EVE General Discussion

Thread has been cleared of rumour and off topic posts.





Please stay on topic - ISD Type40.

Goons/TEST aren't communist at all. Nobody has to pay anyone anything, and you can make as much money as you like. It's more like the UK, actually; capitalism but with an NHS.

Real life politics and EVE are not a good combination and should be avoided.
Same for Religion and EVE.

Who told you this, Mittani man?

I wasn't implying that, I'm just stating that I have an ugly face and there are far more beautiful people out there. My body is even worse looking.

/c

Now, in a real-life capitalist economy, the tendency is that once capitalist production relations become dominant, they tend to displace all other kinds of production relations. Why is this not the case in EVE? The answer lies in the limits of capital accumulation that the game presents. In real-life capitalism accumulation knows no limits and as a result the organic composition of capital, that is the relation of machines and human labour in the production process, become more and more skewed in favor of the former as accumulation proceeds. This process creates and is at the same time driven by competition between capitalists.

In EVE, however, the organic composition of capital cannot be changed in favor of constant capital (machines/means of production) beyond a certain point, because we cannot innovate or invest in the improvement of the means of production. All means of production are constant in their capacity and everybody can easily learn how to use them to the fullest extent of their potential productivity (PE 5). This also means that the same amount of human labour is invested in the production of a commodity throughout the EVE economy, and thus each item of a kind is equally valuable (in fact, any two items which throughout their production chain require the same amount of labour time invested will be equally valuable).

This is why in EVE other, less competition-driven and thus less exploitative production relations can continue to exist next to capitalist production relations. In fact, there is no reason why anybody would be forced to submit to economically exploitative relationships in this game, because everybody can make a living for themselves (for this to happen CCP would have to introduce a mechanism into the game where one could invest exponentially growing amounts of capital into the productivity of their means of production. Just imagine how cool the game would be if you could ruin years of investments by blowing up a POS's production facilities. On the other hand, newcomers to the game would have to be wage laborers, as their would be no other way to make a buck).

But, back to the OP's original point for this thread: Does miner bumping have anything to do with capitalist exploitation? The answer to this question is at this point speculative, as we do not know who actually is behind miner bumping and what their true aims are. Some have speculated that it is a TEST front. Others think they are EVE's mobsters. Maybe they just want to enforce a new style of play, maybe they have less altruistic motives. Maybe James doesn't even know what the true motives of his backers are. I would propose this answer:

You see, when you want to enlarge your share of the profits realized in the whole economy, you step up the competition. Yet, in EVE, this cannot be done through investment in the means of production. But there is another way: in EVE you cannot decrease the average time of labour required to produce your own goods by increasing productivity, but what you can do is to increase the average time of labour required for the production of your competitions' goods by bumping their miners. If done systematically, each bump will increase the accumulated average time of labour required in the production of goods made from resources made by these miners. In the end, your own production process will be more productive than theirs. This way capitalist corporations in EVE can increase their productivity relatively to that of others.

Be this a sinister plot of EVE's bourgeoisie to destroy the organizations of free labour and the petty-producers or not, the actions of miner bumping do incur a real cost on free producers throughout EVE and thus threaten the non-exploitative production relations in which they have chosen to remain!

Free producers of EVE, unite!

Umm, no. You are confusing several different ideas in your definition of communism. In capitalism, you don't build for yourself, you build for others as well. The only correct part of your definition is the social ownership aspect.

"allowing for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals." Underlined portion is a key indicator of communism. Hi sec doesn't fit that.

Seems kind of funny you are saying it is communism because others have something you don't? Why don't some of your corpmates go into hi sec and own the centralized indusrialization ...?

I really wish the people would just be honest and say they want eve to CHANGE to fit how they play. Notice how I said CHANGE. I'm not sure it is broken the way some very vocal people say it is.

Adapt or die as they say in eve... adapt to the way it is now or die. Love when peeps say that in a post when they are loudly advocating great changes in the game!!! That's not adapting... that's whining!! :)

No maam, I was giving a very base and simple explination of communism. I'm well aware of what it is and how it works, my political views are socialist; so it helps to understand these sorts of things in order to be credible in my political views.

I only say that high sec is communist in nature because industry is effectively centralized in high sec, which leads to a somewhat centralized market were a lot of goods are priced at near production cost, and because you can pretty much play as if there was no government at all in high sec.

About the only thing that really throws the whole thing off is the fact that you can say that ISK is money, not currency. PlEX acts like a gold standard and so you have real money instead of a fiat system of currency in EVE. As well as you're taxed by the factions in high sec which are the effective governments.

Of course high sec isn't really communism or Communism, it's just much closer to communism than null sec is.

Communism isn't communism, they're two different things. Communism is the centralization of governement, a single party system with an economic structure controlled by the government, but I'm not really talking about government in EVE, just industry. Communism, lower case c, just implies that there is no class or division, it doesn't really mean no "free" maket; only really that everything is done for the betterment of all people, and that there is an ABUNDANCE of resources available to all.

High sec isn't Communism, it's more like communism to me. Remove the 4 factions and it would be communism, because communism doesn't actually have the much to do with a government, it actually encourages NO GOVERNMENT.

Marx and Engels communist theory is not the same communism that Lennin practiced or what people have become familliar with today. China and Cuba are actually much closer to what Marx and Engel envisioned.

In high sec the industrialists (workers) are not disadvantageed by the peope buying the goods. However, in null sec the industrialist can not say the same. In high sec there isn't really a disproportionate distribution of wealth, in null the industrialists are effectively the lower class; you can't say that about the industrialist in high sec.

Nor am I saying that it's this way because it has something I want. I'm only saying it based on the way that null is impacted by high sec industry, as a full time industrialist who lives in null sec.

All praise to the glorious people's leader TORVIN YULUS!

Yes, because clearly gods would spend the rest of eternity mining, or building crap...or PVP'ing for that matter. Always rubbed me wrong, the "we are immortal, we are gods" bit of Eve lore.