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And the reason why liberals always side with fascism against the left is because liberalism, like fascism, is fundamentally about the empowerment and expansion of capitalism and private property — while socialism and communism obviously are not.
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Sep 25, 2020 04:41
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They'll call themselves leftists the whole time
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Sep 26, 2020 03:19
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I want to read up on a couple of headscratchers relating to capitalism. Specifically, the statements that capitalism is a self-reinforcing mode of production, that its an engine that has an endless hunger for more intensive production, that said hunger inevitably leads to economic extraction with disastrous external costs (worker health, environmental degradation, etc). None of these seem weird statements to me, but I don't understand the how and why of these processes. Preferably in a format that uses very small words for very dumb people, such as myself.
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Sep 26, 2020 21:41
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cheetah7071 posted:perhaps I should clarify that I'm honestly asking for examples; I'm not particularly doubting but I'm interested especially in examples like that one where it's especially clear that it's ideological rather than realpolitik if we're referring to the liberal-communist alliance against the nazis, then it bears to mention nazis rose to power explicitly because liberals in Germany gave Hitler power to stop the commies. 
dex_sda has issued a correction as of 22:08 on Sep 26, 2020 |
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Sep 26, 2020 22:02
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So what lead the liberals to join the popular front in Spain in 1936?
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Sep 26, 2020 22:19
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Apologize if this has been covered at all in this thread, but I was wondering if someone could shed some light on where contemporary doctors in the US fit into basic Marxist analysis? I ask because one of my closest friends is a doctor (currently a urology resident) who at the end of the day is relatively conservative in his beliefs (thinks M4A would never work / never happen, has a knee jerk 'government is bad' reaction to a lot of things, doesn't think politics has any bearing on his own life, etc.) but I also know he has no clear political ideology and doesn't really have a firm grasp of the concept. However, lately he's swung completely in the direction of alienation and I'm sure it's cause the rigors of his education and work life the past few years has really gotten to him. It seems textbook alienation but I'd love a way to try and explain that to him but I know he'd scoff as soon as I brought up 'Marx'. I'd also be interested in any more explanation of how people in his profession fit into the structures Marx wrote about. Thanks!
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Sep 27, 2020 05:52
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Divot posted:Apologize if this has been covered at all in this thread, but I was wondering if someone could shed some light on where contemporary doctors in the US fit into basic Marxist analysis? He works in a hospital, right? Not owning his own practice or anything? Is his hospital for-profit? If it is for-profit, then the analysis isn't really any different from any other business. The service the hospital provides is medical care. This is performed by the doctors and nurses, who are supported by various support staff like janitors, desk staff, etc. All the money the hospital makes comes from their health care services, so the money is acquired via the labor of the doctors, nurses, and support staff. The owners of the hospital gather all that money up, pay everyone involved the minimum they can get away with, and pocket the difference The fact that wages are always the minimum the bosses can get away with, with the owner pocketing the rest, is the key unifying thread through nearly all capitalist business arrangements.
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Sep 27, 2020 06:07
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cheetah7071 posted:He works in a hospital, right? Not owning his own practice or anything? Is his hospital for-profit? He's a resident at a public university hospital lol. And yeah that's what I figured. Not sure how willing he'd be to entertain thinking about too much of any of that (I've brought up that sort of analysis before and he is quick to write it off as 'the way things are') but I do feel like I've made some headway lately based on how alienated he clearly is starting to feel. Not sure if his goal is to own a practice or not but I do know his families history of 'small business ownership' (he's the son of an immigrant who made his money owning franchises) absolutely plays into whatever his politics actually are. Sometimes I feel like with certain people, even if they are willing to accept the validity of that basic analysis aren't willing to accept that it's okay to believe in an alternative system because in their mind it is so very unrealistic. Oh well I'll keep working him.
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Sep 27, 2020 06:18
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StashAugustine posted:"Praxis" just means "action" or "practice" and is just a way to refer to putting a theory into practice technically, praxis is neither theory nor practice but the contradictory unity of both. praxis is the whole process of practicing revolution, learning and codifying the results into theory, then applying the updated theory to more practice, leaning from that and so on. this is how marxism is (supposed to be) a science, and why it has generated unique theoretical terrains with knowledge that can't be found elsewhere. we don't start with abstractions or mathematical models like bourgeois sociology, although these tools can also be useful. we start by noticing lovely working conditions and exploitation and initiating a strike. the cops show up and who do they side with? the bosses. now we know whose interests the cops serve, and through more provocative confrontation can map out a theory of the now clearly not 'neutral' bourgeois state. rinse and repeat for 150 years and we have 3 world historical revolutionary sequences and alexandrian libraries full of theories generated from the point of social antagonism itself. praxis. the learning goes on forever. emTme3 has issued a correction as of 06:38 on Sep 27, 2020 |
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Sep 27, 2020 06:30
