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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Okay so are you saying ALL greed is the result of social conditioning? Or just that our cultural prevalence of it is? I can see the latter but not the former. Because again, squirrels horde food, and they forget where like 4/5 of their food caches are every year which seems like a pretty clear-cut example of desire outstripping actual material need. Unless your argument is that the squirrel is justified in hedging his bets against disaster, in which case why not argue the billionaire humans are doing the same thing? I think Uncop made some great points about human nature. However, I would argue that humans are as greedy as they need to be. We are greedy for food, shelter, what have you. Our society, however, rewards the greediest among us and punishes those that are less greedy, and therefore the natural amount of greed we feel is blown out of proportion because we reward it. Instead, we need a society that rewards cooperation. BTW if I'm making some untrue statements about socialism, feel free to correct me. I have no formal training in it and am learning about it along with all of you.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:33
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I think you're right. Nothing about socialism or communism stops anyone from being an rear end in a top hat, but greed in the sense of hoarding wealth is something only possible through society and specific forms of society at that. Outside of that, it's impossible to meaningfully hoard anything that matters (food, water, shelter, etc) to a point where you having it would hurt someone else because they can't have it. Once we start the process of exchanging our labor for this or that it becomes possible to do so, which again isn't really a problem until it starts to hurt people. Capitalism, specifically, is a system in which greed is the singular virtue. If Jeff gets to the grocer's before you and takes all the eggs or whatever that makes him an rear end in a top hat because now you can't make an omelette. That's greedy, I guess, but not really in a society-meaningful way and is more just Jeff being an rear end in a top hat. If Jeff takes $180,000,000,000 from his employees' labor and we, as a society, point at that and say "yeah that's cool", we've got a big problem.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:40
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I take issue with the previously mentioned ability of capitalism to reward people for doing things they like. The reality is, any such "reward" is only as sustainable in so far as it increases the relative market share of one segment of productive forces. This is why under capitalism you can sometimes get rewarded to do what you love, and especially if what you love is pouring kerosene on perfectly edible oranges specifically so that hungry people can't eat them.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:48
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I'm not at all interested in what you've heard other people define greed as. I'm talking about greed in the sense of having a base need to hoard material wealth. What counts as "hoarding" is entirely subjective. It's not complicated!! What counts as being greedy depends on who you ask, their current wealth and a bunch of social factors. You can't eliminate greed because greed is redefined based on material circumstances. Is it greedy to buy 2 containers of clorox wipes instead of 1 if you think they'll be sold out next week and you'll run out? Ciprian Maricon posted:Come one man, I get where you're coming from but I'm just trying to point out to this dude that the biotruths idea that animals/people just love to hoard money/food isn't true and some studies where animals share food and people forego money for the benefit of others is a perfectly reasonable take on that. We can talk about the problems with the idea of "innate greed' and what we can really deduce from those studies another point in time. You're under the misconception that greed and altruism are mutually exclusive. They aren't, they're both social constructs (when applied to humans). People aren't robots, they're inherently contradictory
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Nov 5, 2020 20:50
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Okay so are you saying ALL greed is the result of social conditioning? Or just that our cultural prevalence of it is? I can see the latter but not the former. Because again, squirrels horde food, and they forget where like 4/5 of their food caches are every year which seems like a pretty clear-cut example of desire outstripping actual material need. Unless your argument is that the squirrel is justified in hedging his bets against disaster, in which case why not argue the billionaire humans are doing the same thing? A squirrel does that because it is stupid and has evolved an inefficient instinct to keep itself alive. But humans are not squirrels, our responses are heavily dependent on how and where we live, and how and where we grew up in our formative years, and the other people we spend time around. The squirrel is neither justified nor unjustified, the squirrel doesn't have a concept of justification, it just does things. Humans can have the ability to make judgements and what judgements they make depends on how they interpret the world around them. Our society depends on people, for the most part, making similar judgements about the world around them so that we can all live in some sort of consensus reality. The goal of would be social revolutionaries therefore seems like trying to figure out what concept of reality we all want to share, because yes the ones we have at the moment are both fragmented and harmful to us and others. Humans may have a nature, as a squirrel does, but it is quite hard to figure out what it is because humans, unlike squirrels, are intelligent and highly malleable in how we act, much of how we act is in response to social conditioning which we learn over time, we aren't born with it.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:53
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now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 5, 2020 20:54
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Slanderer posted:What counts as "hoarding" is entirely subjective. It's not complicated!! What counts as being greedy depends on who you ask, their current wealth and a bunch of social factors. You can't eliminate greed because greed is redefined based on material circumstances. The point isn't that a socialist economy will define and ban hoarding as a universal concept, it's that the reward incentive structure to hoard capital wealth that exists in capitalism won't. Socialist economies will still have people trying to collect all the bottlecaps, keep more food than they 'need,' and so on. What a socialist economy makes extremely difficult is the snowball effect where hoarding control of factories and data centers and so on provides an unbounded, compounding ability to dictate terms to everyone else and thus incentivizes that specific type of capital hoarding.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:55
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Slanderer posted:now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens are you ok?
