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readingatwork posted:A big one though is that I'm not sure how stable Socialism/Comminism is over time. I worry that even if we implement a perfect version of Luxury Gay Communism that over time future generations become comfortable and unaware of the realities of class struggle. They'll de-radicalize and eventually liberal/wealthy factions will start gaining power again as people start carving up the welfare state for their own benefit one tiny piece at a time. The end result might not be capitalism necessarily but some form of class hierarchy would reform and the injustices we fought to unto will begin again. Of course, this is likely a problem in any society, not just Marxist ones, but I still think about it a lot. I'm a Marxist but have only read so much theory, so take this with a grain of salt, but as I understand it there are some elements of Marxist thought that I think are particularly relevant to this: The first is that the process from capitalism to communism through socialism resolves that sort of greed-first drive to start hoarding wealth or carving up parts of the state. Post-capital subjects shouldn't really have the sorts of goals that capital subjects do (eg. gently caress you got mine). We, as capital subjects, for the most part aren't wandering the countryside looking for manor lords to give farmed produce to, and I'd imagine in a post-capital world someone trying to hoard wealth would be seen as just as nutty: You want three houses? What are you going to do with three houses? You can't be in three places at once, why can't anyone stay there when you're not there etc. etc. This is Actual Communism, though, not socialism/"lower communism", which is the sort of transitional state where the means of production is controlled by the public or worker cooperatives, as opposed to "higher communism"'s communal ownership. Before resolution into higher communism we still have to deal with class antagonism as the state (the world, really) reorients away from capitalism, and it seems unlikely to me that you'd ever have a period therein where the class-conscious workers are able to forget about class conflict but still aren't able to make the transition. Which leads me in to the other idea of this all being part of a dialectical process: the contradictions of capitalism are resolved in socialism, and the contradictions of socialism are resolved in communism (or you might formulate it as the contradictions of capitalism are resolved in communism through socialism) -- but! -- that doesn't mean history is over and the ultimate apex of humanity has been reached. I mean, maybe it is, but it seems weird to me that we just happen to find ourselves at the penultimate step of human civilization a mere few thousand years from the start of recorded history. Instead, I (and I think the vast majority of Marxists) think new contradictions will arise and new ideas about how to structure society will arise to resolve those contradictions. None of it is ever "stable" because it's never an end state; it's all moving in a direction. Unfortunately as capital subjects I think it's incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to make anything better than a guess as to what those contradictions or resolutions might be. If pressed, I think I'd say that if the process from lopsided wealth distribution in pre-communist societies to post-scarcity communist societies resolved the problems of the distribution of material needs, then I'd bet the process from communism to post-communism resolves issues around identity, relationships, spirituality, that sort of stuff. Maybe we finally hash out the meaning of life while going from post-post-post-communist to post-post-post-post communist? Who knows!
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Nov 5, 2020 06:27
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Oh wow so I just get a free ride even if my art is singing "gently caress everyone, especially youuuu" to passersby while I play a rubber band guitar and make rude gestures, as long as I have like a Ted Talk about how I tune the rubber bands? In any socialist society, or any communist society that hasn't totally conquered scarcity, if no one likes what you're doing, sooner or later the community is going to come around in one way or another and tell you to knock it off because there's real work that needs to be done. Socialism doesn't imply an end to all forms of coercion, and you probably won't be allowed to just do your dumb bullshit all day because people will get pissed off because you're not helping anything, or making anyone's life better or more enjoyable. The difference between this and capitalism is that, one, in a socialist society you'll probably have much more leisure time to pursue your passion of being a weird rear end in a top hat with a rubber band guitar (if that's what you really want to do with your life), two, in a socialist society you'll get in trouble for not pulling your weight instead of getting in trouble for not making the boss sufficient profits, and three, the "trouble" you'll get into in a socialist society will be being forced to actually do something useful, whereas in a capitalist society the trouble you'll get into is starving to death a ditch.
