Skip tries to figure things out

Skip: ok, Bottle. I've been here long enough. What are your actual political views? 

Bottle: not applicable. 

Skip: that can't be true. You have tons of opinions about everything. What do you actually think? 

Bottle: what's the definition of "politics" today, Compy? 

C: from Oxford Languages: 

Politics (noun): the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power. 

Bottle: there you go. I neither have nor hope to achieve power, i don't govern anything except the conditions in my 3-foot radius of personal space, and i didn't ask to be born on this particular land mass. Yep, don't care. 

Skip: you have to care. 

Bottle: no, i don't. I guess i do have a rule, or a guiding principle, or whatever: if you kill me, i'll be dead. Does that count? 

Skip: ...... 

Bottle: how about "i can think, or i can work, but i can't work while you keep changing what i'm supposed to think about, and i can't think if you keep changing what i'm supposed to be doing"? 

Skip: grrr....... 

Bottle: what answer do you want me to give you? What are we actually talking about? 

Skip: you keep bringing up all these Marxist/Communist topics. 

Bottle: yeah, like 3/4 of the US is already a Communist Country. 

Skip: no, Bottle. Russia and China and North Korea and those places are Communist. 

Bottle: No, every one of those countries have Capitalist societies with varying degrees of Authoritarian governments. Stalin was a State-Capitalist. In an actual Marx-defined Communist country, every individual citizen would be self-employed within the context of "being useful." 

Skip: no, Bottle, that's Capitalism. 

Bottle: no, Skip. I don't know what weird-ass books you've been reading, but they aren't the actual philosophical writings of philosophical thinkers. Friendliness can be just as powerful a system for bartering as money, but there's no physical representation of friendliness beyond actually being friendly. 

Conversely, i don't show up to work every day because i enjoy it, i'm not a yay sports team kind if guy, i show up because it's the most agreeable way to get money that i can find. I don't want to need money, the State forces me to use only money. 

Skip: ok, i guess i don't have any idea what "the State" is. 

Bottle: it was a sketch comedy show in the 90s. 

Skip: you are so freaking backward, Bottle. 

Bottle: Skip, we're in a Klein bottle. If you walk forward in a straight line (assuming one of your legs isn't shorter that the other) you will come back to this exact place facing the other direction. If one leg IS shorter than the other, Jeebus only knows which direction you'll be facing when you get back. It would look like a 3-dimensional Spirograph drawing. 

Skip: what?! 

Bottle: ok, i know, you know how when you go to the optometrist and he swings over the phoroptor? 

Skip: the big lens thing? Sure, why? 

Bottle: because he doesn't have any frickin clue how the 3 dimensions interact in your particular eyes, so he flicks random lenses in small increments in front of you to try to narrow in on your specific eye shape. At the end he just writes down what settings you thought looked best. 

Skip: what does that have to do with Capitalism or Communism or anything? 

Bottle: the eye doctor isn't magic, he owns and operates the machine that tells him what lens prescription you need. You could go buy one if you wanted to. Hard to operate by and for yourself, but he's just selling you the process of correcting your vision for profit. Don't get me wrong, he is also legitimately making sure nothing is going terribly wrong with your eyes over time, but the actual finding your lens prescription part could be done by a 9-year-old. 

Skip: that didn't answer my question at all. 

Bottle: whatever it is we're talking about, you're trying to buy happiness and peace of mind. I already have that. 

Skip: you're trying my patience Bottle. I want to know your political opinions. 

Bottle: get rid of it. Or at the very least, stop trying to run the government like a business. Business is garbage. Marx was mostly a political anarchist, and to a large extent so am i. People have this bizarre notion that Marx cared about government, when he didn't actually care at all. Marx cared about people, and he hated the fact that the economic elite somehow constantly morphed into authoritarian nincompoops to keep that elitism in place. I don't recognize "the government," i simply see groups of people doing things. It's helpful when they are honest about what they are actually doing. 

Skip: are you trying to trick me? 

Bottle: what? You guys are the ones who keep asking me what to do, like i have any idea. You started it, i was just musing on a random quote i stumbled across the other morning. I thought it was interesting given the peculiarities of our enterprise. 