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Nov 5, 2020 20:56
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Slanderer posted:What counts as "hoarding" is entirely subjective. It's not complicated!! What counts as being greedy depends on who you ask, their current wealth and a bunch of social factors. You can't eliminate greed because greed is redefined based on material circumstances. Is it greedy to buy 2 containers of clorox wipes instead of 1 if you think they'll be sold out next week and you'll run out? Slanderer posted:now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens Ah. That's why you're in the thread.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:01
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The Oldest Man posted:The point isn't that a socialist economy will define and ban hoarding as a universal concept, it's that the reward incentive structure to hoard capital wealth that exists in capitalism won't. Socialist economies will still have people trying to collect all the bottlecaps, keep more food than they 'need,' and so on. What a socialist economy makes extremely difficult is the snowball effect where hoarding control of factories and data centers and so on provides an unbounded, compounding ability to dictate terms to everyone else and thus incentivizes that specific type of capital hoarding. I agree with this, but it wasn't what other people were arguing for. A socialist economy should be designed to discourage the personal accumulation of wealth and outright prevent it past some limits. The inherent greed of man (or lack thereof) isn't really applicable. "But if people are inherently greedy, they won't consent to it!" you might say. But at the same time, if people are instead currently socially conditioned to be greedy, then they also won't consent to it. The only way to find out is to actually try it in practice and see what happens, instead of building a theoretical framework that is incapable of explaining why a relatively wealthy person might steal a candy bar from the checkout aisle as anything besides mental illness or inherent evil
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Nov 5, 2020 21:04
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Slanderer posted:now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens Pentecoastal Elites posted:
If we're going to allow a discourse of "a socialist country did murder, therefore socialism is murder" in this thread then I'm just going to reply to every one of these posts with the historical record of how the US sponsored or directly conducted a genocide on behalf of capital interests since as we all know and agree, if your nation-state nominally subscribes to a mode of economic organization and does bad things, that mode of economic organization is bad.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:05
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OwlFancier posted:are you ok? Pentecoastal Elites posted:Ah. That's why you're in the thread. Comedy forum.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:05
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The Oldest Man posted:The point isn't that a socialist economy will define and ban hoarding as a universal concept, it's that the reward incentive structure to hoard capital wealth that exists in capitalism won't. Socialist economies will still have people trying to collect all the bottlecaps, keep more food than they 'need,' and so on. What a socialist economy makes extremely difficult is the snowball effect where hoarding control of factories and data centers and so on provides an unbounded, compounding ability to dictate terms to everyone else and thus incentivizes that specific type of capital hoarding. Ohhh okay, that explains a lot. There's a scale of social degradation to actions, and the higher up misdeeds are the ones you're really trying to address, not the piddly stuff. It's top-down reconfiguration that removes the cascade effect that leads to the extremely egregious examples, not micromanagement of day-to-day examples. That figures- a lot of the pro-capitalist arguments out there do a very good job of making people think their personal finances and the finances of multi-billionaires work exactly the same when that is not at all true, and a lot of the anti-socialist arguments strive to concentrate on what's gonna happen to an individual's right to own 2 screwdrivers when one would certainly be enough, comrade! It's a stratification issue (but then what isn't?) So if my own personal rinky-dink abuses of capitalism aren't really what we're out to defeat, what can I do to move us towards these transformative overarching goals? If all we're changing is stuff at the top, I don't see how I can have any effect on it (but I'd love to be proven wrong!)
