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fool of sound posted:If the people doing the shunning have the ability to deny the person being shunned essentials then it's absolute coercive, and not in a terribly different way that capitalism is. Yea, I would say it would still be coercive even if it was just emotional distancing and not physical necessities. As we are now, humans have a required need for some socialization even among the most neckbeard of neckbeards, and people tend to go a bit broke in the brain without it.
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Jan 20, 2021 21:46
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Defenestrategy posted:Yea, I would say it would still be coercive even if it was just emotional distancing and not physical necessities. As we are now, humans have a required need for some socialization even among the most neckbeard of neckbeards, and people tend to go a bit broke in the brain without it. Yeah if you believe that a punishment of "the rest of the village met and decided not to acknowledge you for 1 year since you beat up that kid" is coercion, then yes, you need coercion. fool of sound posted:If the people doing the shunning have the ability to deny the person being shunned essentials then it's absolute coercive, and not in a terribly different way that capitalism is. Shunning is a type of punishment that's used by all types of societies including fundamentally patriarchal and capitalist ones, including ours. I was just seeing if this guy's definition of coercion included "we're not going to talk to you anymore." The difference in capitalism is that one or a small group of economically advantaged takers can use their media platforms to target enemies for shunning - and outright violence - and are perfectly willing and socially able to deploy that capability without any real worry of reprisal. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jan 20, 2021 |
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Jan 20, 2021 22:01
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The Oldest Man posted:Shunning is a type of punishment that's used by all types of societies including fundamentally patriarchal and capitalist ones, including ours. I was just seeing if this guy's definition of coercion included "we're not going to talk to you anymore." Does "we're not going to talk to you" include doctors and other essential services? fool of sound posted:If the people doing the shunning have the ability to deny the person being shunned essentials then it's absolute coercive, and not in a terribly different way that capitalism is. Very much this, although the key difference being whether the coercion is democratically decided.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:04
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Does "we're not going to talk to you" include doctors and other essential services? There's a lot of examples and a few of them go this far, some further. Ostracism or banishment would lie at the far end of that spectrum where the offender is fully excluded from all benefits of membership in the community.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:06
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Very much this, although the key difference being whether the coercion is democratically decided. Whether it is democratically decided and whether it is enforced are also two different things. Like, if you steal someone's poo poo, "we mostly agree that you're not part of our group anymore and any of us can just deny you stuff that you could otherwise expect us to give freely, you might be able to talk to your remaining friends for stuff if you need it, but if we find out they're deliberately funneling you resources from folks who don't want to give them to you there may be consequences for them, please find somewhere else to be" is very different to Capitalism's "the only place you are allowed to exist is this tiny locked box, if you are anywhere else armed people can and will harm you and will be rewarded for doing so." Getting kicked out of a group is absolutely coercive, but there is no group that can exist without the ability to remove people from that group. Like, a fan discord might kick someone out for being a creep, and then if they found out a member was funneling that creepy person photos of the people they were creeping on, that member might also face consequences. This level of facing consequences isn't even bad. Coercive, yes, but it's the minimum that a group can have and still call itself a group; calling it "like Capitalism" is a big fuckin' stretch. If you're going to dictate that true anarchism means you can't even exclude people and must give freely to everyone, whether they're in the group or not, and regardless of what they've done to the group, you're not talking about anarchism, claw out your own eyeballs and hand them to a blind person because you're on some bodhisattva poo poo.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:47
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Denial of essentials is one of the prongs of how capital compels labor, and I would argue that it's more corrosive than the other: denial of freedom/threat of state violence. It's interesting that you bring up fan communities, because examples of abusive individuals with an audience avoiding justified shunning or directing unjustified shunning on others are trivial to find. Imagine that when the consequence of shunning isn't expulsion from a social group, but instead a denial of basic rights. That's not really all that different from wealthy capitalists doing the same.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:17
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I think coercion in and of itself isn't necessarily good or bad. It depends on its application. Work in lovely conditions for me or ELSE vs Don't murder people for no reason or ELSE
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Jan 20, 2021 23:22
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fool of sound posted:Denial of essentials is one of the prongs of how capital compels labor, and I would argue that it's more corrosive than the other: denial of freedom/threat of state violence. It's interesting that you bring up fan communities, because examples of abusive individuals with an audience avoiding justified shunning or directing unjustified shunning on others are trivial to find. Imagine that when the consequence of shunning isn't expulsion from a social group, but instead a denial of basic rights. That's not really all that different from wealthy capitalists doing the same. Did you misread the part where I explained that being able to expel people from your group is literally necessary for a group to exist? You're a Something Awful moderator, you know that the ability to remove people is a necessary part of how a functional community works. In your response you point out how harmful it can be when an abusive individual is allowed to stay, or direct rightful expulsion at others- both of these are accomplished through unjustified influence. That's something anarchies actively seek to prevent: unjust hierarchies. You also don't bring up the times that abusive individuals have been removed correctly and successfully, because such stories are not noteworthy; they're an assumed correct outcome, from which the first two outcomes are abberations. Capitalism will, by nature, reinforce and entrench hierarchies until the vast majority of individuals are always denied basic rights, even while still within the group. Anarchies would more likely work on a boolean "in or out" rule- you're either part of the group and receive its benefits, or you're not and you don't. Anarchies therefore need the ability to revoke group membership, the same way that every other group needs that ability. You're entirely right it's easy to find stories about removal going wrong. No-one writes about it going right. Defenestrategy posted:I think coercion in and of itself isn't necessarily good or bad. It depends on its application. Contribute to the community when you have plenty or ELSE you may be prevented from taking from it when you do not. Capitalism?