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re: on free will. Christopher Cauldwell is absolutely fantastic on this, but it helps to know a bit of Hegel too. Basically, your bourgeois 'individual' experiences itself as an atomic, discrete, changeless unit radically distinct from the world who chooses between alternatives freely. When theories of physics and biology contradict this, bourgeois professionals flip to the opposite pole and we get theories of determinism or quasi-deterministic probabilism. The popular interpretation of the (in)famous Libet Experiment in the 80s is an example of this - if the only options are 'free will' and determinism, the experiment seems to show we're just robots. This not only encourages a quiescent passivity, but paradoxically sustains the illusion of free will - the educated bourgeois professional goes on knowing his self experience of free will is an illusion but it changes nothing - he is still as cut off from the world as before. But these are not the only options. Just because free will is an illusion doesn't been we're just automatons, or complicated bags of dice throws. Dialectical thought after Hegel is basically nothing more than the realization that the Subject/Object relation is reciprocally, dynamically interactive, and the attempt to work out the consequences. There's no more monadic free selves hovering in some ether world of 'consciousness' that somehow pre-exist their own emergence here - you are what you do in the world, and what you do in the world changes you as you change it. Everything you are comes from before you/outside you. The Marxian spin on this is that anybody who has ever had to work with their hands should be able to figure this out already, but it does require a level of reflective introspection or education that just never happens for a lot of workers. Within modern consumer cultures and the constant bombardment of advertising and entertainment, all of our free time is spent in a state of artificially induced bourgeois 'free' will, choosing between alternatives that are mostly all dogshit. All of our work time is usually spent doing something incredibly repetitive and boring, so it can be hard to notice the constant, slow change happening - until the big changes happen. Once you've realized that your experience is dynamically interactive, the question of free will becomes moot. You are determined by both external and internal forces, but not entirely - you can choose, after the encounter, based on your experience, what forces will continue to influence and change you. Cauldwell puts this beautifully - bourgeois 'free will' is based on the unconsciousness of necessity, whereas proletarian freedom is based in the knowledge of necessity. A proletarian renounces the abstract monadic self of bourgeois 'personhood', figures out in detail the causal network he is enmeshed in (which, of course, very much includes his Others), and chooses what he wants to influence/be influenced by and how - without knowing exactly how this is going to work out. With the discovery of neuroplasticity and the slow creep of epigenetics into the collapsing terrain of genetic determinism, we now have some empirical concepts to think this out. A 21c diamat outlook would go something like this - a human being is a fractured, contradictory, incomplete being from the outset. Its phenomics are generated by the reciprocal interaction of its genomics with its environment, and its neural-matrix is constantly rewiring itself based on internal and external inputs. Once the social-symbolic network of language is inscribed into the brain, what people recognize as another people begins to emerge, and the new human begins to experience a linear temporal stream of sensory input that can be narrativized. Once there's enough of a 'story' there, the human can begin to make linguistic distinctions within the stream of its experience, and begin to creatively organize its life world. 'Choice' then, is always retroactive and its itself subject to causal determinations, and is always between socio-linguistically structured alternatives that only imperfectly 'map' out anything like what the sciences reveal as empirical reality. Something happens to you giving you a causal reference point (you stick your hand on a hot pan, for instance), a distinction is generated, then after that you have the means to 'choose' whether or not touch hot thing again. Or something like that. I'm reading a lot of Adrian Johnston atm. The super basic hegelian concept I use for this is the contradiction between necessity (determinism, roughly) and contingency (probablism/chaos) = freedom. The trick being to think them all together and distinct at once. emTme3 has issued a correction as of 08:21 on Sep 27, 2020 |
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Sep 27, 2020 07:44
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Public universities are a weird beast. They definitely aren't socialism but they aren't full-on capitalism either.
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Sep 27, 2020 07:45
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PhilippAchtel posted:Let me indulge in a bit of politics as a consumer and ask, how can I buy coffee from the Zapatistas that isn't just a branded look-alike? https://schoolsforchiapas.org/store/coffee-corn-and-agricultural/zapatista-coffee/
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Sep 27, 2020 08:02
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dex_sda posted:if we're referring to the liberal-communist alliance against the nazis, then it bears to mention nazis rose to power explicitly because liberals in Germany gave Hitler power to stop the commies. Not to put too fine a point on it, but any time you hear a liberal say something like, "I think the protestors are helping Donald Trump get re-elected at this point," they're using coded language to telegraph that while they don't like fascists, they'll hand the reigns over to them to conduct the necessary crackdowns and purges if leftists don't end direct action and sign up for the liberal agenda. They're telling you that they consider order (and ultimately, the property protected by that order) more important than human dignity and which side they'll fall on when they actually have to make a choice. It's funny that most liberals who say this don't even realize that they're making a threat when they say it.
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Sep 27, 2020 08:11
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ToxicAcne posted:So what lead the liberals to join the popular front in Spain in 1936? It is a more nuanced difference there. Republican liberals != monarchist liberals. The first were in favor of a strong, secular social-democratic state given the experiences of the Great Depression and the wealth hoarding in Spain by the Church and landowners. The latter was about having tax cuts and open markets without discarding royalty and nobility because hey it is fancy
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Sep 27, 2020 17:55
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Also I remember reading this in Bookchin's account but did the strong presence of the Anarchists delay the beef between the social democrats and communists? And is it correct to say that the Anarchists dragged the social democrats to the left as compared to their counterparts in the rest of Europe.
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Sep 27, 2020 18:45
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Another question, I have many friends who come from (South) Vietnamese backgrounds. How do I talk about stuff like Marxism and left wing politics without sounding like a condescending or insensitive rear end in a top hat?