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Nov 5, 2020 21:07
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Its always seemed very telling to me that most of the arguments people make against socialism effectively boil down to either A) what if the majority of people are bad actors and work in concert to destroy society or B) what if socialism can't work!
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Nov 5, 2020 21:12
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Ohhh okay, that explains a lot. There's a scale of social degradation to actions, and the higher up misdeeds are the ones you're really trying to address, not the piddly stuff. It's top-down reconfiguration that removes the cascade effect that leads to the extremely egregious examples, not micromanagement of day-to-day examples. That figures- a lot of the pro-capitalist arguments out there do a very good job of making people think their personal finances and the finances of multi-billionaires work exactly the same when that is not at all true, and a lot of the anti-socialist arguments strive to concentrate on what's gonna happen to an individual's right to own 2 screwdrivers when one would certainly be enough, comrade! It's a stratification issue (but then what isn't?) One thing people can meaningfully do right now is democratize the workplace and ownership of community resources through co-operative models and also if you are someone who makes investments make them in the solidarity economy.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:13
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Crumbskull posted:Its always seemed very telling to me that most of the arguments people make against socialism effectively boil down to either A) what if the majority of people are bad actors and work in concert to destroy society or B) what if socialism can't work! I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of bad actors, and most of the arguments made (at least ones made in some semblance of good faith) don't necessitate everyone to be a bad actor, but acknowledge that some people inevitably will be. After all, if a precondition of socialism is "everyone becomes magically altruistic and no longer cares about wealth", we can skip all the messy economic changes, since no one will even try to accumulate capital in the first place!
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Nov 5, 2020 21:16
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:So if my own personal rinky-dink abuses of capitalism aren't really what we're out to defeat, what can I do to move us towards these transformative overarching goals? If all we're changing is stuff at the top, I don't see how I can have any effect on it (but I'd love to be proven wrong!) You're not a capitalist unless you own things for a living. I'll say that again: if you do labor either directly for others (via painting houses, busking, shoeing horses, sucking dicks, or designing websites), or you draw a wage from somewhere, you're not a capitalist. No matter how much money you have, if you are not capable of supporting and growing your livelihood without your own labor, you are not a capitalist because you are not living off of the value stolen via the capital wealth siphon. And as such, you are not really able to benefit from the run-away snowball effect of capital accumulation. People aspire to this via investment, savings, 401k, buying real estate, etc. but only a very tiny fraction of the population actually achieves a capital runaway where their wealth grows without limit without their own labor. Even if you believe you can retire and live a lavish lifestyle on your investment savings and returns, if there's a "planning threshold" where those savings eventually give out, you're not a capitalist and economically you are closer and have more common interests with the guy in the gutter than you are to Jeff Bezos. Everyone else is a member of the lower class and is just bribed (with a large salary and some thin promise of protection from deprivation) and/or propagandized (via ethno-nationalism most typically) to sympathize more with capital interests than with others around them and their various plights. As far as what you can do, check out the mutual aid and organizing thread at the top of this very forum. Solidarity starts at arm's length.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:17
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enki42 posted:I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of bad actors, and most of the arguments made (at least ones made in some semblance of good faith) don't necessitate everyone to be a bad actor, but acknowledge that some people inevitably will be. After all, if a precondition of socialism is "everyone becomes magically altruistic and no longer cares about wealth", we can skip all the messy economic changes, since no one will even try to accumulate capital in the first place! It's similarly easy to solve the problem of prison abolition if you ignore rapists, or the problem of performing essential but awful jobs under socialism if you say "oh we'll just automate anything people dont like doing" (regardless of whether or not it is feasible or wasteful to do so in a particular case)
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Nov 5, 2020 21:24
