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Pablo Nergigante posted:Volkerball have you considered that there are a lot of people who literally could not spare $20 a week But lots of other people, who are not wealthy or even middle class, in fact could? I don't understand what the issue with VB is. He's pointing out how compound interest and investing work. He's pointing out that returns on invested capital in things like housing are available even to people who don't have the cash or credit to plunk down for a house. He's not wrong about any of that, and as far as I can tell he's not saying setting aside $20 per week in an IRA is going to cure all the great ills of society.
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Mar 25, 2019 13:22
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OwlFancier posted:Yes it's exploitation, because you are charging them a portion of their surplus for the pleasure of having access to your capital. You can do this because you have the capital and they do not. The nature doesn't change because you made the numbers smaller. What happens when the system collapses under the weight of bad investments and misallocated resources because the collective bank is run by people who don't know wtf they're doing or have an incentive to use resources wisely? What happens when the collective bank decides it's not giving out money to fund co-ops of type X and a bunch of people want to start a co-op of type X anyway? Where do the resources even come from to fund the lending of the collective bank if not from the gains of the enterprises it's funding?
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Mar 28, 2019 14:43
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OwlFancier posted:I dunno what is it like living under capitalism? Capitalism has answers to all of those things, though they're not pretty or compassionate answers. What are the answers under the system you're advocating?
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Mar 28, 2019 15:21
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Many commies would probably deem the Somethingawful forums a "spectacularly wasteful excess" and demand that the ::tenbucks:: being spent on this go to something else. Helsing: You raised some interesting points. I don't know whole lot about the economic growth of the USSR but China had several things working its way that had nothing to do with communism - 1) a high initial savings rate, 2) a huge mostly pre-industrial population to be turned into an internal market and 3) fortuitous timing. They also did allow what people ITT would call private ownership of capital, just with the heavy hand of the state involved. OwlFancier posted:Not if the sole purpose of the investment fund is to reinvest, no. If the fund is freely available to anyone who needs it that's not exploitative. It is when the process results in the transfer of surplus labour from the collective output of the workers to the control of a single owner, by virtue of the power relationship between the owner and the workers, which is embodied in the ownership of capital that is the surplus, that it is exploitation. A fund freely available to anyone who needs it would be quickly depleted. There would have to be gatekeepers, auditors, administrators, and that sort of thing. Those people would have to be paid, which would have to come out of the returns generated by the fund. To grow and support more projects the fund would have to retain some of its earnings to invest later in more people, more expertise, etc, to support those new projects. In almost all ways, if the fund is well run, it would have the same relationship to the funded companies as exists under Capitalism.
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Apr 1, 2019 15:56
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OwlFancier posted:I mean maybe if they're weird tankies fighting a culture war? Sure with socialism it'd be publicly funded but maintaining a public forum is entirely useful be it a concrete one or a digital one? A public forum, maybe. Somethingawful.com....I mean, probably not. Useful is not the word I'd use. Sorry, Lowtax. =( OwlFancier posted:Sure you need administrators, but the point is that say, a VC fund does not invest in anyone who needs it, it invests where the fund manager thinks will give the greatest monetary return to the fund. Because the point of money in capitalism is to accumulate more money. A socialist fund is one which interfaces with the production chain to provide resources where they are needed to ensure the things that are needed, are produced. What is needed is decided democratically rather than by some guy with a lot of money having a "brilliant idea" and setting about making it in the most profitable, but not the most useful way possible. There are funds that do all those things. Invest in renewable energy, invest in providing things people need (or at least want. And I mean...of course, right? Otherwise who would buy?) Maybe not so much nuclear energy right now because, ironically, the environmental lobby makes that very risky. Investment funds usually have a committee that evaluates the viability of a project, risk vs return, that sort of thing. A "socialist" fund would likewise probably have to have a committee evaluating potential investments along the same lines, including declining to invest in things that don't seem to have enough upside even if they're popular. It's just kind of a necessary part of the activity of investing and not related to any economic system. Things would still have to be produced where they're relatively cheap to make and there's have to be some mechanism (ie: people paying for stuff, or some analog of that) to both ration what people consume and ensure enough resources (or money to buy resources) get back to the institutions doing the production to fund operations, innovate, expand, etc. Those are also just kind of things that are necessary to the functioning of an economy and not something to do with any particular economic system. The reality of maintaining a modern society kind of dictates that in a lot of details the practical implementation of a socialist system is going to look a lot like what exists in, say, Scandanavia, today.
