economics – Page 5

10 Years Of VJM Publishing On Amazon – And The Plan For The Next 10 Years

It was ten years ago today that VJM Publishing launched our first book on Amazon. Titled Stop Smoking Cigarettes with the Token Economy Method, it is a short Kindle book describing how to use a clinical psychology technique known as the token economy method to overcome cravings for tobacco cigarettes. It hasn’t sold many copies, but it has two 5-star reviews, showing that it greatly helped at least two people.

Since then, we have published 15 other books on Amazon, all of which are available in paperback form as well as Kindle (see sidebar to right). In general, these books have received good reviews, especially the most recent one, Clown World Chronicles, which has a 4.5-star rating across GoodReads and Amazon.

All in all, the last ten years have been pretty good for VJM Publishing. We have produced a decent number of high-quality books, but have been hampered by a lack of the funds necessary to promote our work in today’s pay-for-play media landscape. The way forward from here will be about finding new ways to bring our work to a wider audience.

The plan for the next ten years is to keep producing quality books and to keep building our company reputation. We are already shadowbanned from both FaceBook and Google, banned outright from most Reddit subs and the mainstream media will never feature us, so we have two major strategies to stay relevant over the next decade.

The first strategy is to prioritise alt tech.

Getting shadowbanned from our erstwhile main sources of traffic has been difficult. Luckily, there are alternatives. The main alternative has been podcasting: VJM has already made multiple appearances on the Jackson Fowler podcast, the Chad Chaddington podcast, and the Bobbing Along podcast. Not only that, but we have also started our own VJM Publishing podcast!

Apart from the podcasts, we’ve been able to establish a decent presence on Gab, and have just expanded into Telegram. The Gab presence has been particularly fruitful, as our posts there regularly get more reactions, comments and shares than on FaceBook, despite that we only have one-eighth of the subscribers on Gab. Alt tech today is as reluctant to ban wrongthinkers as FaceBook and Google were ten years ago, so we will use them more in the future.

The second strategy is to expand in meatspace. This involves two sub-strategies.

The first sub-strategy is to buy land that can be used as a physical base for operations – a literal asylum in the mountains. This involves increasing VJM Publishing’s income over the next ten years to the point where we can afford the land and, once the land is purchased, to establish a temple and monastery dedicated to Elementalism.

Elementalism is the name given to the religion we launched with the publication of our book Elemental Elementalism. This was founded as a Dharmic religion for the Age of Aquarius, one which promulgated the perennial spiritual truths that have been mostly forgotten after the twin onslaughts of the Abrahamic death cults and nihilistic materialistic atheism.

Elementalism needs a physical space that can serve as a holy ground for followers of this religion, the religion of the new age of the world. It is to achieve that end that VJM Publishing intends to raise $2,000,000 over the next 10 years. The goal is to buy a secluded campground somewhere that can serve as a temple and monastery.

With a temple and monastery established, VJM Publishing will be in a position to take in spiritually-minded people who can’t find a place in Clown World. These people will be able to stay at this holy ground and help work towards providing spiritual truth and solace to the benighted masses of the world.

The second sub-strategy is to sell copies of Elemental Elementalism in the street.

This will involve a kind of spiritual evangelism, not like the Abrahamic crusaders and jihadists, but like Socrates’s effort to enlighten his fellow Athenians. Here we will strike up discussions with passing citizens, and debate them about philosophy, in an effort to shine a light upon the ignorance of the modern age.

With copies of Elemental Elementalism in hand, VJM Publishing will take to the streets to spread the truth about the nature of reality and the Good News of Elementalism to as wide an audience as possible. The Good News of Elementalism is the doctrine that Clown World so desperately needs. Although we expect to encounter massive opposition, as Socrates did, we know that the truth will win in the end, as it always does.

The next ten years will see the religion of Elementalism take root and expand all over the world. We will be pushing it as hard as possible from our offices here in New Zealand, working towards the goal of acquiring enough money to buy land for our temple and monastery. Herein we intend to follow in the footsteps of Pythagoras, who established a philosophical monastery ancient Greece.