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Nov 5, 2020 06:37
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The Oldest Man posted:Actually under capitalism it's pretty likely that some monied individuals will dial 911 and have their bought-and-paid for goon squad come and gently caress you up if you do a single thing they don't like. The economic asymmetry of the society allows the Haves to dictate everything to the Have Nots; they don't need to wait for loud artists to die. The social order created by capitalists carving divides in the working class in order to hamper challenges to their power has resulted in "musicians" being shuffled to the bottom of the social totem pole and as a result you were beaten to death by a drunken gang of your fellow workers one night while busking with your rubber band guitar. Whoops! BoldFrankensteinMir posted:This. Everybody wants to dump on Horatio Alger rags-to-riches thinking because it's unsustainable and self-destructive, which are totally valid points, but they fail to address the key benefit on the other side which is drat what a sexy premise!. Do whatever I want and get rich!?!? Yes please!!!! This is the sort of... I don't know... toxic memetic colonization capitalism does to its subjects. It's never "I want dedicate my life to doing this thing I love, and I don't want to worry about material needs or my or my family's health and safety". It's always "yeah yeah I want to be a singer or whatever and I want to GET RICH." To what end? To get more stuff you don't need? Better stuff? Social prestidge? After a point it's just about hoarding wealth. And that wealth doesn't come from nowhere, it's part and parcel of the entire system. One of the most important ideas in Marxist economic thought is that all this poo poo is inexorably linked -- if Murcielagos just spontaneously appeared every so often it'd be one thing, but that car you bought as part of your wealth hoard is built on a chain of labor that starts at horrifically exploited people mining ore and doesn't get much better for quite a while up the chain, with profits squeezed from labor every step of the way. Why? So a few thousand people can live in outrageous, decadent luxury at the immiseration of billions? Who except for the most broken sociopaths would ever want that? Why do we have to organize society in this way?
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Nov 5, 2020 07:00
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Okay a bunch of people are using similar arguments about art that has "value" vs art that doesn't, and I want to stop y'all for a moment and ask you, who gets to determine which art has value and which doesn't? By what rubric, and with what extent of authority? If you're gonna have laws in your society that hinge on this, you better get it down. And that is not historically an easy task. I assume you are angling to argue against communism as it appeared in the Soviet Union but that's not what we're talking about here. To answer your question, though: the people. The communities involved with the creation and appreciation of art. This is objectively better than what we have in currently-existing capitalism because the people who decide the value of art right now are not "the people", they are "the rich people", a very, very, very small minority.
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Nov 5, 2020 07:05
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I've already addressed that (twice), but to spell it out more clearly: those desires are generated by capitalism, and the project of overthrowing capitalism will necessarily include work to dismantle the general sentiment of maniacal greedy hoarding that capitalism upholds as its principal virtue (which is not anywhere near as universally felt as you want to paint it as, by the way)
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Nov 5, 2020 07:08
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I think at the small scale -- between people, ad-hoc groups and communities, etc -- markets as a useful technology will persist long after The Market is gone. A market is a tried and true distributed system for determining specific demand. That said, I really do agree with DrSunshine's outlay here and will take an extra step in saying that that's already how most, if not all, of the internal production and logistic structure of the major firms in the global economy works today. Every point of sale transaction of an iPhone or solar panel or Toyota Corolla or whatever bubbles back up (down?) through massive Just-in-Time manufacturing and distribution networks that produce exactly (or, at least, pretty close to) what's needed, when it's needed, and deliver it to where it's needed. They mesh with hundreds or thousands of other similar networks and thousands or tens of thousands of suppliers. It's important to mention, too, that large parts of this are not (and may never be) fully automated! A lot of this operates over human labor and works out perfectly fine, and by all accounts is a superior system. In fact, whenever anyone tries to import capitalist market principles into their business model it tends to fail spectacularly. The transition from a market-based economy to a need-based economy doesn't need to be that difficult or complicated. Most of the work is already done! You just lop off the part where people exchange money for goods and services and instead tie those interactions directly in to the supply chain. Maybe you mediate it with labor vouchers or item limits or something, which might be very necessary for difficult to produce, highly useful or desirable goods.