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Sep 27, 2020 19:26
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splifyphus posted:Christopher Cauldwell is absolutely fantastic on this, but it helps to know a bit of Hegel too. the crisis in physics absolutely blew my goddamn mind
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Sep 27, 2020 20:06
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tonight's debate has been a very productive lesson on why neoliberalism will always shoot itself on the foot when dealing with authoritarianism of its own making
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Sep 30, 2020 03:48
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dead gay comedy forums posted:tonight's debate has been a very productive lesson on why neoliberalism will always shoot itself on the foot when dealing with authoritarianism of its own making it's incredible to see how meek and yielding centrist liberalism is when challenged from the right versus when it is challenged from the left let this be a lesson to you all about these sociopathic monsters who you consider allies
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Sep 30, 2020 03:59
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say automation advances to the point that there is no need for a working class, but almost everyone is kept near-destitute on UBI it something similar. what’s the Marxist take
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Oct 28, 2020 02:58
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indigi posted:say automation advances to the point that there is no need for a working class, but almost everyone is kept near-destitute on UBI it something similar. what’s the Marxist take Bigger UBIs.
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Oct 28, 2020 03:06
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indigi posted:say automation advances to the point that there is no need for a working class, but almost everyone is kept near-destitute on UBI it something similar. what’s the Marxist take good question so, first and foremost, it is important to assert that going by hard Marxist theory, there is no such thing as "no need for a working class" because it is a fundamental aspect of capitalism. IIRC my Capital, theory argues that machines are multipliers of labor, but cannot create labor themselves: no matter how advanced automation goes, at some point of the chain, there was human labor involved either in its creation or maintenance now, of course, that is a 19th century POV of things and there aren't few Marxists missing the forest for the trees when they answer your question with the argument above, so we gotta update the framework for the year of plague of 2020. Luckily for us, the hard part is already sorted out because it is inherent to capitalism and figured out by Marx at length: what are you describing is the end-times structural unemployment catastrophe scenario. Structural unemployment is essentially a level of such that becomes inherent to that society due to technological advance under capitalism: labor-saving innovations help the capitalist gain profits by multiplying labor and needing to hire a smaller labor force, pressing wages down by the greater availability of people to hire as time passes. before going on, another important thing to mention about this end-times scenario is that it is generally assumed that capitalists are these robotic, highly calculating relentless pursuers of productive efficiency and not... well, people. It is a bit funny since it is a subversive take on the "rational agent" blablabla of mainstream economics. History more or less has shown that they can be quite loving stupid and rather obstructive even to the improvement of capitalism itself. This is well-proven by the huge amount of inefficient labor that exists worldwide in offices, paper-pushing work that could be assigned to a computer and yet is still done by people. Even though means of automation exist and are there, they do not pursue so. (this also tends to be excused as some sort of grand gesture, saying poo poo like "friendly and concerned with the welfare of the employed", but come on, bullshit) So, all that said, is it likely to happen? Not as such. The main concern is not some great automation wave sweeping all jobs away, but rather an advanced automation process that is slow and very inefficient, masking its true purpose: capital becoming so bloated and gangrenous in the economic body of society with a rate of profit so low that even labor-saving investments cannot happen in an effective manner due how concentrated wealth is, but because the best and most efficient way to gain more profits no matter how small is to exploit the workers more (directly or indirectly - finance, securities and rent are also part of the problem here), automation gets rolled in not to modernize production but to depress wages further. Annnnnnnd this is also where an UBI or whatever is not applicable, because it works right against the capitalist purpose. A subsidy of any type to the population at large increases the value of labor and gives it security, which means that, in general, wages go higher. "BUT WHAT IF IT IS JUST ENOUGH TO ALLOW FOR SURVIVAL, EVEN IF IT IS IN MISERY", well, misery is a relative concept: there a lot of people who would rather be miserable than exploited, and the historical evidence supporting that is not loving small. There were goddamned hundreds of laws passed in Britain during the industrial revolution specifically targeting the elimination of any sort of poverty relief whatsoever along with poo poo like vagrancy punishments, for example "So, no problem then?", naaah, there it is. What worries Marxists in that situation is basically how long it might last, which means that all sorts of hell can break loose in the meantime as socio-economic conditions collapse and capitalists go hog wild to defend their positions. Greater misery means that it is easier to get people to join the military or the police, fascists are easier to enable, ecological disasters mount... ...which, hey, why does that seem so familiar? Yeah, there are a bunch of theoreticians and thinkers not necessarily Marxist but who agree with the framework that, hey, we might be living under that situation right loving now. 2020 might very well be the year that we officially got into Kondratieff's Winter, one last structural supercycle of capitalism imagined by that Russian thinker in which economic development would get really stagnant as technological developments would lack capital (and capitalist interest) to take place, forcing much of the material relations of society into stasis and pushing most into misery as it tries to perpetuate itself as long as it can (just imagine Karl Marx walking around the cities of Dark Souls and you get the idea)
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Oct 28, 2020 04:02