This second sub-strategy supports the first. It will be through demonstrating the power and truth of Elementalism through street evangelism that we are most likely to encounter a generous donor with the wealth necessary to help us buy land. Promoting Elemental Elementalism is the most effective way to light a fire in the soul of such a person.

In summary, the next ten years of VJM Publishing operations will be similar to the first in the sense that we will focus on producing quality informational material and promoting this to the masses. But they will be different in the sense that we will explore alternative methods of promotion, as well as developing real estate in the physical world instead of just online.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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If Anyone Deserves Reparations, It’s Working-Class People

A lot of noise is currently devoted to the question of reparations. Most of the talk is about reparations to American blacks, with the remainder to homosexuals or mental health patients. However, as this essay will examine, there’s one group of people whose claim to deserve reparations is stronger than that of anyone else: working-class people.

The working class has effectively been enslaved for millennia – and still is. In, fact, the entire societal infrastructure upon which all wealth rests has been built on the backs of the working class, and continues to be maintained by the working class. Without the efforts of people in this class, no-one else would live any higher than barbarians.

The entire essence of being a working-class person is that you don’t own land, and therefore cannot earn a living or an income from your own property. That means that you have to labour on someone else’s property, and that means you’re forced to accept whatever terms they lay down. As there are no commons to hunt anymore, the alternative is starvation.

Our entire economic system is built on the idea that the owners of the land also own all the productivity that takes place on it. Those who do the producing have no say, because the landowners employ police and security services who will use force to destroy the workers if they try to keep their productivity. The end consequence of all this: the workers are dependent on those owners for a wage.

This wage is the only difference between the worker and a slave. In theory, the worker gets enough of a wage so that, if they save diligently, they too can become a landowner one day. A slave, by contrast, is incapable of improving his position. In practice, the modern Western worker cannot improve his position either, as his wage only covers tax, rent/mortgage, food and a few other necessities.

So even though the worker is given a wage in lieu of being left to starve, his savings are so low that there’s little practical difference between him and a slave. The three lions of profits, taxes and rents take away the vast majority of his productivity, leaving him with only just enough money to keep him alive.

Even worse than the loss of productivity has been centuries of anti-working class prejudice that has seen countless people driven to the wall.

This prejudice continues today. In Britain, some 19,000 girls are raped every year by foreign grooming gangs. But because the vast majority of those girls are working-class, their suffering is ignored by the authorities. In Rotherham, official contempt for the suffering of the working class was so great that the Police covered up grooming gang rapes of working-class girls so as to keep racial tensions down.

This transparently unjust state of affairs has existed for centuries already, in some form or other. Because slavery is more profitable than paying a fair wage, the landowners have always sought to reduce the working class to a state as close to slavery as possible. And they’ve always succeeded to some extent. The working class has never, at any point in history, got a fair deal.

Perhaps the worst deal the working class ever got was to be forced wholesale into the slaughterpits of World War I and World War II. Working-class men comprised the vast majority of the soldiery in both wars, suffering most of the trauma, both physical and mental. The intergenerational consequences of this trauma persists today in a higher-than-baseline level of most mental illnesses among working-class people.

All this historical exploitation explains why landowners are so wealthy today, and workers so poor.

This reduction to penury has only been possible because of power differentials. As mentioned above, owning land makes it possible to own an enforcer class, which can then be used to take all the productivity away from the working class. If the working class tries to get a better deal through e.g. strike action, the enforcer class will break the strike up. Effectively, then, the working class has been robbed of most of its productivity for centuries.

If anyone deserves reparations, it’s the people who have had most of their productivity taken off them under threat of starvation for hundreds of years. The same group who has performed most of the hard labour but which has the least of the wealth.

The majority of the world’s wealth has either been produced by, or made possible by, the labours of the working classes. Despite that fact, the working classes of the West continue to languish in poverty. The average Western working-class person today, not having middle-class parents to inherit from, has almost no chance of gaining enough money on his wage to buy a home and raise a family.

If reparations are to be handed out, it should not be on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation but on the basis of need. This means that reparations ought to target working-class people.

The ideal reparations would come in the form of a universal basic income funded by a land tax. The land tax would hardly impact the working class, who can’t afford property on their wages anyway, while the univeral basic income would make it possible to both heal intergenerational trauma and to negotiate wages from a fair position.