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Jan 20, 2021 23:57
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Thought I'd chime in from a Marxist perspective of the question. In the period of time Marx called the "lower phase" or "first phase" of communism, he expected some kind of arrangement to provide remuneration "to each according to their contribution". Specifically, labor vouchers, which are a sort of non-circulating redemption system, basically tickets you can redeem for Critique of the Gotha Programme ch 1 posted:What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. In this way, even Marx expected that under communism people who labored under more necessarily "intense" conditions such as work that is necessarily harmful would receive a correspondingly larger share of the social product. Been a while since last I watched it but I recall the youtube marxist Xexizy did a video on labor vouchers that might be a little more illustrative https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMfExwigqNY
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Jan 21, 2021 00:04
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Ruzihm posted:Thought I'd chime in from a Marxist perspective of the question. Thanks for sharing, I hadn't read about this aspect of lower-phase communism/socialism before. Not gonna lie, my immediate reaction on reading that and watching the youtube is, sounds fine on paper but impossible to implement. To me the sticking point is how value is assigned to the vouchers. The video brings up the idea of two individuals who have the same labor output, but one of them has 4 children so would need to receive more vouchers despite the same labor output, but then the video just kind of dismisses this as a "minor" complication that would sort itself organically. This seems like a massive complication to me, and I have hard time envisioning how this system would be implemented at scale. That said I know my gut reaction is not very nuanced so I'm curious to hear more about this.
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Jan 21, 2021 00:37
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Thanks for sharing, I hadn't read about this aspect of lower-phase communism/socialism before. Not gonna lie, my immediate reaction on reading that and watching the youtube is, sounds fine on paper but impossible to implement. To me the sticking point is how value is assigned to the vouchers. The video brings up the idea of two individuals who have the same labor output, but one of them has 4 children so would need to receive more vouchers despite the same labor output, but then the video just kind of dismisses this as a "minor" complication that would sort itself organically. This seems like a massive complication to me, and I have hard time envisioning how this system would be implemented at scale. The vouchers are also a point where lenin disagreed with marx iirc.
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Jan 21, 2021 00:49
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Thanks for sharing, I hadn't read about this aspect of lower-phase communism/socialism before. Not gonna lie, my immediate reaction on reading that and watching the youtube is, sounds fine on paper but impossible to implement. To me the sticking point is how value is assigned to the vouchers. The video brings up the idea of two individuals who have the same labor output, but one of them has 4 children so would need to receive more vouchers despite the same labor output, but then the video just kind of dismisses this as a "minor" complication that would sort itself organically. This seems like a massive complication to me, and I have hard time envisioning how this system would be implemented at scale. It's a valid point. I'd argue it'd be no more complicated than how our government under capitalism decides on how many tax credits you get for having kids or whatever. The point is that under our current situation, the businesses that serve holders of these tax credits are incentivized through the circulation of value to maximize the share of that funding is exchanged for their products. However, in a non-circulating voucher system, the places these vouchers are redeemed at can't turn around and use those redeemed vouchers because they are non circulating - there would be no incentive to compete over a "voucher share" like there is over a market share today. The incentive would be to simply do the job adequately to earn your own vouchers. VictualSquid posted:That is basically the anarchist critique of that point of marx's. Kropotkin writes a lot about that and the conclusion there is that "to each according to their needs" should come before "from each according to their abilities". Which implies that you should try to move to direct distribution of goods by need instead of using the intermediate of such vouchers. I'd be interested to learn more about these, especially the last point. Do you have any sources in particular? For the first point, Marx is pretty clear about providing for needs and wants in terms of satisfying "common welfare" which increases ever more over time. Would that not just be a disagreement of initial magnitude rather than a disagreement of form? I'm not aware if Marx explicitly said what ~should~ be covered in the first place but I'd be interested in learning more. Ruzihm fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 00:59
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Somfin posted:Did you misread the part where I explained that being able to expel people from your group is literally necessary for a group to exist? You're a Something Awful moderator, you know that the ability to remove people is a necessary part of how a functional community works. My ability to expel someone from the something awful community is not comparable to societal shunning that denies the shunned the essentials of life. The local shopkeeper or the food quartermaster or the union of independent farmers denying someone access to food is violence, and not only that, but it's less humane than temporary imprisonment and FAR less humane than proper rehabilitative justice. Putting that power into the hands of any given community leader or other person with a sufficiently large audience is no more just than capital having that power now. The only just way to deal with bad actors is a structured, consistent, well-administered system based on preserving human rights and dignity to the absolute greatest degree possible. That's complicated and difficult, but it's a lot better than assuming that Future Communists are going to act fundamentally more just and make better decisions about how to deal with bad actors.