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Part 1 (skip part 1 if you don't like navel-gazing): Socialism Is Not When the Government Runs All the Factories Can you clarify - are you primarily referring to Economic Liberalism as opposed to the broader concept of political/moral Liberalism? Regarding the latter, I would think that certain concepts from Liberalism are possibly shared with socialism? E.g. equality, importance of social contract/consent to be governed... Whereas Economic Liberalism and Socialism are more diametrically opposed? I think I often don't appreciate how much Liberalism and Economic Liberalism get used interchangeably on this forum, and that a criticism of the latter is not necessarily applicable to the whole of the latter. Cpt_Obvious posted:Reason is the yardstick by which Liberalism measures the world because a yardstick must be impartial. You can't use a measuring stick if it keeps changing, so you try to explain everything assuming that reason remains impartial. This is called Rationalism, and this is where Liberalism fails. The problem is, humans are not only rational. They are also emotional, delusional, what have you. The greatest proof that we are not all logic beep-borp computers is that we do not all agree on anything. Not even pizza toppings, and especially not our president (Seriously, you cannot explain Trump as a product of rational choices because even racism is irrational). I have a hard time following this, specifically as it relates to reason/logic and Rationalism. I think what you're saying is that Economic Liberalism assumes that individuals act rationally in their own self interest, and that this is a very poor way to analyze behavior at a individual let alone societal scale. Is that correct? If so, agreed. What I'm a bit worried about is that I think this is a more nuanced and precise argument than saying that "Socialism discards with the metric of reason". If socialism discards with the metric of reason, then there is no ability to analyze societal phenomena under a materialist lens; economic materialism still requires adherence to reason/logic in order to analyze how/why material conditions lead to societal and individual behaviors, no? I.e. rationalism in a more epistemological sense, as opposed to political or economic. --- I'm curious how Marxist thought has grappled with the rise of the military-industrial complex and what that means for revolution of the working class and ability for capitalism to yield to socialism. With technology advancing so significantly in terms of weapons and surveillance, and becoming so concentrated in the hands of the capitalist ruling class, it seems that the only way to move to socialism let alone communism would necessarily have to be very slow and incremental, because workers would be so outgunned in a violent revolt. But I also sense that there is very little patience for incrementalism on the left (which I understand and feel myself). Are these reconcilable? Is it less that the left is averse to incremental progress and more that there isn't trust that the Democratic party of 2020 is actually interested in achieving that progress at all? Thanks for this thread btw, good stuff!
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Nov 5, 2020 21:29
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Slanderer posted:You're under the misconception that greed and altruism are mutually exclusive. They aren't, they're both social constructs (when applied to humans). People aren't robots, they're inherently contradictory You made your point clear that you dislike the simplification I used. Cool noted. I do not think greed or altruism are mutually exclusive or that people are robots. Anything else you wanna be pedantic about?
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Nov 5, 2020 21:30
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Slanderer posted:It's similarly easy to solve the problem of prison abolition if you ignore rapists Prisons protect women from rapists about as well as capitalism protects people from economic bad actors, yes.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:30
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:I'm curious how Marxist thought has grappled with the rise of the military-industrial complex and what that means for revolution of the working class and ability for capitalism to yield to socialism. With technology advancing so significantly in terms of weapons and surveillance, and becoming so concentrated in the hands of the capitalist ruling class, it seems that the only way to move to socialism let alone communism would necessarily have to be very slow and incremental, because workers would be so outgunned in a violent revolt. Technically if everything is automated and the owners of the machines kill all the workers rather than surrendering control of the machines because their labour and consumption is no longer required, then that has also resolved the bourgeois/proletarian conflict but from the other direction 
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Nov 5, 2020 21:33
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The Oldest Man posted:Prisons protect women from rapists about as well as capitalism protects people from economic bad actors, yes. Cool, then come up with a better solution in your policy proposal instead of treating even the most anodyne critiques of it as bad faith attacks. Ciprian Maricon posted:You made your point clear that you dislike the simplification I used. Cool noted. I do not think greed or altruism are mutually exclusive or that people are robots. Anything else you wanna be pedantic about? I would also like to note for the record that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the monster.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:38
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There is a whole thread on police abolitionism if you are interested in which I wrote far too many words.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:39
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Slanderer posted:Cool, then come up with a better solution in your policy proposal instead of treating even the most anodyne critiques of it as bad faith attacks. Adam Frankenstein is a perfectly acceptable name for the monster 