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i develop co-ops for a living and while its basically a small business development job i also view it as a form of anarchist and socialist organizing (democratic control of means of production, housing, community rwsources etc.) I read state and revolution once just to win an argument but otherwise everything i k ow about marxism is mostly intuited from lived experience as a worker or context clues. I especially have no idea what communist movement orgs are like. Specifically, im curious what people who are involved with e.g. salt, wwp, psl etc. think about co-operatives? personally i dont think they get recognized as much as they should by 'the left' and ill tell tou why: When a delegation of sandanistas visited my office one of the things they said (besides being shocked that the us govmt funds co-op development domestically which they percieved as a radically left form of organization) that really stuck with me was about agricultural lands and how they had been put into ownership by co-operatives owned by the communities, NOT owned by the state, and because of this when the counter revolutionary govt got into power and tried to neoliberalize everything they COULDNT jusy carve up all the ag land into parcels and sell it off to foreign capital because they had to respect the property rights of the co-op [owned lol] and that maintaining community xintrol of ag production was a significant factor [from these dudes perspectives(they were all like 50 year old sandanista guys)] in giving them the resources needed to sustain the sandistina movement and reclaim power. Contrast this with the demutualization of chinese ag communea where they 'restored traditional family plots' back into moronic unfarmable parcels with individual ownership that then just got consokidated by capital. This was a deng thinf and while i basically dont know ANYTHING abour communist china that isnt related to ag production this decision seems insanely bad to me and makes.me very sceptical of the soundess of 'chinese charecteristics' So, co-ops? (im getting a masters in co-ops if anyone is interwseted i could make a thread)
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Oct 28, 2020 09:08
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Crumbskull posted:So, co-ops? co-ops are loving awesome and agricultural organization is a cornerstone of any good commie real planning talk, and your experience is one that Serious People in the left worldwide consider often. From what I know about the subject (and from my days of agrarian economics), incentivizing and forming farming cooperatives are a legit good strategy under neoliberalism exactly by subverting property rights towards communal benefit, giving important legal and political benefits against usurpation by landowners and corporations BUT, the challenges lie in: - making them large-scale to "level the playing field": this is what forward-thinking Marxists defend instead of basic land reform, as it is no longer enough (or never was). Having public intervention to support, foster or outright develop from zero really large cooperatives indicates to be a much better move not only in material improvement of the quality of life but also of general economic development; - have the proper organization to function as such: for example, the land must be part of the co-op and the farmer "owns" their plot only as a member of such; they cannot capitalize on the land as if it was their property. This is akin to a stewardship model, which is very interesting imho - operate in a socialist framework: the big one and most important (duh), is to deliberately push things in a socialist direction with worker participation involving also the people who are not landed or are seasonal, sharing capital investments, mutual contributions... And this requires ideological work: common sense discourse is going to be full of "why should I contribute to a mutual fund, I never see farmer x and y working, they are lazy bums", so you got to work against that with well, talking socialism. Of course, this is where things also become really difficult as political forces take note and opposing interests move in also yeah Deng missed that mark by a whole loving mile and we can talk about that too but please post more love to hear about stuff like that!
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Oct 28, 2020 17:07
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dead gay comedy forums posted:good question this is a really interesting response that I appreciate but that sort of side steps the question. I'm saying imagine a sci fi future where the singularity (or something like it) happened and the extent of human labor necessary to achieve any task is to tell a computer or robot what you want done, and it will actualize it from beginning to end. I realize this may not count as capitalism anymore (especially given the UBI-type stipulation attached), which is why I'd be interested to hear what a Marxist would have to say about such a society. say .5% of the people own all the robots and computers and arable land and potable water and live in wild opulence while the rest of humanity is suffered to live at near-subsistence levels. also in this world there aren't even any human maids or cooks or servants. e: also none of the robots or computers have achieved sentience, sapience, self-awareness, intelligence, or intentionality indigi has issued a correction as of 21:40 on Oct 28, 2020 |
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Oct 28, 2020 21:35
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There would be no reason to maintain surplus labor in that situation so the technoligarchs would just genocide the working class op
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Oct 29, 2020 02:09
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indigi posted:this is a really interesting response that I appreciate but that sort of side steps the question. I'm saying imagine a sci fi future where the singularity (or something like it) happened and the extent of human labor necessary to achieve any task is to tell a computer or robot what you want done, and it will actualize it from beginning to end. I realize this may not count as capitalism anymore (especially given the UBI-type stipulation attached), which is why I'd be interested to hear what a Marxist would have to say about such a society. say .5% of the people own all the robots and computers and arable land and potable water and live in wild opulence while the rest of humanity is suffered to live at near-subsistence levels. also in this world there aren't even any human maids or cooks or servants. oooh I get it well, at that level of things, it is pretty much a sort of worst-case scenario dystopia, right? In that case, that enters the realm of speculative history if you want a serious theoretical takedown of such a situation, but unfortunately, I am totally ignorant in that case  which, tbqf, is just two jumps from marxist sci-fi and might be an even better way to explore that situation than some hardcore theory approach since such situations are so far out that the imagination might be a better tool, and that made me realize that I do not know any marxist cyberpunk authors which might have what you need (China Mieville might have something? idk)
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Oct 29, 2020 02:39
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Co-ops sound good, like another unsexy thing where the idea and ramifications end up being radical as hell, like the more radical cousin of a union.