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Jan 21, 2021 01:15
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fool of sound posted:My ability to expel someone from the something awful community is not comparable to societal shunning that denies the shunned the essentials of life. The local shopkeeper or the food quartermaster or the union of independent farmers denying someone access to food is violence, and not only that, but it's less humane than temporary imprisonment and FAR less humane than proper rehabilitative justice. *Putting that power into the hands of any given community leader or other person with a sufficiently large audience is no more just than capital having that power now. The only just way to deal with bad actors is a structured, consistent, well-administered system based on preserving human rights and dignity to the absolute greatest degree possible. That's complicated and difficult, but it's a lot better than assuming that Future Communists are going to act fundamentally more just and make better decisions about how to deal with bad actors. You don't get to choose the capitalist, he inherits or steals his power. It is a top-down system not dissimilar from a monarchy that incentivizes selfishness and exploitation. If the public disagrees with him, that's too bad because they are his employees. You don't elect your capitalist overlord, he picks you. A community leader must, necessarily, derive his power from from the public, and if the public disagrees then they no longer follow you. It's the basis of an election, afterall. I would also hesitate to assume that an anarchic society does not have a coherent justice system. Just because there is a horizontal power structure doesn't mean it is unable to hold trials and investigations. Does this make it impossible for corruption and mistakes? Of course not. No system is perfect. However, a larger, equal group of people making decisions is more resistant to corruption than a handful of hereditary thieves.
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Jan 21, 2021 01:32
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fool of sound posted:it's less humane than temporary imprisonment and FAR less humane than proper rehabilitative justice. I'm pretty sure that any good society would have "proper rehabilitative justice" as its first port of call, with its worse outcomes being reserved for times when that fails. I'm sorry if I came across as suggesting that "if you don't work, you get expelled immediately" was a good way to run a society. Remember also that "temporary imprisonment" can easily also have the effects of permanent shunning from access to work, multiplied by Cpt_Obvious' point above about that not being something that we have a choice about- every employer gets to choose whether your prison sentence also means you don't get to work there.
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Jan 21, 2021 05:23
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Thanks for sharing, I hadn't read about this aspect of lower-phase communism/socialism before. Not gonna lie, my immediate reaction on reading that and watching the youtube is, sounds fine on paper but impossible to implement. To me the sticking point is how value is assigned to the vouchers. The video brings up the idea of two individuals who have the same labor output, but one of them has 4 children so would need to receive more vouchers despite the same labor output, but then the video just kind of dismisses this as a "minor" complication that would sort itself organically. This seems like a massive complication to me, and I have hard time envisioning how this system would be implemented at scale. Its not a minor complaint at all, its one of the many serious problems with this labour voucher system Marx was fond of in his later years. Another serious issue with the scheme is the whole "non-circulating" part. How exactly can you stop people from circulating vouchers without a very active policing force of some kind and who would be in charge of that? etc. There are many problems with this scheme which essentially means either a permanent rationing system with the controls in the ends of some nebulous authority, or just another version of money. These usually are just shrugged off like in that video. The only marxist theorist I know of who dedicated a lot of time to trying to solve all of these problems was Bordiga, and his conclusions were that for it to work the party leadership would be made up of the greatest scientific experts who would plan out every aspect of the lives of the entire global population in a totalitarian (his word) system of scientific planning were the individuals would own nothing and would be subject to this regime. This was a good thing in his mind. Personally I don't think its a coincidence that Marx mostly talked about labour notes/vouchers when he was criticising his rivals economic plans. It looks a lot like he didn't have a complete system thought out himself but needed some grounds to base his criticisms on so just used some sketches he had. He did that a lot which is why a lot of his writings weren't published during his life time.
