ancient greece, its been documented in other cultures including hunter-gatherer ones. While we should be careful about painting the past in overly rosy colors it is just a fact that the way this is expressed today and the force it is expressed with means it is a profoundly modern taboo.

yeah I know it was cancelled by Stalin who made the case a state is needed

Yeah, and what happened? Poland invaded the USSR in 1922. Nazi Germany attacked in 1941 and then the US and NATO spent the Cold War pointing their nukes, planes, ships and tanks in the direction of the USSR. I feel no need to defend absolutely everything the USSR ever did but if you try to build a different world, the imperialists will come and fucking kill you. You want to do it by abiding all the rules of the bourgeois democratic process? Just look at what happened in Chile in 1973. You even want to try anarchism? Well, anarchist Catalonia was crushed by two fascist great powers directly intervening on the side of a domestic fascist rebellion against the legitimate Republic. Iran isn't even socialist but Trump and Israel are trying to crush it now because they insist on their sovereignty. Trump is starving Cuba with a naval blockade and it hasn't been a "threat" since Soviet nukes were withdrawn from the island, its revolution happened in 1959 and the imperialists are still holding a grudge. The Western imperialists are still petitioning the Russian government for compensation for foreign assets expropriated in 1917. They are relentless. You may know something about the Paris commune, given Prodhoun's influence in france and among a substantial section of the communards, you might say its the closest the type of politics you claim to favor ever got to getting off the ground. What happened? Well, they did not seize the banks and the state aparratus and were too forgiving of the class enemy among them, well, the Bismark permitted the French reactionaries who had raised an army in Versailles to cross his lines to put down the Revolution there. It was a massacre, historians estimate anywhere from 20,000-70,000 communards/workers were slaughtered in Paris, with contemporary eyewitnesses saying it was as if whole working class districts in Paris were depopulated. The Third Republic was built atop the bones of the working class -- an irony, given all the communards were republicans and upheld the legacy of the French revolution, whatever they thought about the State itself as an entity. I didn't make this thread to defend Marxism but its clear MAPs need to think as Marxists. They must learn to struggle ruthlessly with the enemy. Because it is a war, and not only is it clear they will kill and jail us if we get close to succeeding but they are doing that already and, I don't claim to be able to predict the future, but based on the current trajectory we are not close to succeeding yet.

Proudhon got lost to history (though loosely mutated in C4SS, Rothbard's "anarcho" capitalism, stateless society projects, free and open source software, decentralization crypto currency)

Prodhoun did not get lost to history he is still a core part of the anarchist canon. What happened is that anarchist revolutions failed to succeed anywhere. Whether prodhoun was a consistent anarchist is an open question I suppose but the Paris commune was the last time a large group of people upholding Prodhoun's banner tried to make a revolution and it was drowned in the blood of the working class. In a sense, that was the ultimate test of whether Marx or Prodhoun's vision would win it out politically. Marx himself said Prodhoun's Property Is Theft was a monumental accomplishment as Prodhoun, in Marx's description, was the first thinker in history to question property itself. You only need to read Marx's critiques of Prodhoun's works to find why he thought it was insufficient. While Marx was a particularly acerbic critic, I think its worth noting that his critiques were probably less respectful than a younger Marx would have given because Prodhoun was becoming increasingly reactionary. The anti-semitism is well-known, what's less well-known is Prodhoun eventually came to the position that certain strikes by french workers should be put down with violence. For that reason, some scholars maintain Prodhoun was closer to anarcho-capitalism in his later career then people tend to think of him now.

and we can get the best out of markets lowering prices

That's a major problem for capitalism which is why state policy since the Great Depression has been inflationary on the whole. And while even this will not work in the end, it is a factor designed to aid the persistence of capitalism when faced with overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Looping back to the LTV vs. marginalism section earlier, without profit there's simply no way that markets can "effectively" allocate resources. Maybe it doesn't seem like such a big deal to you if a small business makes a 5% profit (actually profit rates of small firms tend to be somewhat higher due to using more exploited labor and lower capital density, a high profit/turnover rate is the only thing that can justify someone with limited means using them to create a business) but if we're following Marx's LTV that's still exploitation. Okay, lets put that aside, the ruling class has more than hundred trillion dollars in assets they want to keep profitable and debts they want someone to pay down. They are not going to let you do anything that will impede this extraction without fiercely resisting you, whatever they give you they will try to take back.

An analogue here, is whatever breakthroughs MAPs had in the 70s, and comparatively more minor cultural breakthroughs in the 2000s with its generally horny and lassiez-faire attitude, did the enemy give up? No, they organized to undermine and destroy what little we had. Its about time we do the same, we need a little less "I" in this movement and more we. I know, that this movement has many weird heterodox people and individualists but that is part of why we are losing. You speak of "I Zarkle" as if your opinion should be adopted by all voluntarily, what I can say is I do have an organization at my back that I am a speaker for.

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