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Nov 5, 2020 18:29
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Personally, I think people don't need to have greedy desires "generated" by anything, it's the natural state of man, This was posted after I went to bed but I still want to address this because it's pretty important: this, as far as we're able to tell, just isn't true. Humans, as animals, are incredibly cooperative and (more importantly) altruistic. Material hoarding of wealth wasn't even possible until the neolithic revolutions of agriculture and animal husbandry, and primitive communities were (and still are, where they exist) totally communal. Everyone helps out, everyone is taken care of. We also see this very often in crises where society breaks down to a significant degree. People always expect Mad Max, but we end up getting -- for the most part -- people cooperating to help each other get through the tough times. Greed isn't some sort of intrinsic part of human nature. If anything, greed is antithetical to human nature, and has only been imposed on us through the material conditions we find ourselves in -- which is to say, the material lack that has existed since the dawn of agriculture and persists through capitalism. The evidence all suggests that if we remove that material lack one way or another, the "human nature" of greed turns out to not be so natural or core to ourselves as humans. Once again, capitalism has colonized our minds so thoroughly that it convinces us that the singular evil it imposes on every human interaction is actually a fundamental piece of what it means to be human. This is not the case.
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Nov 5, 2020 18:46
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no, to be clear, I am not blaming greed on capitalism, just material lack. I am, however, saying that capitalism leads us to believe that greed is a fundamental component of humanity, when we know this just isn't the case. Additionally, it's not just the lack of a punishment mechanism for hoarders that causes greed in modern capitalist societies, it's that the economic system is structured in such a way that hoarding wealth is far and away the optimal behavior.
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Nov 5, 2020 19:02
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It's important to make the distinction because if greed is intrinsic then the whole project's bust: we'll never achieve anything better than what we've got now because humans will inevitably reproduce societies in which greed can be expressed in the same way that they'll produce farms and permanent structures because the need for a constant food supply and protection from the elements are also human nature. If greed isn't part of human nature, if it's something that arises from material conditions -- even if those material conditions are tens of thousands of years old -- it means that it can be overcome by changing the material conditions. We've seen this is the case in the archeological record, and in societies where, by chance, the material conditions are such that they're still in a preagricultural state. Communism says you can get there by going through, so to speak: you can advance society to a point where we return to a communal structure where all material needs are met by collective action. Pentecoastal Elites fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 19:30
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:It almost seems like you're saying there's an immutable human nature underneath our social evolution that doesn't change and can always be reverted to? So what, the ultimate goal is to revert to Bonobo chimps? What stage of our evolution do you set as "the real normal Humans" and why? It really seems like anthropological cherry-picking to say "oh this is the real state of humans, the one that fits my political ideology the best'. It seems like you're trying to engage with what you think I mean instead of what I'm actually saying. Let's be clear here: you are the one saying that there's a human nature, and specifically one that involves "greed", based off your personal experience. I'm saying based on the prehistorical, anthropological, and direct firsthand reported experience of both contemporary preagricultural societies and people in times of crises and disaster, we cannot identify any sort of "human nature" that includes greed. But greed is clearly something that exists -- so, if it's not an intrinsic part of what it means to be human, where does it come from? Also, altruism and cooperation aren't like these totally mysterious things that arise specifically due to human society. Many vertebrates exhibit altruistic behavior. More so with mammals. Even more so with primates. Humans are especially cooperative and altruistic. That's one of the reason we're actually able to form societies in the first place. It's important to recognize this because arguing from the position that every individual human is some sort of horrific slavering beast kept nominally in check by a society that promotes cooperation and altruism (that was somehow constructed by said beasts) is arguing from a bad foundation. BoldFrankensteinMir posted:I do not, I have seen people horde massive piles of stuff and live in permanent fear of poverty despite their being extremely well-off and those concerns being completely nonsensical. I think greed persists no matter the material conditions of a person's life, because it's a simple animal response that exists inside their own head first and foremost, like the urge towards anxiety-driven binge-eating when you're not hungry. Ever left a dog alone with an open bag of food? It's in no way beneficial for them to gorge themselves until they throw up, there is no real scarcity in play, but they do it anyway on instinct. I think you're conflating mental illness with an idea of human nature here -- or rather, trying to explain bizarre behavior you've seen or experienced in your life. You're also attributing very disparate behaviors to "greed". You're not binge-eating because you're trying to sate some distantly-imagined starvation period (even if the very deep biological processes might be fueling the endorphins you get from doing so), you're doing it to try to assuage the anxiety you're feeling about something or other. You're doing it because it feels good and makes the anxiety less uncomfortable. You're not engaging the same deep processes when you're skimming your workers' paychecks so you can buy another sports car. The dog is eating because the food bag is open and it thinks kibble tastes really good, it doesn't have the fundamental brain structures to be greedy about food in the same way that a capitalist is greedy about wealth. World War Mammories posted:But it is beneficial: it is in response to the distinct possibility that there won't be any food later, so stock up now. It's just another material condition. That there's no material scarcity in play is part of the point - just like dogs, people aren't rational. Pentecoastal Elites fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 19:58