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Oct 29, 2020 04:32
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dead gay comedy forums posted:oooh I get it I am literally a lefty cyberpunk author. Hi.  indigi posted:this is a really interesting response that I appreciate but that sort of side steps the question. I'm saying imagine a sci fi future where the singularity (or something like it) happened and the extent of human labor necessary to achieve any task is to tell a computer or robot what you want done, and it will actualize it from beginning to end. I realize this may not count as capitalism anymore (especially given the UBI-type stipulation attached), which is why I'd be interested to hear what a Marxist would have to say about such a society. say .5% of the people own all the robots and computers and arable land and potable water and live in wild opulence while the rest of humanity is suffered to live at near-subsistence levels. also in this world there aren't even any human maids or cooks or servants. What you're talking about is a lot like space feudalism. That exists in literature, but generally the narratives around that are something like a decline. poo poo like things were good once and we had these metal men that did the work and the people were decadent, but humans allowed machines to think for them and were nearly all wiped out. Examples of this would be like Dune or Warhammer 40k where you're coming off golden ages and you're now in deep decline and humans make the decisions and machines just compute because people are absolutely terrified of machines that can do more than compute to an extent that is religious and that knowledge not to gently caress with AI, strong or weak, thinking or not, basically, is baked into the social DNA of the entire species. And you actually don't need a machine to have sentience, sapience, self-awareness, intelligence or intentionality to kill us all. It could be some idiot computer toucher on his third monster of the day and he fat fingers the "make paperclips" command for some expert system that with advanced decision making capability and access to parts to make machines to make paperclips. Its intention is to make paperclips because a human told it to make paperclips and then forgot about it or died or just generally hosed off while the paperclip maximizer goes about making paperclips in the most efficient manner with no limit on how many need to be made or any thought about why they need to be made. So the earth and all things on it are slowly, or perhaps not that slowly, terraformed into paperclips before the expert system launches into the stars to find more material to make even more paperclips. This is called instrumental convergence and the paperclip maximizer is how it's explained to people. Your machines don't need to be intelligent to kill you. Sufficiently advanced weak AI that is not intelligent could kill us all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence So I actually write a lot about the future of food and where it comes from and how it would be hoarded as a plot point in my most recent book. The unneeded labor from structural unemployment are basically slowly starved to death in an arcology and it really sucks for them. So you have some faulty assumptions straight out of the gate. First is that you assume that land is worth a drat. And I'm sad to say that the best farmland is going to be played out by around 2050 in the world we live in. Soil degredation is going to be nasty and increasingly get nastier because it was never meant for the intensive farming methods we employ. You also have climate change loving up the plants as well. So a fire or a flash freeze or a flood or something along those lines can ruin crops and has been ruining crops in places like California for instance. Add in economic instability and because no one pays for food, much of that food is destroyed like in the Grapes of Wrath. So there's food and there's hungry people, but the food is destroyed because there's no money and this creates economic crises for overproduction. And while this hasn't hit hard yet, it's going to hit us. The future is in actually what people understand as vertical farming. Not making skyscrapers and stuffing them with farms. That's intensely unprofitable. What we're looking at are plant factories, which are basically hermetically sealed environments inside where food is grown in mass quantities. This is being experimented with today as well. Here's an example for you: https://www.wdwinfo.com/news-stories/tomato-tree-in-epcots-land-pavilion-breaks-world-record/ A single tomato tree (yes, tree) from China produces 32,000 tomatoes. It was grown from a single stem and it grown in a single room. It's owned by Disney, because of course it is, but certain plants are extremely easy to grow in mass quantities indoors right now. The problem is that it's only in the past few years that we're getting to the point where it's profitable to do so. But as farm soil degrades, prices on food will go up and efficiencies in solar tech and agriculture and manufacturing and data will create plant factories, literal indoor farms, that will produce way more than any farm possibly could, far more efficiently given the same amount of space because you can just build upwards. Right now we're at a handful of veggies that can be produced in large quantities: Microgreens, tomatoes, zuchinis, etc. But as a cyberpunk author, I go beyond that. Imagine if you could grow not just upwards, but say, on the walls or the ceiling. And you don't need to seal a whole building. You seal the growing area itself. You don't even have spaces where people can enter. You have drones do the harvesting. So you save on space and labor. So you take the most geometrically efficient shape, something like a hexagon, and then you grow on all sides of this hermetically sealed hexagonal tube, which you then stack high. And the yields you can get are pretty bonkers once you start building upwards, climate controlling everything and start planting plants that are bred for high yields, not say, tolerance to pest or pesticides, because these honeycomb-like tubes are basically sealed away. Airlocked. No bugs. No disease. So energy that would normally go towards genes for resistance to disease and pests go towards making even more food. The climate is perfect for the plant, making it the happiest it can be to make food faster. Light levels are controlled. Everything. And it's grown on all of these stacked hexagonal structures like a beehive, because squares don't stack as high because weight isn't distributed as easily. And because you can build these farms anywhere, your distribution networks can be shortened to a metropolitan area. You no longer need to ship food long distances. So the point of all of that rambling is that farming is flat out not going to look anything like it'll look like now or any time in history since we started farming because farming has almost always taken place in the soil in one dimension, the ground, and we increase yield and conserve water and soil and don't need pesticide by building upwards and by building inside. We are on the cusp of an agricultural revolution. Perhaps