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It’s Time For A Global ‘Lying Flat’ Movement

A wave of young people in China, driven to exhaustion by the relentless demands of their industrial culture, have launched what they call the ‘Lying flat’ movement. They protest their workplace pressures by doing the absolute minimum amount of work possible. This essay will suggest that it’s time to bring the lying flat movement to the world stage.

The lying flat movement is inspired by the idea that a chive lying flat cannot be reaped. In this context, to lie flat is to refuse to be exploited, to disengage from the rat race. The usual path involves moving to the countryside and living as cheaply as possible. Someone lying flat might still work, but they’ll do it for themselves or their family or village instead of some corporate.

The lying flat movement began in China as a reaction to their onerous 996 culture, which insists on a 9am to 9pm, six day workweek. These 72-hour workweeks are incredibly profitable for those who own and run the factories and offices, but, for those supplying the labour component, they’re brutal.

Such long hours are tough even when well-remunerated. A 72-hour workweek leaves very little time or energy left over for recreation. It’s an extreme grind, and will drive a worker to exhaustion in short order.

Unfortunately, the post-nationalist capitalist mentality is that workers are just replaceable parts, and if one breaks down it’s a simple matter of chucking it out and replacing it with a new one. The Chinese industrialists, like the Western industrialists, import outside cheap labour to replace the native labour that they drive into the ground, only theirs comes from rural China instead of everywhere in the world.

The net result is the same, however. An oversupply of labour can only lead to one thing, and that’s a discounted labour price, which itself leads to the impoverishment of the working class. The mass importation of cheap labour has such a destructive effect on native wages that the inevitable end result is a shit life for everyone except for the employers of that cheap labour.

The Chinese have figured out that there’s no winning for workers under these conditions – so why don’t we?

Why don’t we take the lying flat movement to the whole world?

A global lying flat movement would firstly recruit the already rapidly-growing legions of NEETs in the West, and the hikikomoris in Japan. These groups have already dropped out of the industrial profit machine, and are essentially part of a global lying flat movement already. They were the first to realise that the equation of how much was being asked of them to how much they were rewarded did not add up, and their example can inspire others.

The movement would next recruit anyone who works full-time but can’t buy a home or raise a family on their wage. The individuals in this group have not yet suffered psychological collapse, unlike those in the first group, and are still able to labour. However, the equation doesn’t add up for them either. The difference is that this second group is now close to 50% of the working-age population, and higher in the younger demographics.

Before either group can be recruited, a canon of high-quality propaganda must be developed. This propaganda must suggest persuasively that industrialised hyper-capitalist society is in fact evil, and that refusing to power it with one’s life energy is a moral imperative. One example of such propaganda argues that a life on welfare is morally superior to a life as a worker, because the welfare beneficiary uses fewer resources, and resource conservation is now more important than production.

This propaganda will be effective because many who hear it will already be receptive to it. Many are already tempted to drop out of the system, having long ago calculated that their wages will never allow them to save enough to own their own home and raise a family. If they see that other people achieve a higher standard of living by dropping out of the system, they’ll become motivated to drop out as well.

That people will drop out of the system is inevitable at this stage of the cycle. Working hard in the city only makes sense during the boom times, because in the boom times the workers have the leverage, and so they can get a fair share of their own productivity. But capital always outpaces labour (link goes to .pdf), so when the bust part of the cycle hits, the people who own everything will maintain their share by reducing the share of the workers.

If you’re a worker and not an owner, then, you want to be living cheaply in the countryside when the bust hits. This is what great numbers of young Chinese have already figured out. It’s harder to do in New Zealand, because we don’t have villages everywhere, but it’s still possible. The basic leverage equation makes city life less and less worthwhile with every year that passes.

A global return to cheap, low-stress country living would cripple the industrial capital juggernaut, and shift the balance of wage negotiation leverage back towards the worker. Starved of cheap labour, the ruling class would be forced to pay a fair wage or go without producers. It’s time to go tang ping, and bring the lying flat movement to every corner of the industrialised world.

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They Would Go Back To Chattel Slavery If They Could

A number of wage subsidy scams are being reported right now, usually involving a worker being coerced into working for free or for discounted wages. Many people seem surprised that employers would be so brazen as to take advantage of a struggling person, especially in times when solidarity is needed. The reality is that employers would go back to chattel slavery if it wasn’t against the law.