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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.Slanderer posted:why not instead say you'd like to create a society that discourages certain behaviors by design (and prohibits others by law)? Because it's important to understand what the scope of the project is and what can actually be done. If greed is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human, I'm never going to build a society that isn't subverted by greed. The best, and most stable, and most harmonious society would be one where our fundamental needs are aligned with the production of that society. The communist argument is that our actual needs (food, shelter, community, something to do, etc etc) align and are satisfied by communism. If the expression of greed is a fundamental need, that can't be true.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:09
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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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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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Slanderer posted:What, no lol. I'm rejecting the notion that humans are inherenty predisposed towards altruism and away from greed, because (a) it's extremely hard to distinguish learned from innate behaviors in people (and in observational studies of primates in the wild) and (b) greed is entirely subjective, more so than altruism in general is, so trying to pin it down as a thing you can specifically learn seems like a fool's errand. That's also not to say that humans are predispoed towards greed and away from altruism, because (a) greed is subjective again and (b) i dont really buy it. But mostly that it doesn't matter what behaviors are learned or innate with regard to socialism, because socialism can't (and doesn't) rely on everyone acting perfectly. Again, who or what are you arguing against? As far as I can tell no one has argued that socialism requires a population of fully altruistic do-gooders. I, personally, have argued that communism (as opposed to socialism) develops a society where the material basis for greed (or if it makes a difference to you, wealth-hoarding at the expense of others) is absent. BoldFrankensteinMir had said greed was "the natural state of man", which is something I roundly reject. I was trying to point out that - if anything - humans are predisposed to altruism and cooperation, rather than "greed". I think this is important because if humans some have innate drive towards greed (again, as defined as wealth-hoarding at the expense of others), I think communism is impossible in the long term because humans will inevitably reproduce societies where they can satisfy the need to express greed, in the same way that humans will inevitably reproduce societies with clothing and indoor living spaces so they can satisfy the need to protect themselves from the elements. Somfin posted:This study just shows that between the ages of 18 months and 24 months, people become drastically more pro-social. Yeah -- actual, honest-to-god brain structure keeps developing over the first few years of life. You don't pop out with a fully-formed adult brain, blank and awaiting input. It doesn't take a newborn six weeks to "figure out" how to discern their parents from other people, the parts of the brain that help with that process are under construction until the ability is there. Learning while we're very young is nearly as much a biological process as it is a cognitive process.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think that it is still in our collective interests to went to build a society that attempts to mitigate against greed, even if we grant that "innate greed" will make communism long-term unfeasible, as opposed to maintaining a society that... does NOT fight against greed. I want to make clear that in taking about greed and human nature I am arguing against this, posted upthread: BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Personally, I think people don't need to have greedy desires "generated" by anything, it's the natural state of man I think it's totally ridiculous and contrary to scientific observation to assume that greed is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. My argument is that although an individual can be greedy, or crude, or mean, or lazy, or whatever, greed as something that dominates human society arises from material conditions, not "human nature". My point is that if "being greedy" really is the natural state of man, striving to create a society that excludes greed is as pointless and impossible as trying to create a society that excludes interpersonal relationships or the use of language. I think it's clear that if we can point to any collection of behaviors and call it human nature, we won't find it contains "greed" as anything other than a transient mood or feeling like jealousy or pique or something. Cooperation, on the other hand, I think we would find. To bend this into a more explicitly Marxist idea, I'd argue that the contradictions of capitalism contain this relationship between greed and cooperation within the socialization of labor and the privatization of capital. Its resolution is within communism, and makes communism a more stable configuration of human society because it doesn't subject us to the same perverse and alien drive to hoard that capitalism does.