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Nov 5, 2020 21:39
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Ruzihm posted:Adam Frankenstein is a perfectly acceptable name for the monster I'm willing to concede this point to you.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:40
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The Oldest Man posted:You're not a capitalist unless you own things for a living. I'll say that again: if you do labor either directly for others (via painting houses, busking, shoeing horses, sucking dicks, or designing websites), or you draw a wage from somewhere, you're not a capitalist. No matter how much money you have, if you are not capable of supporting and growing your livelihood without your own labor, you are not a capitalist because you are not living off of the value stolen via the capital wealth siphon. And as such, you are not really able to benefit from the run-away snowball effect of capital accumulation. The worker and capitalist are not people, they are social roles, and the same person can occupy both. The people who meaningfully occupy both roles at the same time constitute a capitalist middle class that do make a meaningful amount of money off of other people's labor even if there's no positive feedback loop over the accumulation. Those bribes you mention aren't just some form of extra-economic "corruption", they're a dividend on capital. The capitalist middle class literally lives on those dividends just as it lives on the compensation for its own labor, so telling it to refuse those dividends and wholeheartedly join the workers is naive at best, and doesn't work in any case. This middle class's interests are threatened by both the workers and the capitalists depending on their demands against the other, so it has an interest in doing two things: it tries to conciliate between the two sides in order to produce a peace that benefits them, and it shamelessly sucks up to the more powerful side, which in capitalist society are the capitalists. Mao basically had it right when he said what the only way to consistently win over the middle classes to the workers' side is to defeat and humiliate the enemy so badly that the middle classes totally lose faith in its ability to keep ruling.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:42
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Slanderer posted:I would also like to note for the record that Frankenstein was the name of the doctor, not the monster. This post made me lol because referring to the monster as Frankenstein is good praxis even if incorrect.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:44
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I would tend to agree also that the middle class is real and is kind of opposed to the working class material interest wise. I would essentially view it as a bet. As lower/working class, the bet I am offered is "work your whole life and you will almost certainly get nowhere, if you're lucky you might still have a state pension for a few years before you die" and I rightly think that is a loving terrible bet. But if I was middle class, the bet becomes "work for a few decades and you might be able to retire early with a nice house and live for quite a while in a life of luxury" which is actually a pretty good bet, certainly a lot better than what I am being offered, so it is irrational for people to accept that? I don't think so. Yes in theory we could all work together and ensure nobody has to risk destitution and we could all live happier, but that's a big "in theory" whereas the retirement package is on offer now to the middle class and they probably know a lot of people who have made out pretty well with it. I don't think it's surprising they support the system. I don't think it's false consciousness or anything, I think they've just picked what reasonably seems like a good bet for them.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:48
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Ciprian Maricon posted:This post made me lol because referring to the monster as Frankenstein is good praxis even if incorrect. Frankenstein is the monster, his creation is his victim, yeah.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:53
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enki42 posted:I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of bad actors, and most of the arguments made (at least ones made in some semblance of good faith) don't necessitate everyone to be a bad actor, but acknowledge that some people inevitably will be. After all, if a precondition of socialism is "everyone becomes magically altruistic and no longer cares about wealth", we can skip all the messy economic changes, since no one will even try to accumulate capital in the first place! It is, almost as a rule, used in an incredibly bird brained and facile way because it is a tremendously easy 'concern' to have without knowing a single thing about what is being discussed irrespective of which system of political economy is being proposed. 