Skip: but you're just constantly bringing up Marx and Communism, and you're so backward about all of it. 

Bottle: no, i'm not. I think i'm starting to see the problem here. Maybe i didn't do a good job of explaining it in my books. Ok, see, there're two different things going on. One is what Marx thought, the other is called Marxist Thought. Now, Marx thought all his thoughts while he was alive. A lot of people didn't like those thoughts, and most of those people ended up being really thrilled by that charmingly charismatic guy named Hitler. Now keep in mind, Hitler wasn't born until 6 years or so after Marx died, but chronological time isn't my strong suit. I'm an idea guy, and ideas don't work like that. 

Also remember, that Marx grew up during what we call the Industrial Revolution (he was in his 20s at the official scholarly end of that time period). Like i mentioned a long time ago, Marx was reading first-hand news reports about our Civil War. His perspective is very different from ours, is what i'm saying. 

Marxist Thought, on the other hand, didn't start until after Marx died, so you need to keep in mind that Marx wasn't what we today would call a Marxist. Doubly confusing, Stalin wasn't by any relevant definition a Communist (Marx invented Communism from his imagination), and Marxism as manifest in Marxist Thought is more like "will the real Slim Shady please stand up" than anything Marx himself actually wrote with quill and ink. Marxist Thought is, so to Bottle speak, more of a religion than thinking. 

Now, i also have to mention that Lenin wasn't very good at understanding Marx. So, when Stalin tried to govern the Soviet Union under his interpretation of Lenin's interpretation of Marx's idea of how people throughout history reacted to being repressed, he just repressed as many people as possible. I don't mean for that statement to be offensive to anyone who thought Stalin was great, i'm simply aligning myself with George Orwell's categorization of Stalin as a homicidal authoritarian nincompoop (assuming, of course, that you've read Animal Farm and 1984). 

Which brings us to Socialism. Socialism doesn't have anything to do with government whatsoever. Socialism is 100% about the ownership of surplus. Anyone saying "socialism" in relation to government has no idea what they are talking about. It is the opposite of capitalism in the sense that it says surplus belongs to society at large rather than individuals as an investment. Note i said surplus. If there is no surplus production, then none of this stuff matters at all, 'cause we'll starve and/or cannibalize each other. When supply exceeds future demand, the apparent value of a commodity is zero. Why do you think the lightbulb cartel invented planned obsolescence? There's a Shelby bulb still working today, right now. 

Economics is about what people do with the resources available to them. If the guy who owns all the resources won't let you do anything, what do you expect? Conversely, if the people who like doing things don't get anything in return, then what are you going to do, make me? 

Skip, did i force you to be the editor? No, it's just that that was the only thing i could think of when you asked me what to do. You can leave any time you want. I don't have the foggiest idea HOW, but that's hardly my fault. I'm not the one who gets bored, remember? I think about stuff. If you and Compy stop handing me stuff to think about, i'll just go back to picking things up off the ground and thinking about them. That's what i do. All Marx was doing was trying to explain why he thought everything sucked, then everyone else got all "blast off, it's party time! No sleep 'til Utopia!" 

Skip: wow, just wow. 

Bottle: which part? The part where everybody uses money as a universal equivalent, so obviously the apparent value of its physical manifestation converges on zero? You can't "buy" money with money, you buy money with stuff, use it to buy different stuff, and then trade that stuff for hopefully more money than you started with. The key word is "hopefully." To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever successfully legislated away hopelessness. 

I don't change what i do based on what the President or Congress says/does, i simply change my plans based on what everybody else does. I can't even guess at this point, everyone's acting like lunatics. 

What everybody forgets is that, Industrial Revolution aside, Marx was talking about raw materials, manufacturing, and logistics on the scale of actual individual people, and how all those industrious people combine their labours for the benefit of everyone. You can't make that happen with machine guns, it's a naturally occuring process. 

All day long people scream "buy my stuff or die!," and i reply "i can't, nobody wants to pay me for the things my brain can do when it's relatively quiet, please stop yelling." 

Did any of that help? 

Skip: no, not really. 

Bottle: sorry, i'll think about it some more and try to do better next time.