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Nov 6, 2020 04:54
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You've probably seen this already, but just in case: you might want to reach out to the US Federation of Worker Co-ops which seems to have resources to facilitate exactly this sort of thing. That said I don't know much about them outside of their existence, so YMMV.
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Nov 9, 2020 05:33
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Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and immediately died, and Marxist thought has not developed at all since them because its adherents are too busy turning off their brain and cheering for mass murder.
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Nov 11, 2020 20:03
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The reason capitalism will collapse is that it only has one thing it can ever do: extract profit. Eventually you hit a point where the wealth you're extracting from labor is so significant that workers can't afford to buy the things you need them to buy for the system to continue to function. I think it's pretty clear that since the 70s, we've entered the terminal crisis as capital has more or less run out of runway and the only thing it can do now is privatize what social-democratic niceties remain until the whole thing finally shuts down. Who knows how long this will take, though. A decade? Two hundred years? My bet is that as the cliff finally comes into view, governments will try to push for more regulation and welfare that will just barely keep everything afloat and significantly extend capitalism's zombie half-life. I think the further we get into that period the more vulnerable the system is to a serious left challenge, but if one doesn't arise I think it can get very, very bad and trundle on for a very, very long time.
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Nov 13, 2020 04:09
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Acerbatus posted:So what exactly is the difference between communism and anarchism if both seek to eliminate the idea of a ruling class and create a horizontal power structure with everyone being equal? Am I misunderstanding something? both anarchism and communism have the goals of eliminating class structure and create a horizontal power structure. Anarcho-communism is a political philosophy. If you're looking for differences you're going to have to look between variants of either. Being unable to imagine how it scales seems like a lack of imagination on your part, however 
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Nov 13, 2020 22:30
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Personally, I vote for the candidate who has the most leaderly skull shape
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Nov 14, 2020 04:35
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ronya posted:don't affiliate yourself to schools of thought and see your duty as a servant to uphold it. An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. Don't let the first persuasive pamphlet you happen to read determine the rest of your intellectual life; most issues in life are complex, and constructing sympathetic narratives around complex issues is just an exercise in rhetoric, not reflection This is one thing if we're having discussions about the contemporary literature or the evolution of contemporary thought on a particular subject or something. If we're academics talking about like, the history of structural Marxism specifically and you haven't read Althusser you're probably going to be at a disadvantage in the discussion, but it doesn't invalidate your thoughts on the topic. There's a tendency in academic circles, which it seems to me like you're reproducing here, to view criticism and commentary - or just later work in general - as some kind of strictly linear development, when really that couldn't be further from the truth. Moreover, if we're going to be Marxist about it, this is a hideous mangling of the dialectic: time and the process of motion (philosophical, economic, social, whatever) never stops flowing, but it doesn't mean there's a direct progression of ideas from A to B to C. It flows through. eg. Focault doesn't supplant Marx, if only because both Marx and Focault and their ideas were necessarily products of their time and space. Same with journals or arguments or whatever attempts at synthesis you care to check out. A broad understanding of the contemporary debate about a topic might be useful in some sense (mostly academically), but aside from that it's not very valuable. We're not on Leftism v.3.5; Marx is useful if he helps explain the world. Marx is especially useful if it reorients your relationship to the world in such a way that it informs praxis. Marx remains essential because his ideas as so fundamental and important to any sort of left thought, even "non-Marxist" left thought. Like, what we're doing here in this thread is mostly masturbatory, because it's fun to talk about this stuff, but it's not very useful beyond the broad strokes -- what is your relationship to your labor, the product of your labor, and the profit your boss takes. How does that inform our current situation? What can we do about it? What does a world look like where that is changed for the better? All stuff anyone can easily grasp in like a ten minute overview of Marx's writing. Who gives a poo poo about "the wider field"? Who gives a poo poo about knowing all of the literature? Who in the world could possibly, ever, give a single poo poo about academic debates so far removed