'What if someone really evil subverts the system?' is a problem that can be asked about literally any topic and having it be your opening salvo suggests that you don't actually know very much about the specifics of what you are interrogating. I do not believe the criticism is made in bad faith, I believe it is made out of convenience and ignorance and I further believe that the people asking these questions should take it upon themselves to do even the most cursory amount of research to learn about common proposals for actually implementing a given system of political economy before reflexively deciding that 'maybe this nearly two century old political philosophy whose entire existence has been defined by violent resistance and oppression never considered that there might be bad actors'. Its also a pretty dirty rhetorical trick in my opinion because the question is predicated on such a profound lack of shared understanding of what is being discussed that it becomes really easy to keep circularly asking it while the respondent has to slowly explain the entire system/philosophy of political economy to you. Just my two cents, I don't think it is a fruitful starting point for a discussion/critique. EDIT: Oh but my answer to 'what if someone is simply incapable of being in society without attempting to take more than they need, to the detriment of their community, and then leverage that taking into having the power to oppress and control the community is and is successful enough at this that it poses a meaningful existential threat to the community' is, personally, I would kill them. Crumbskull fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 22:01
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Can you clarify - are you primarily referring to Economic Liberalism as opposed to the broader concept of political/moral Liberalism? Regarding the latter, I would think that certain concepts from Liberalism are possibly shared with socialism? E.g. equality, importance of social contract/consent to be governed... Whereas Economic Liberalism and Socialism are more diametrically opposed? Because Socialist theory uses materialism as a measuring stick, it doesn't consider equality and social contracts to be "real" outside of the way that people relate to each other. For example, let's use the Constitution as our social contract. A bunch of words written by dead rich white guys 300 years has no power over anyone. It is the people who enforce the social contract that empower it. If they decide to ignore the freedom of speech, they can do a McCarthyism. If they want to treat all Black people as slaves, they can ignore the all-of-it. Because the words aren't real, the actions of the people are, and it is the relationship between those people that transforms the social contract from a theoretical construct into a tangible, material creation. And all of a sudden you have people using the Constitution to justify things which it explicitly outlaws, just like the bible is used to justify literally everything. I don't know what you mean by "Economic Liberalism", but I assume it's the idea that freedom justifies capitalism? Sharks Eat Bear posted:What I'm a bit worried about is that I think this is a more nuanced and precise argument than saying that "Socialism discards with the metric of reason". If socialism discards with the metric of reason, then there is no ability to analyze societal phenomena under a materialist lens; economic materialism still requires adherence to reason/logic in order to analyze how/why material conditions lead to societal and individual behaviors, no? I.e. rationalism in a more epistemological sense, as opposed to political or economic. When I say "socialism discards the metric of reason" I don't mean that we stop using reason to analyze things, I mean that we analyze things in the real world, not as theoretical constructs. So, if you say that capitalism rationally means theoretical freedom for everyone, a Marxist points to slavery and coercive nature of the wage-labor relationship. How can you be free if you'll die if you ever stop working? OwlFancier posted:Technically if everything is automated and the owners of the machines kill all the workers rather than surrendering control of the machines because their labour and consumption is no longer required, then that has also resolved the bourgeois/proletarian conflict but from the other direction Stop saying the things I try not to think!
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Nov 5, 2020 22:03
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OwlFancier posted:Technically if everything is automated and the owners of the machines kill all the workers rather than surrendering control of the machines because their labour and consumption is no longer required, then that has also resolved the bourgeois/proletarian conflict but from the other direction This is actually the "victory" ending of "To Build a Better Mousetrap", a game about class conflict: https://www.molleindustria.org/to-build-a-better-mousetrap/
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Nov 5, 2020 22:08
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uncop posted:The capitalist middle class literally lives on those dividends just as it lives on the compensation for its own labor, so telling it to refuse those dividends and wholeheartedly join the workers is naive at best, and doesn't work in any case. The capitalist middle class is not a fixed quantity, either in size/importance or stability. In some times and places, the material reality is that the capital dividend (or bribe from the rulers of the social order, however doctrinaire you want to be about framing it) is so large and so distributed that the extracted class simply does not have the numbers or the material ability to affect change. In others, the opposite is true. Mao's take was right for China in the early 20th century; it is not universally right. quote:Yes in theory we could all work together and ensure nobody has to risk destitution and we could all live happier, but that's a big "in theory" whereas the retirement package is on offer now to the middle class and they probably know a lot of people who have made out pretty well with it. I don't think it's surprising they support the system. I don't think it's false consciousness or anything, I think they've just picked what reasonably seems like a good bet for them. This is closer to where I sit on this issue. It's obvious that an appeal to the better angels of anyone's nature is going to fail when their material reality tells them the opposite. However, material interest isn't the whole story on this issue because propaganda has gotten so good that there are large swathes of modern society for whom the bribe/dividend is flatly a lie, but one that they believe in because capital and the state have mythologized it for them. In this case, the appeal is not to their better natures but to re-evaluate their material reality. That appeal becomes more and more powerful the larger and louder the lie has to be in order for them to ignore the collapse of their conditions.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:15