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Apr 2, 2019 14:29
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OwlFancier posted:The difference is that in a capitalist society everything is driven by profit, and profit is not utility. Profit is an indicator that whatever enterprise you're involved in is running well enough to generate a surplus. If there's no profit then your enterprise has to pull resources generated from other enterprises to fund the thing it is doing. But then those enterprises have to be generating a surplus, and if they're not they have to pull from somewhere... and etc. Profit - or something analagous to profit - is going to exist as part of any successful economic system. If it doesn't, that system is ultimately going to collapse. OwlFancier posted:It is an engine of commodified consumption which is not the same as an actual need driven economic system. How does one figure out what people need? The worst mechanism we have - except for all the others weīve tried - is a market economy. It's imperfect and it results in a lot of bullshit but it works better than central planning by a lot. A successful economic system is going to have markets or market analogs as well. You can't really get around it. I guess you could posit a world in which people are allocated a defined package of goods and services that it has been decided satisfy their needs? OwlFancier posted:Critically when the problem is environmental destruction as a result of rampant expansion of production, capitalism is inherently incapable of dealing with that. Socialism is not inherently environmentally friendly. People are going to want things. People are going to need to live places. New people are going to be born, and they're going to need new things and new places to live. Resources are going to need to be exploited to accomplish those things. Those are ultimately the drivers of environmental damage, not profit per se. Profit is just keeping score.
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Apr 2, 2019 18:12
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OwlFancier posted:I didn't say it was, I said that if you want environmentalism, what you need is something akin to socialism. I did not say that socialism is inherently environmentally friendly, I said that capitalism is inherently environemtnally destructive. And I'm saying you're wrong about that. The drivers of environmental damage are the same independant of the economic system. People are inherently environmentally destructive. =(
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Apr 2, 2019 18:16
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Typo posted:I'm pretty sure as long as you have an industrial economy it's going to be environmentally destructive even if you suppose some sort of government committee puts a cap on individual consumption. Quoting because yeah, basically, this.
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Apr 2, 2019 18:23
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OwlFancier posted:People desire things, but not all desire is organic. If it was, marketing wouldn't exist, would it? Are you suggesting that people throughout all of human history were just utterly miserable because they didn't have smartphones? People can be happy with fewer things if they are not constantly told they should want things or living in a society where having things is required for full participation. People before the internet were quite happy not having the internet but now the internet exists and mobile devices exist so now everyone is expected to have and use them and that's how our society works now, and that's heavily influenced by the fact that the internet and mobile computing are extremely profitable. Dude those things are profitable because the internet and those devices are incredibly useful, not the other way around.
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Apr 2, 2019 18:25
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OwlFancier posted:No, it's both? A large part of why they are considered useful is because they have commercial utility, that has always been a massive reason for the expansion of the internet. It is as widespread as it is because it was commercialized, and now it powers amazon which runs on cheap labour and individual deliveries rather than bulk transport. Sure. The internet is massively useful to a a huge number of people - for commerce, for spreading information, for all sorts of things. Not only or even primarily for companies that produce mobile computing devices and provide internet service, which is what I took you to mean at first. I don't understand what your point is, though. Commerce is not going to stop under any conceivable political system. The coordination problems solved by the internet would still exist under socialism. If communications advances hadn't have happened and there were no internet or smartphones those problems would be even worse?
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Apr 2, 2019 18:37
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OwlFancier posted:If I had all those things without having to work all the time I'd spend the rest of my time doing something I like? Like going for a walk, maybe learn to play an instrument, learn carpentry, there's lots of stuff I'd like to do that isn't based on just loving collecting more poo poo. Nothing actually stops you from working as little as necessary to satisfy a set of arbitrarily curtailed material needs then using your time for those things if that's what you want to do? Like not to be personal about it but it seems like the problem is internal not external?
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Apr 2, 2019 18:39
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OwlFancier posted:I am suggesting that the coordination problems that the internet solves are commercial ones, primarily. It does not, by design, solve any other kind of problem. It may do so as a side effect but it can also have quite bad side effects in the process of solving commercial problems. It facilitates amazon while externalizing its labour practices and environmental damage. It facilitates facebook and twitter while externalizing the social effects of massive-scale social interaction on an extremely superficial level. It facilitates reddit while externalizing subreddits for child molesters and neo nazis. And sure there's backlash to these but fundamentally the backlash only matters when it threatens the commercial interests that caused the initial problem. That sounds like the opening paragraph of a manifesto, man. I don't really know what I can say in response to that. OwlFancier posted:Yes, nothing stops people from not working. Nothing at all. I was talking about what I assumed you've been talking about - working just enough to buy a bundle of necessities and freeing up some time for other things. But if you're talking about not working at all...in what world would most people just not work at all? That's not a a reasonable expectation unless you're living in the sort of post-scarcity utopia that doesn't exist and can't exist. Under every possible economic system, people still have to work. You would have to work, unless there were some compelling reason you couldn't.