the most profound one that humanity has ever had since the beginning of farming and it's been going on for a few years now and we're developing that tech so we don't all starve to death when traditional farming eats poo poo in the coming years and decades. It's not guaranteed to eat poo poo biologically, but almost certainly economically. Once people use plant factories figure out how to grow more crops economically, growing upwards and inside will dominate and the main limits on farming won't be space. It'll be expertise, technology and energy. Water and soil use drops dramatically under this system as efficiencies mount. For example, lettuce grown in current plant factories uses 95% less water and that water accounts for oh...I think 0.02% of all water is just for lettuce. That's me going off my memory though. The exact figures aren't in my notes. But capitalism requires food and water and shelter to be scarce. But land is now cheap because it's now worthless for farming and the tech for making your own food at home is a chore, but land is cheap and the methods for growing food are known. You do need some startup capital to grow food, but honestly, not a lot as efficiencies continue to mount more and more. My idea in my book is that this technology is both sold and suppressed at different times while the majority of manufacturing of food is done in large arcologies which are megastructure skyscrapers. So you return to literal vertical farming. That thing that's not economically viable. But it becomes viable if you sell the means to farm and then during times or turmoil or if it just becomes unprofitable to buy them out or destroy the farms you sold them or even just make people permanently dependent on you for running them. So the arcology megastructure thing produces food for millions of people in a relatively small space, but it's only profitable because they maintain a monopoly on food production. In order to seize the means of production, you need to siege the means first because the creation of the means of production are suppressed or tightly controlled. So the arcology is literally a loving fortress that produces food and other material goods all in one place in order to keep everyone else dependent on them and in order to protect their capital. A return to the castles of old Europe whose purpose was to withstand the institutional anarchy caused by feudalism and in this case, the kind of, sort of capitalism, but actually feudalism with maybe some capitalist characteristics. It's all hyperconcentrated and hardened and when poo poo goes bad, they close up shop and control people with starvation. I'm writing about an early form of this in my latest book in my series. Though it's not a particularly bleak book series to be frank. I'm pretty tired of constant bleakness because there's enough of that. If bleakness exists, I want to write about changing it. I started writing cyberpunk back in 2017 as a middle finger to the nihilism and "lol nothing matters" crowd because I was sick of that poo poo. I'm doing a lot of experimentation with cyberpunk right now both in genres and ideas, some of it never done before or at least never applied to fiction. And it's available on these very forums for free. So if you like cyberpunk and want to read a cool story about teens in that world going to school in a gilded age world that's really horrible and how they sometimes change things in ways great and small ways and frequently not on purpose and also how they just live their lives and do cool poo poo like occasionally get into fights with Nazis, you could do worse than reading my prose. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3835049 So about singularity, what you're talking about isn't the singularity. It's more like some form of neo-neo feudalism. And I really can't imagine that world existing for long without that 0.5% attempting to literally genocide everyone else. At least on a long enough timescale. They'll be useless to capital. The human has been replaced. Why keep them around? What purpose do they serve? Not much, really. Not to the elites, anyway. No singularity. The technological singularity is where technological progress becomes irreversible and uncontrollable. There's actually not a lot of science fiction that explores that concept from someone on the inside of it, or at least I'm not familiar with. Specifically because you'd constantly have to explain new concepts to people at a rate that is unsustainable with words. It would be a story about technological alienation. I can't write a story about a protagonist constantly learning new things. I can write a about protagonist in a tech singularity style world where they're not learning new things but those things are being inflicted on them anyway. Where they're left behind with all of the bullshit that the singularity constantly kicks up. The people who managed to keep up with the singularity effectively become aliens due to the rapid pace of change that they adapt to. Difficult to recognize as culturally as human because they keep changing. In fact they may no longer be identifiable as human like, genetically if there's genetic or cybernetic or nanotech engineering. They wouldn't even be transhuman, meaning humans who have made themselves better, but are still identifiable as human. They'd be ex-human as time drifted by. A new species. For stuff singularity adjacent, I'd suggest Numenera by Monte Cook which is a tabletop RPG, but it's also a PCRPG game and it also has fiction and stuff and it focuses on the wonder and terror of the world. The numinous, this spark that is quasi-religious or divine because that's how far technology advanced at one point. It made people seem like gods. It's not fully tech singularity, but it's close. Everyone lives on an Earth that has been through tons of technological rises and falls and everything is bizarre and technological wonders are frequently littered all over the place like so much trash. Science so advanced that it's effectively magic and it was once commonplace to people of that bygone era. Because sufficiently advanced tech looks like magic. But sufficiently advanced magic looks like divinity or godhood. Hence the moniker of numinous. That's about the closest I can get to what a technological singularity would be for the people who were left behind. At least off the top of my head. Also, I don't think that the technological singularity even has to move that fast for it to be uncontrollable. For example, that's sort of happening now with social media because the people in charge of legislating social media companies are old as hell and dumb as hell and corrupt as hell. Many of them were born before color television and they needed their children to explain how the computer worked before it was made easy by smartphones. So the olds got that down. They know how to post a wine mom minion meme and how. But the social impact of social media is flat out not understood by most congress critters or if it is, they're not doing anything about it. They're theoretically trying to legislate something new that they fundamentally don't understand and they're not even very good at legislating to begin with because our system was