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Jan 21, 2021 10:59
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I guess nowadays you could probably invent some sort of technological solution to try to make voucher transfer at least very difficult if not outright impossible. If you really wanted to.
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Jan 21, 2021 11:04
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OwlFancier posted:I guess nowadays you could probably invent some sort of technological solution to try to make voucher transfer at least very difficult if not outright impossible. If you really wanted to. Indeed as China's experiments with cashless economy shows you can. But it also shows us that to do so requires a powerful and invasive policing mechanism in the control of a powerful group with the muscle to back its decisions up and determine arbitrarily the value of goods and currency.
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Jan 21, 2021 11:09
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I mean that's certainly a technological solution but I mean, like, presumably if someone was actually inclined they could invent some sort of local biometric authentication or something, like a credit card you need a fingerprint to charge/use, but rather than storing the fingerprint data centrally you store it locally on the card like how PINs work. No need for a major central authority, just limits your ability to spend money to places you personally can take your card. Not foolproof obviously but might be sufficiently difficult to limit transferrability. Though equally you could argue that nobody capable of developing such a system ever would because they would rather develop a centralized system so they can control it.
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Jan 21, 2021 11:17
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OwlFancier posted:I mean that's certainly a technological solution but I mean, like, presumably if someone was actually inclined they could invent some sort of local biometric authentication or something, like a credit card you need a fingerprint to charge/use, but rather than storing the fingerprint data centrally you store it locally on the card like how PINs work. No need for a major central authority, just limits your ability to spend money to places you personally can take your card. Umm yeah you would, someone has to make those things, someone has to distribute them, someone has to handle replacements, someone has to make sure they're serving their intended purpose, someone has to take them out of circulation when no longer needed etc. Then there's the calculations of how much each card can actually use otherwise the system is completely pointless. You haven't changed anything or solved any of the problems, your just adding extra steps.
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Jan 21, 2021 12:00
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Baka-nin posted:Umm yeah you would, someone has to make those things, someone has to distribute them, someone has to handle replacements, someone has to make sure they're serving their intended purpose, someone has to take them out of circulation when no longer needed etc. Then there's the calculations of how much each card can actually use otherwise the system is completely pointless. You haven't changed anything or solved any of the problems, your just adding extra steps. I think he's saying bitcoin will make communism
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Jan 21, 2021 14:32
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To make labour vouchers non transferrable can't you just have names on them? And then at point of redemption they could just check that face matched up to name.
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Jan 21, 2021 14:50
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I mean I don't really understand why they need to be non transferrable to begin with or how that role isn't just served by normal money but if you're dead set on doing that for whatever reason I'm sure you can figure out a way.
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Jan 21, 2021 14:53
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OwlFancier posted:I mean I don't really understand why they need to be non transferrable to begin with or how that role isn't just served by normal money but if you're dead set on doing that for whatever reason I'm sure you can figure out a way. They are non-transferable because the goal is to create a non-capitalist market.
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Jan 21, 2021 15:04
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So you want people to exchange tokens for products but the place you give the tokens to doesn't get to keep them afterwards?
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Jan 21, 2021 15:07
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The point of labour vouchers is to prevent accumulation. Thing is, though, it doesn't have to be a perfect system to accomplish that goal. Even if a (statistically) handful of individuals manage to get around the system, that's still not enough for classes to reemerge or for people to return to exploiting each other/buying up the means of production/etc. Doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to achieve its societal goals.
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Jan 21, 2021 15:08
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OwlFancier posted:So you want people to exchange tokens for products but the place you give the tokens to doesn't get to keep them afterwards? That's the idea.
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Jan 21, 2021 15:09
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Ah I see, sorry I thought by "non transferrable" you meant like ration cards were supposed to be, as in you can't give them to other people not that the place you spend them can't use them afterwards.
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Jan 21, 2021 15:10
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Basically, coupons. Coupons aren't money, they disappear as soon as you use them, and they're redeemable for a concrete thing.