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Apr 2, 2019 18:49
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OwlFancier posted:I don't know how much you get paid but "working just enough to buy a bundle of necessities" is generally full time work. I thought we were working like dogs and literally killing ourselves and the planet to consume things we don't even need. But now you're telling me that in fact it's impossible to work a little less and buy only the things we actually need in order to free up time. That's a little incoherent. OwlFancier posted:I'm literally a communist, I'm going to sound ideological occasionally. And itīs possible I'm being a little unfair in putting you on the spot, because any utopian ideology is going to have trouble addressing the mess that is reality and that's not exclusive to your version of communism. But you're also being a little unfair sniping at Capitalism and blaming it for all the many problems that relate to it having to function in the real world.
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Apr 2, 2019 19:01
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OwlFancier posted:If only there were some... place, or group of people, where a lot of... surplus value was going that could perhaps be... redistributed towards people who are required to work all day so that they could work less? To borrow a phrase...capitalism is the worst form of economic arrangement except for all the others that have been tried, including communism.
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Apr 2, 2019 19:27
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OwlFancier posted:I'm going to suggest that human productive capacity in tyool 2019, if organized towards providing the things I listed, homes, food, healthcare, security of life, to as many people as possible, it would actually be quite possible for us all to live quite pleasant lives, do a lot less environmental damage, and work a lot less. Or if all of those aren't possible, then we would still be doing a lot better on those fronts than we currently are. What we'd lose is millionares and billionaires, do you think this is a bad thing? This is utopian idealism. Which is not bad, at all. Just not something that is actually possible.
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Apr 2, 2019 19:28
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OwlFancier posted:Why is it utopian idealism to suggest that money and resources would and could be better organized towards making more people better off rather than making very few people obscenely rich? Again, you are assuming capitalism is some sort of immutable state of nature rather than a relatively recent invention. It's utopian idealism to lay all the ills of the world at the feet of capitalism and assert that Communism will just solve those problems. It is utopian idealism to assert that people could be happy with much less stuff and therefore we don't need a society focused on producing stuff except the stuff that people "need". Those ideas are utopian because as soon as they come into contact with reality they become extremely messy and end up subject to all the same problems plus additional ones. For example - any regime in history that has claimed Communism as its organizing principle. One could say "well, that wasn't real Communism..." and one might be right. But one would be right because real communism is a utopian fantasy that doesn't survive implementation. Not because it just hasn't been done right yet.
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Apr 3, 2019 12:47
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WampaLord posted:Better Things Aren't Possible so why even try? This is a forum discussion and I'm in no position to make policy or advise anyone who makes policy. Or even advise anyone who advises anyone on policy. So for me it's fine to talk about these things with some emotional distance and if a particular idea doesn't seem like it's workable, that's ok. IMO itīs even more important for people who have actual power to be able to do that, come to think of it. Further, I donīt think Communism is a means to get to a better world. I think it's a utopian idea and trying to impose it on the world is probably a dangerous mistake. So I guess yeah, Iīm going to write it off, and would consider other ways to make the world better that have a better chance of actually working. OwlFancier posted:Put it this way, if you want to keep capitalism then you need to make a financial incentive to not kill the planet. There are all sorts of ways that we are, right now, unde capitalism, trying to tackle preserving the planet. Just off the top of my head... 1. Emission controls, both explicit and in cap-and-trade type schemes. 2. Mandated scrubber technology, controls on where waste can be disposed of and how, and things like that. 3. Subsidizing renewable energy and setting targets for the growth of renewables. Those are all things that are happening right now, under capitalism. I'm sure there are many more. Those efforts are in many ways hampered, ironically, by democracy, in the sense that there isn't a dictatorial authority that can force (for instance) China and India to stop industrializing because emissions targets are more important than raising the living standards of like 2 billion people. And in the sense that voters in much of the first world don't want to give up their standard of living in order to consume less even if they support the idea of environmentalism in principal. And in many other ways having to do with people having different ideas of what priorities should be, who should sacrifice for them, and etc. The real world is messy and complicated. If your solution to that is "Well if we had global communism...", then yeah, that is a pipe dream.
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Apr 3, 2019 13:44
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poo poo, if you're going to write off the entire concept of trying to get to a better world because you can't conceive of how it's possble to get there.
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WampaLord posted:
Ok dude. I think I've said everything I can reasonably say and no new points seem to be coming up so I'm going to bow out.
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Apr 3, 2019 13:52
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heh, looks like you all care too much about being killed off to enrich the 1%, too bad you can't be rational about things like me