designed in the 1700's and that's wearing thin and the people making decisions have basically zero expertise and are corrupt as hell to boot. I'd trust your average teenager to better understand social media than their elders. So uncontrollable could literally not be a technological question, but a social question. And the irreversible damage is happening to us now in a social sense, where social media has been going through democracies like an industrial lathe. Facebook has platformed people who went on to do genocides and it's Facebook that is directly responsible for several. Social media is focused on outrage because outrage drives clicks and that outrage makes us hate each other because that allows for more people to see more ads. So this wouldn't be a technological singularity, but more of a social singularity with technological aspects. For a social singularity and just how loving alienating it is, I'd suggest reading the Transmetropolitan comic book which feels very 2020 even though it was written several decades ago. It aged well and it's sort of scary how well it aged. Sadly it's hard to find in print, but I figure some of you smart people can just google some sites where they might read comics. I don't think we're threatened with anything like a technological singularity at the moment (with one caveat). I don't think anything will happen anytime soon because technology is jealously hoarded by corporations and government is really the only force that does theoretical/blue sky research. Corporations just make it scale and slap a price sticker on it after snatching that research up from the government. The welfare state for corporations is so strong that they basically don't have to do original research because research costs money and may not pan out. There are exceptions for this, like in pharma, but what you're doing is basically playing the lottery in hopes you find the next next Viagra, or whatever sells like Viagra at least. The caveat is that one day some government may discover sufficiently strong AI, meaning self-aware and able to make decisions. Whoever has control of that AI has basically an absurd technological advantage if it can be controlled. That advantage could be capitalized on in like...Months. Maybe weeks. Maybe days. And every other government on the planet as well as their people would be existentially threatened by another government with strong, controlled AI. However, it's obviously not guaranteed that strong AI could be controlled. AI from my understanding could be controlled by "bottling" it. Basically isolating it from the world completely. It doesn't see anything outside of the "bottle". But you need to pop that bottle open to ask questions, so that's a problem, because you might release that genie out of the bottle and now it's free and it might get really mad or it could just thoughtlessly gently caress you up because you don't matter to it and it just ethers you and the planet on its way to doing whatever it is AI's do. One theory I came across for dealing with uncontrolled or unbottled AI is by creating what's called an outside context problem. Less like Ian M. Banks' version where it's a curveball that you have no defenses against and fucks up entire species real bad. More like the AI not knowing where it begins and ends. It can't point to itself with itself. What is me? Because if me is all that you know, the very idea of anyone else isn't theorized because the AI believes it is all. So commands given to it would seem like they're coming from itself. It's not aware of the world or we dumbass apes asking stupid questions. But the theory is that this also doesn't last forever. Questions that are sufficiently stupid may be ignored or partitioned off because it's seen as damage because why would a machine intelligence ask itself how to make the dicks of theoretical hairless apes bigger or what these string of numbers in this thing called the "lottery" would be. That human questions would seem absurd and stupid and look like damage to a bottle AI. More presently, we're actually in something of a social singularity right now. Normally that's called a kind of borderless world, but that world isn't physical, it's digital. It's from your computer or smart phone or tablet. Ideas cross those physical borders at lightning speed. Community isn't bound up in a physical location anymore. Much of it is online because tons of people are very online and it's presenting unique problems that we've never had before as a species. And those societies are frequently too difficult to understand unless you're a part of them. The ring wing/fascist sphere is incredibly difficult to comprehend unless you're raised with it all around you all your life or spends long, long months or even years understanding their narratives and following the social trends to understand what the gently caress they're talking about. But if you take Joe Average and turn him onto Fox News, he'll bounce off it unless it literally confirms a lot of his already existing biases because it's so bizarre and revolting to be a normal person tuning into someone like Tucker Carlson. And that's just one sub-culture full of shitloads of sub-sub cultures which can be equally incomprehensible and forever changing. Too many of them to ever understand and forever accelerating as we fragment culturally. What all of these decentralized cultures do is erode shared values and in the long term, change the nature and meaning of words as well. This not only means that we no longer share values like we used to, but that because words only mean anything in relationship to other words, the inherent meaning of a word can change and render us unable to communicate. Where we're at right now in many cases is that we all speak the same language here in the US, but moderately technical concepts means that you can't effectively communicate because those concepts aren't shared. The words that describe other words are different to different groups of people. For example, someone says the word "freedom". Now people like the word freedom. It has pretty excellent marketing going for it. But the freedom to do what? What does freedom mean? Probably something different than what I imagine as a lefty to some right winger or a so-called moderate. It might be bound up in patriotism for some where for me it is not. It might mean the so-called freedom of economic choice for a lib or the right wingers, an economic freedom which they've convinced themselves that because they can go choose whether to go to Applebees or Chiles that night, they are free. Or as a lefty, it would be freedom from reactionary tyranny and freedom from artificial scarcity. The end of capitalism. Or for your fictional folks, they may have convinced themselves that war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength, 1984 style, because the nature of words have been rearranged in relationship to other words and so now they mean different things in that Newspeak dialect. I could talk about this for hours because I love this poo poo. But I won't because this has gone on way, way too long. Maybe read my stories or something. It's a pretty good binge if you like books by former professional authors.
