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asdf32 posted:All actually functioning societies have people “in charge” of government and institutions and they will always be a form of elite. Nice that you add "actually functioning societies" so that you don't have to think about non-white people in your human nature argument edit: To clarify, I'm assuming that basically just means "has a state" unwantedplatypus fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Dec 28, 2019 |
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Dec 28, 2019 19:16
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Helsing posted:"Elites" are difficult to avoid altogether because there are built in hierarchies of skill and experience that seem to be more or less necessary for an industrial or agricultural society. However, there's a tendency to conflate "elites" with the holders of extreme wealth who are better termed oligarchs. I think the thing that people care about when they use the term "elites" is a (perceived) lack of accountability to "non-elites." Einstein was undoubtedly an intellectual elite, and had far more sway in the scientific community than most others, but that didn't translate into political power or dominion over other people's lives.
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Dec 28, 2019 19:20
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You can't look at the current way society is structured and make an argument that it is the natural way humans have and will always organize themselves. We are ultimately limited by the laws of nature. An agricultural mode of production only creates a small surplus, such that the vast majority of people must work as farmers to feed themselves. There are two options, either evenly distribute the surplus, or set aside a group of people who will not work to feed themselves, but instead dedicate their time and energy on some other, specialized task. It does not matter what our "nature" is. If 99 cultures choose the former option, and 1 culture chooses the latter option; and the latter option makes a culture more likely to survive, over time the world will fill with hierarchies as a product of necessity. But when the mode of production changes, so too do the restrictions we operate under.
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Dec 28, 2019 19:27
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asdf32 posted:Einstein's not a great example. President of Marxist Boeing Corp is. You can't build a jumbo jet without a hierarchical structure of thousands of people regardless of 'mode of production'. The person leading that organization and their counterparts across the economy hold economic power basically identical to capitalists. Does your system keep their power in check or not. That's the entire trick. That is a lot of words you are putting in my mouth. What system are you describing? Because the power that the coordinator of jumbo jet production has depends entirely on the system he or she is operating within. Is money a thing? How much do they have? Is it possible to use this money to gain an advantage in the justice system? Were they appointed to their position by a "higher" authority or were they elected by the workers of that organization? What is the process for removal of someone in their position? How much unilateral power do they have? Of course someone who is baiscally comrade CEO will have the same power as a CEO, but it is incredibly uncharitable of you to assume that is what I'm talking about. edit: If one were to make a human nature argument, I would look at the mode of production that has been unanimous amongst humanity for most of our species' history, and therefore is the only mode of production that could really affect or be affected by evolution; that is, hunter-gatherer societies. People don't do this, because then our own society would seem like a massive abberation of human nature, which it is. unwantedplatypus fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Dec 28, 2019 |
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Dec 28, 2019 21:04
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asdf32 posted:You posed the right questions but somehow didn't realize none of them are answered by the mode production. Then you don't understand the point I was trying to make by talking about food surpluses
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Dec 29, 2019 02:41
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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. You can have a factory "hierarchy" without the presence of a socio-economic class hierarchy surrounding it. I'm talking about the later more so than the former, because the latter is the actual reason hierarchies have such power in our society.
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Dec 29, 2019 14:24
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asdf32 posted:No you can't. An economy populated with hierarchical organizations has a class of leadership elites that run them. 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.
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Dec 29, 2019 18:05
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Alchenar posted: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. 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?
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Dec 29, 2019 20:08
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NovemberMike posted:This is a bit overly reductive. Markets behave differently to command economies, if you're willing to just pretend that they're the same to make a point then you're ignoring a lot of nuance. Oligarchs do have an outsized influence on markets, but they're still much weaker than they are in a command economy. It wasn't the oligarchs pushing Blockbuster out of business. Markets are composed of lots of individual command economies
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Dec 29, 2019 20:10
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Alchenar posted:e: /\/\ yes which is why the profit motive and market value are important things 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. I can't, and nobody can, describe every aspect of an economic system that doesn't yet exist; much in the same way that you can't actually fully describe how the economy that you live in and take as a rule of nature actually functions. Yes you can appeal to the vague term of "market forces", but that's little more than a thought-terminating cliche that ignores how the market is just the results of many individual decisions of supply and allocation. You can believe there is some special labor organizing ghost that dwells within the gaps of our knowledge, but I think that's a little unreasonable.
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Dec 29, 2019 20:22
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Alchenar posted:Nice meltdown. Well first off you haven't defined what efficiency is, so you aren't actually saying anything. The part your psuedo-evolutionary argument leaves out is that, as described, your ideal market will lead to monopolization as the "inefficient" companies are outcompeted and the older efficient companies use their market power (or use levers of power outside the market) to prevent newer efficient companies from meaningfully competing with them. Therefore, the market will trend towards entities that outcompeted the first "batch" of command entities and then successfully cemented their hold on their sector of the market. In addition this is a super simplified and idealized version of a market that describes very little and predicts even less
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Dec 29, 2019 21:09
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karthun posted:In either case I perform no socially necessary labor so no profit can be extracted from me. Welcome to to the R in R&D. Yeah, there's a reason there's like no antibiotics research
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Dec 29, 2019 23:23
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