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Jan 22, 2021 00:27
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One of the points touched on in the video is that there's not really a need to enforce the non transferability of labor vouchers. If someone makes a coat that's priced at 10 hours of socially necessary labor, there would be no reason to sell it at 9 when they could sell it at 10, and no reason to buy it for 11 when it could be bought for 10. And selling it for 10 isn't a problem. Markets could even provide a way to price unique goods or transactions that don't fit neatly into a Taylorized system. But even if transfer was entirely free, it still wouldn't be possible to bring back finance or wage labor. There would be no one to enforce a loan, and claiming to have bought a factory would probably elicit a more condescending reaction than claiming to have bought the Brooklyn Bridge. I think the issue here, and with the punishment discussion, is hashing out technical solutions that are either not universal or are already solved. Our current system has experts who are extremely skilled at determining how much socially necessary labor goes into a product, or is consumed by four children, and the problem with the current system isn't the accuracy of these estimates but that it steals the socially necessary labor and frequently doesn't feed the four children. Similarly, there's plenty of thought on restorative justice (e.g. what consequences work best to maximize rehabilitation and community health), but none of that will ever be implemented under liberalism, where thieves and mass-murderers retire to billion-dollar fortunes while the captive populations are subjected to (or threatened with) death and slavery. The consequences for a transgression in a society will depend on the conditions in that society and who in that society decides what goals to pursue. At the same time, I don't think "technology will solve it" is the best answer to these questions of practical implementation. A socialist society might implement a cybernetic system like Project Cybersyn or OGAS (or the kind of internal tracking systems used by any modern multinational corporation) if they have the technology to do so in order to save labor time and better optimize preferences, but socialist societies have existed without the technology to do those kinds of projects. It'd be better to note that every modern problem has multiple solutions that a socialist society could pursue, and which one they would choose depends on the material conditions at the time.
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Jan 22, 2021 04:46
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I generally agree with that post, but particularly with the criticism of "technology will solve it." It's the same level of lazy thinking that leads to "if he have gun, this not happen." Technology might play a part in solving these problems if it's designed and controlled by the exploited class. Otherwise it's just going to be robot cops.
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Jan 22, 2021 07:45
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Seems like in the history of the world new technologies are the things that make actual large changes to social structures and the human conditions more than pretty much anything anyone just does
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Jan 22, 2021 13:06
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If technology will be able to save us depends significantly on the definition of technology. Beer did a lot of writing on how planning systems made up of either people or computers interact with the real people the administer and the planning encoded in institutional patterns that the "scientific management" ends up destroying. As cybernetics are generally considered part of stem this would be technology, but it isn't what most people mean by it.
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Jan 22, 2021 13:24
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I was specifically suggesting that if you wanted to create some sort of highly specific form of money to fill a purpose that marx thought was necessary then it may be technologically more possible to do that now than when he was writing, not that creating new forms of money will make communism happen.
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Jan 22, 2021 13:32
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VictualSquid posted:If technology will be able to save us depends significantly on the definition of technology. I read this first as meaning beer the drink and I was nodding my head at how good an example of how a technology is the only thing that really fundamentally changes human civilization since beer is seen as one of the driving forces of the agricultural revolution
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Jan 22, 2021 17:58
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Why did Marx think that there needed to be an intermediary step of Cash->Coupons->People are provided for? Wouldn't it be far easier to just continue to use Cash and just tax peoples wealth at near 100% which would prevent hoarding except by the government themselves?
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Jan 22, 2021 18:01
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Defenestrategy posted:Why did Marx think that there needed to be an intermediary step of Cash->Coupons->People are provided for? I think the idea is to move away from a system where some jerks could come by and lower taxes again and we're back to square 1.
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Jan 22, 2021 18:28
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Defenestrategy posted:Why did Marx think that there needed to be an intermediary step of Cash->Coupons->People are provided for? If people can amass resources, then they can buy a political system no matter how egalitarian that political system is designed to be because at the end of the day power is just a measure of resources. And if you by a political system, you can just drop taxes as much as you want. Just look at what happened to the top marginal tax rate in the US:  This is what happens if you allow people to amass wealth, even if they are taxed very highly on that wealth. Eventually, they will buy their way out of it and then *waves around at everything* PerniciousKnid posted:Anybody have a good elevator pitch for Marxism? Cash Rules Everything Around Me
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Jan 22, 2021 18:42
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Seems like in the history of the world new technologies are the things that make actual large changes to social structures and the human conditions more than pretty much anything anyone just does "Large scale change" can mean anything. Writing can mean transmitted knowledge and it can mean saleable debt. Robots can mean robot cops and it can mean fully automated luxury space communism. Human agency is what decides what we get.
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Jan 22, 2021 19:02
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I think I misspoke, what I meant by tax was, the tax man comes assess all your assets and reduces what you currently have down to 100 funbux and a buy two entrees get one free at olive garden coupon, but I get what you're all saying. Certainly even perfect labor coupons have the same problem, you get a bunch of dudes together to pool their labor coupons and suddenly Reaganomics? Wouldn't the "interim stage" require some sort of safe guard from the counter revolution? I mean, besides eating the rich to stop them from doing it in the first place?
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Jan 22, 2021 19:20
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