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unwantedplatypus posted:Then you don't understand the point I was trying to make by talking about food surpluses You aren't following through on your own logic (which is really just to repeat Smith). Decision making (business/economic/political/whatever) at a certain level requires a person who can specialise into gathering the information necessary to make decisions, analysing it, and developing consequential courses of action - that's why hierarchical organisations exist, to channel information upwards from the shop floor to the person who specialises in making decisions. If you want a non-hierarchical structure then you either need everyone to be equally informed and invested in making decisions (possible if you are a ~10 person startup, which is why it happens there) or you have to stop caring about whether the decisions are informed.
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Dec 29, 2019 13:15
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:44 |
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unwantedplatypus posted:I'm not talking about hierarchies within an organization. I'm talking about social and political hierarchies that reproduce themselves. You can have hierarchy within a specific organization without that hierarchy translating into disproportionate political or economic power outside of that organization. When transportation and communication are not particularly technologically developed, and when there is no formal schooling system, it makes sense that skills and knowledge would be passed down through families, and this system would calcify into a class system. Oooh, I think I understand you now. In which case, the problem you have is that you need to find a more efficient way of allocating skills to jobs than the market, and it also can't be a person or group of people making those decisions because you've instantly created a socio-economic class hierarchy there. You can definitely fiddle with markets to change their outcomes, but I don't think you can successfully replace them (at least not under our current paradigm).
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Dec 29, 2019 14:59
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Purple Prince posted:In theory at least allocating resources to problems in an objective way, without a central coordinating mind, ought to be the sort of job distributed computing is good at. You don't and you don't try. You let humans decide what they want and automate the means of production. That's the big next paradigm shift in the means of production and the trap we need to avoid in future - we either go in a direction where everything is basically free and available to everyone, or everything is basically free but owned by an oligarchic elite that has no incentive to make it available to everyone.
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Dec 29, 2019 15:57
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unwantedplatypus posted:The reason that we currently and historically have a class of elites, and what makes this a socio-economic class, is that their position and power is reproduced across time and individuals; and their position in society gives them a shared interest. There is no intrinsic reason that the head factory coordinator has a shared interest with a residential building administrator. Their jobs have little to do with each other, and neither commands respect in the others line of work. However, if both of those positions personally profit from exploiting the labor and resources of others, suddenly they have a shared interest in keeping an underclass of people to exploit for their own benefit. A CEO's exploitation of workers is intrinsic to a model of social labor for personal profit, and thus is preserved across generations and persons. In addition, when the unequal distribution of resources and power is abstracted into the accumulation of money, it can be passed down via family inheritance. However, this perpetuation of class is only possible through the model of social labor for private profit. I absolutely understand this, but you are still sidestepping the retort that any option that replaces market forces allocating labour with people allocating labour is a literal regression under your model to a pre-capitalist system which has even more inbuilt inequality. Until you can answer this question, the best possible option for the progressive left is the same one it's been for the last 50-60 years or so, which is to argue for a free market economy to do the initial allocation of resources and generate wealth, moderated by taxation and market incentives to redistribute wealth out as fairly as you can. e: \/\/ sure you can try to do that but without a model to look at I'm totally unconvinced you actually get good outcomes from it. There's loads of problems but I think the two most glaring are: 1) As previously stated complex decision making requires specialisation. You need information and the time to assimilate it and make decisions. Being a boss/manager/politician is literally a full time job and I can't see how you get past that. 2) I also don't think people actually want anything like this. Lots of people in the UK grumble about having to vote in a general election more often than the usual five year cycle. They want to be able to vote on the direction of the country once and then not be bothered by politics for the next five years. They have problems, but what they want is for politicians to recognise those problems and offer solutions - we don't live in a world where everyone has a pet policy they desperately want to pursue. I think that most people are happy just knowing that there's someone in charge and they don't have to worry. Where they get unhappy is when they think the system is rigged against them and that politicians have stopped caring about their problems, but that's a cry to fix the system, not that they want more to do with it. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 19:41
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e: /\/\ yes which is why the profit motive and market value are important things. Decentralised decision making needs a guide rail to produce outcomes. In capitalism it's the market. In what you want it's...?unwantedplatypus posted:Well its not a "regression" because I don't take a Teleological view of history, but also the idea that "people allocating labor" = literally feudalism is a leap of logic you and you alone are making. I cant answer your question because I have no idea what you're talking about. How does people allocating labor lead to inbuilt inequality? Why are you somehow conflating all non-capitalist political economy with feudalism or (i'm guessing) USSR style state capitalism? Because you keep refusing to describe the system that you want, so all we have to go on are examples of systems based around people allocating labour, which all instantly become systems where the people you have allocating labour are the socio-economic elite. Owlfancier has at least given the usual answer ('some form of democracy') but every time I ask this question I've never managed to get further than that hopelessly vague response.
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Dec 29, 2019 20:11
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:44 |
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unwantedplatypus posted:Well the original point I was trying to make was that you can't make conclusions about human nature based off of how present and historical societies are structured; and also therefore can't assume that all political and economic systems require a class hierarchy. The fact that I can't mention a marxist analysis of something without you going "OH YEAH I BET YOU DONT EVEN KNOW HOW TO DO COMMUNISM" is not my problem. I can talk about steps we could take to weaken class hierarchy, such as democratization of the workplace, de-commodification of goods like housing, food, and healthcare, expropriating all private (as distinguished from personal) property and making the creation of new private property illegal, changing the currency system to some form of labor notes. Nice meltdown. It's pretty easy to explain how a series of command entities competing in an marketplace with informed consumer choice results in a system in which efficient entities succeed and inefficient entities do not. Individuals, through the aggregate of their purchasing choices, will choose which command entities are allocated more resources. Because they will make those choices in their own interest, the economy will trend towards the entities that are able to produce the best quality goods in the most efficient way. Now we all know it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that, and has all of the problems that have been brought out earlier, and sometimes just fails, but there in three sentences I've described market capitalism in a way that explains how as a system it attempts to work. Also none of it relied upon class analysis because you don't actually need class analysis to explain how any of this works. It's sometimes helpful, but it's only a small part of the picture. If you can't even do that, and all you have is 'if people were different then things would be different', then all you've done is make a trite observation that doesn't actually help anyone.
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Dec 29, 2019 20:45
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