The typical attitude of an employer in New Zealand is most accurately summarised by the Magic Talk caller known only as “Mark”. Mark called in to say that Kiwis were lazy and that immigrants made much better workers. This contempt for New Zealand workers is shared by most of the ruling class. John Key spoke for this ruling class when he said that we need to import foreign workers because Kiwis are lazy and on drugs.

As any Kiwi who has worked overseas knows, Kiwi workers are highly sought-after specifically because we are not lazy. If we had been lazy, we would never have survived the challenges put before us in our short history, because those challenges demanded that we shape an entire nation out of almost nothing, and we overcame them.

The truth, as is widely understood if not widely admitted, is that workers who are dependent on their employer for a visa will be much more submissive, and will accept much worse treatment, than those who are not dependent. This is why foreign workers are desired in New Zealand and New Zealand workers desired in foreign countries.

The mentality of the average employer, anywhere in the world, hasn’t changed much from 200 years ago. People from the working class are still considered cattle; their suffering is routinely ignored in the pursuit of profit. The mindset of today’s employer is still to put profit first and to discount human suffering, especially if those suffering are poor. It’s little different to the mindset of a cotton plantation owner.

Understanding the psychology of the employer – and, thereby, understanding why our economies are structured the way they are – requires the realisation that the ruling class would rather pay the workers nothing at all. If society was governed by an employers and landowners union, it would happily go back to chattel slavery.

Because the ruling class can’t get away with that, they can only push the worker as close to chattel slavery as the law allows. This is achieved by taking away as much of their productivity as legally possible. And so, most of the productivity of every worker is taken from them by the three lions of profits, taxes and rents.

The employer in a capitalist system is obsessed with profit. Profit is a matter of maximising incomes and minimising expenses, and the major expense is usually labour. It’s not cheap to get a person to work on your plantation all day when they’d rather be at home taking care of their family and community. So employers usually have to pay big. This has conditioned them to seek out any and all opportunity to maximise their access to cheap labour.

It can be said that cheap labour makes the world go around.

One of the first things that Brazil did after coming into existence was to import slaves – some 5 million were brought to Brazil before 1866, mostly to farm sugar cane. America, likewise, didn’t wait long before importing African slaves of their own. Even though only 300,000 were brought to the United States, it was enough to significantly depress wages in the Deep South. Much of colonial South and Central America operated on the slave plantation model pioneered by the Portuguese.

Australia and New Zealand never operated on this model. The Anzac ruling classes, however, have always been subject to the same temptations as the other colonial ruling classes. The temptation to maximise profit by minimising the cost of labour has always been present, sometimes intensely. We can see this from the fact that the Western ruling class have pushed the workers as close to slavery as possible without calling it slavery.

Rather than import slaves, and maintain them at the employer’s own expense on their plantations, it’s easier for those employers to import foreign cheap labour, and dump them into working-class neighbourhoods to fend for themselves. This is not only as profitable as chattel slavery, but it outsources the mental labour of arranging to feed, clothe and house the workers back to the workers themselves.

The importation and then naturalisation of cheap labour externalises the cost of diversity onto wider society, while keeping all the profits for the employer. The major negative consequence of diversity is lower wages. This occurs because diversity makes it more difficult for the working class to present the united front necessary to force the employer class to share the productivity of the workers.

The net result of 70 years of the mass importation of cheap labour: our wages have fallen so far that the average worker has no hope of owning their own home. The mainstream media screams ‘Racist!’ at anyone who draws the connection, but even high-school economics students understand that an oversupply of cheap labour will inevitably crash the price of working-class wages.

In 1992, the average Kiwi could buy the average house after about 7,000 hours of labour at the average wage. Today, so much of the average Kiwi’s productivity is sucked away in profits, taxes and rents that it takes over 25,000 hours of labour at the average wage to buy the average house. Vast numbers have completely given up hope. It’s already becoming the case that people are working just to stay alive, and some have to borrow money just to be able to do that!

All this was made possible by the working class getting pushed, closer and closer, over several decades, towards chattel slavery.

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