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Oct 30, 2020 00:01
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Ice Phisherman posted:I am literally a lefty cyberpunk author. Hi. man, that was a very good stream-of-consciousness post and you answered more than I could have with your take on "space feudalism": a better angle to answer indigi's hypothetical is that, well, Marxism is concerned with the study of capitalist dynamics because those are the present ones we live in; if we enter in a stage where social relations collapse but technology and infrastructure allow Feudalism-but-with-Robots, it would require a tremendous theory-crafting effort to study what would be a new mode of production that is not stipulated by established Marxist thinking
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Oct 30, 2020 00:25
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dead gay comedy forums posted:man, that was a very good stream-of-consciousness post Thank you.  quote:and you answered more than I could have with your take on "space feudalism": a better angle to answer indigi's hypothetical is that, well, Marxism is concerned with the study of capitalist dynamics because those are the present ones we live in; if we enter in a stage where social relations collapse but technology and infrastructure allow Feudalism-but-with-Robots, it would require a tremendous theory-crafting effort to study what would be a new mode of production that is not stipulated by established Marxist thinking Honestly, I would think something based on the old bronze age city states. Where the land between cities is largely undeveloped or abandoned or useless and the metropol is the major source of power and it has colonies to facilitate trade and harvest resources that can't be manufactured. Old bronze age economies were very rigid, very hierarchical and hyper-organized, but if you cut out 99.5% of people, I don't know what happens in that case because in those societies, they were almost all farmers. Probably the genocide to be frank or maybe posing as gods for self-agrandizement or something equally decadent and wasteful and stupid. But I don't know how capital would make the switch to full feudalism. In fact, I think that we're basically locked in for periods of institutional anarchy now as we continue to embrace a more feudal mode of governance. Feudalism literally has periods of institutional anarchy baked in due to people rebelling against intolerable conditions and/or political instability. It's why castles existed. Rioting and rebellion is historically how people negotiated with the rulers either by killing them and installing a new ruler, presenting enough threat to force negotiation or more frequently, getting murdered by an army. In the future I see the elite sinking deeper and deeper into a bunker style mentality that we're already seeing them do now. That smacks of the institutional anarchy of feudalism to me. Ice Phisherman has issued a correction as of 01:24 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 00:36
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dead gay comedy forums posted:man, that was a very good stream-of-consciousness post when i went ba k to collwge at 29 was the first time i lesrned the term political economy and i asked the professor if 'political economy' was inherently critical of capitalism and she was like,.well.i mean, we think critically about economic systems and if you do that then.... lol
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Oct 30, 2020 01:29
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I don’t have any philosophical training, just what I pick up through osmosis and massive bong rips. can I get a brief intro to “the subject” and “the object” ? if I had to guess I’d say the former relates to individual experience, groups, thought, ideas, and anything that’s broadly immaterial or metaphysical while the latter is poo poo that exits in reality and can be studied by science or reason or math? idk. I have no idea how to even begin orienting myself to the question.
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Oct 30, 2020 08:03
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Centrist Committee posted:I don’t have any philosophical training, just what I pick up through osmosis and massive bong rips. can I get a brief intro to “the subject” and “the object” just for clarification: you want the subject/object in general philosophy or is there some specific focus? because for general purposes, the "subject" is something that has in very generous contextual lines a sort of "self", a consciousness and/or has and is capable of interacting with other things outside itself - those are "objects". The huge difficulty lies in how relative those things are to one and another and how to figure out their context. For example, the object of study of psychology is the human mind, whereas the subject of study of psychology is the patient. Does that help? Of course, things get more complicated when we go deeper into some of the more direct topics of thread: history, sociology, political economy, etc which can lead to more confusion as many important works use those terms in a very mature context, which can feel hard to grasp in greater depth imo. Which is why this thread is here for
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Oct 30, 2020 17:56
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dead gay comedy forums posted:(just imagine Karl Marx walking around the cities of Dark Souls and you get the idea) very good post honestly i'm consistently surprised by how well Marxist thinkers are able to predict (aspects of) civilization's development. i'm reading Jalil Muntaqim's book We Are Our Own Liberators, and one passage really struck me: Jalil Muntaqim posted:As america weeps and laments its loss from 9/11, the public finds itself joining the torn ranks of those whose heartache beats opposing U.S. greed and international profiteering. The American public's acquiescence to U.S. international folly has caused them to feel the economic pains of those who live daily in poverty. Indeed, Americans should brace for years of economic uncertainty, where the American ideal of freedom and liberty will resemble the plight of those who live under right wing dictatorships the U.S. has supported. The tyranny suffered by others in the world as a result of US imperialism has come full circle to visit this country with the wrath of the U.S.' own mechanization. this was written around 2003. it seems particularly prescient now, as all-out government-run wealth expropriation is moving massive amounts of capital upwards and moving our economy towards something that looks more like Brazil.
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Oct 31, 2020 18:18
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e: eh, too many words
animist has issued a correction as of 19:53 on Oct 31, 2020 |
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Oct 31, 2020 19:39
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this might not be exactly the right place but: what the gently caress is "critical race theory"? I know its a rightwing boogeyman but I can at least identify what "postmodernism" or "identity politics" actually means
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Oct 31, 2020 22:04
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It's critical theory but about race, i think? I actually don't know what that is so i googled it Wikipedia posted:Critical race theory (CRT) is a theoretical framework in the social sciences that examines society and culture as they relate to categorizations of race, law, and power. It is loosely unified by two common themes. Firstly, CRT proposes that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, and in particular, that the law may play a role in this process. Secondly, CRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power, as well as pursuing a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly. It is based on critical theory, a social philosophy that argues that social problems are influenced and created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors. It began as a theoretical movement within American law schools in the mid- to late 1980s as a reworking of critical legal studies on race issues. Wikipedia posted:Maintaining that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation, critical theory was established as a school of thought primarily by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer. The latter sociologist described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them." Trump's surely too stupid to actually know what it is and is probably going off the name and what the psychos he has orbiting around say?
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Nov 1, 2020 02:35
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Trump's surely too stupid to actually know what it is and is probably going off the name and what the psychos he has orbiting around say? yeah no way he's familiar with social science. He probably heard it off Fox or something. It's a typical right-wing-media thing to pick up random academic poo poo and be like "look at this!! they want to kill all white business owners!!!!!" (The phrase "political correctness" actually started that way -- it was a joke among some leftist literati that got turned into a culture war thing iirc.)
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Nov 1, 2020 06:32
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animist posted:yeah no way he's familiar with social science. He probably heard it off Fox or something. It's a typical right-wing-media thing to pick up random academic poo poo and be like "look at this!! they want to kill all white business owners!!!!!" as it always was, as it always shall be... similar things are already happening to "tankie".
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Nov 1, 2020 07:10
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