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Hey Marx said it was unstable and he was right, he just didn't imagine that it could be unstable in both directions It's still fully automated communism, just on a rather smaller scale than we hoped. The Oldest Man posted:This is closer to where I sit on this issue. It's obvious that an appeal to the better angels of anyone's nature is going to fail when their material reality tells them the opposite. However, material interest isn't the whole story on this issue because propaganda has gotten so good that there are large swathes of modern society for whom the bribe/dividend is flatly a lie, but one that they believe in because capital and the state have mythologized it for them. In this case, the appeal is not to their better natures but to re-evaluate their material reality. That appeal becomes more and more powerful the larger and louder the lie has to be in order for them to ignore the collapse of their conditions. This is true, a lot of people believe their odds are better than they are, and yes as how rigged it is becomes more obvious it does (we hope) prompt a re-evaluation, though it can also just lead people to become more and more unhinged.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:17
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OwlFancier posted:Hey Marx said it was unstable and he was right, he just didn't imagine that it could be unstable in both directions 
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Nov 5, 2020 22:19
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OwlFancier posted:This is true, a lot of people believe their odds are better than they are, and yes as how rigged it is becomes more obvious it does (we hope) prompt a re-evaluation, though it can also just lead people to become more and more unhinged. Fascism is also a solution to collapsing material conditions! For a few people, anyway.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:21
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Slanderer posted:Cool, then come up with a better solution in your policy proposal instead of treating even the most anodyne critiques of it as bad faith attacks. This is a bad faith attack, in both venues. It's simply diverting attention from real ongoing harms that have solutions toward harms that exist currently and may well still exist in the future in either case. It's also a pretty good example of middle class and white perfectionism, on both issues. "I won't buy into your project that <prevents your family's being made homeless/prevents your incarceration for life for use as slave labor/prevents your children starving> because <insert issue unsolved in current system that I find more important to solve than your issues>." The equivalent line of attack in the debate over slavery in the antebellum United States was that there was just no feasible way to guarantee freed slaves would find productive employment rather than turning to crime and vice. If that sounds like an absurd rationale to keep people in bondage in retrospect now, so too will arguments that some people will act in bad faith in a socialist economy. They will; so what? But ultimately the goal of socialists and abolitionists both is not to convince everyone in the middle class and everyone who is white that their issues will be solved by the change, it's to create the conditions under which the obstructionists and the wreckers do not have enough material power to stop the change from occurring. Co-opting some of the white and middle class to those respective causes can be a part of that strategy, but it's not absolutely necessary and co-opting the whole of those groups is a laughable objective since many of them have the totality of their material interests vested in the status quo.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:39
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Slanderer posted:Cool, then come up with a better solution in your policy proposal instead of treating even the most anodyne critiques of it as bad faith attacks. Fewer armed police, more therapists. Fewer prisons, more treatment centers. Cure the disease, not the symptom.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:42
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OwlFancier posted:This is true, a lot of people believe their odds are better than they are, and yes as how rigged it is becomes more obvious it does (we hope) prompt a re-evaluation, though it can also just lead people to become more and more unhinged. I think the Posadist wildcard variable in play that's genuinely novel is that capital is going to make the planet more and more uninhabitable over time and if you make common cause with that agenda or fool yourself into thinking that liberalism can (or would even want) to reign that in enough stave off disaster, you're more or less condemning yourself to a collapse in conditions at best and signing your own death warrant at worst. Hell, I'm no different than any other human being in my material self-interest. I wouldn't have the leanings I do if I wasn't so sure the leopards were going to eat my face too.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:50
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