from actual lived reality that they're only relevant or interesting to other academics? If "correct thought" and best practice lie somewhere deep inside thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of pages in university reading lists it's totally worthless. The ideas are useless for anything other than academic fart-huffing because they require so much investment and can't be communicated easily. What you're doing here is the grossest kind of simpering gatekeeping. None of this poo poo matters. Everything written in a book is already dead. These things only have any value in how they inform our thoughts and actions today, and if they can't be communicated in the first place they're as worthless and embarrassing as your r/atheist rear end attempts at brutal owns. ronya posted:An acolyte who barely knows their own literature, never mind the wider field, charging around waving a banner is just engaging in public foolishness. jfc
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Nov 16, 2020 21:41
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me, watching amazon warehouse workers unionize: NO!!!! Don't you know that Hyndman wrote that unions are a hindrance to that complete organisation of the proletariat which alone can obtain for the workers their proper control over their own labour?!?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! STOP!! e: wow what an awful snipe. devoid of context I want to make clear that Hyndman was a dumbass antisemitic little bitch
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Nov 16, 2020 21:50
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Defenestrategy posted:Lets say such a society has magically gotten rid of coercion in related to working conditions I want to reiterate here that socialism, communism, and -- to a certain extent -- anarchism don't abolish coercion. There are still jobs that need doing that really suck to do, be they dangerous, strenuous, or just extremely boring. Someone has to do them and it will suck. The idea is that the hardship (and you can include the coercion itself here) involved with doing this work is spread out and lessened to the extent that it's not that bad, or at least doesn't totally define your waking life, and everyone likewise gets a fair share in the product, or the enjoyment and a participation in a society where whatever work has to be done is actually being done. To port it back to your widgets thing, yes, at some point someone is going to say "listen I need you to make a few widgets and we need them by Friday". In eg. communism it's the workers making the decisions and the workers doing the work and that will result in the job being more-or-less as nice as it can be, with as many safety precautions taken as needed, with enough break time, etc. etc -- because the people doing the lovely job will be the ones calling the shots and setting the working conditions within the lovely job. Contrast with capitalism in which we need widgets and the boss goes to like a sweatshop in Malaysia and tells them they're going to make widgets for fourteen hours a day until they keel over dead. Even in a perfect, magical, techno-anarchic fully-automated gay luxury space future like The Culture or something, if there was a problem big enough that needed widgets at some point there'd need to be some level of coercion.
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Jan 20, 2021 06:05
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I think, too, in fully-realized communism the relationship any given person would have to the collective would be such that coercion would be unnecessary. You'd build you widgets (or work despite a pandemic) because you'd understand the necessity of it, and recognize your responsibility to the community. On the flipside, there wouldn't be unnecessary or useless dangerous or unpleasant work because society would only propagate that work which is useful to society: you're stocking the grocery store because people need to eat, not because Rodney McMullen needs a few more millions. Realistically, though, even in as fully realized communism as you'd like there'd almost certainly be coercion, somewhere, at some point. You'd probably get enough willing garbagemen as you'd need in a city, but that might be a tougher ask in a small town and you might need to "force" someone (even if it's only via social pressure or something) to spend a few tuesday mornings on the truck. also regarding the "reality disagreement": I'm willing to bet 99.9% of that stuff would dissipate in years, if not months, if the loudhorns that blast pure, uncut, fishscale white supremacist propaganda were turned off and the underpinning ideology of society isn't "gently caress you got mine". The only sort of isolation/re-eduction you'd ever need would only be for the people that have accrued power and wealth under capitalism: the capitalists -- and specifically the billionaires and their attendant politicians, because they're always going to fight to reproduce the conditions that give them their wealth and power. The vast, vast majority of even the most boat-dealership-owning MAGA chuds will lose their resolve and become more-or-less regular people in a shockingly short amount of time because these things that we think of as bedrock ideologies that define who a person is in their hearts and soul mostly aren't. Even the most devoted ride-or-die cult hardliners almost always drop their foundational beliefs if the cult breaks up or they leave the social environment of the cult. This cuts both ways, too. If any of us here woke up tomorrow with billions of dollars and wealthy friends we'd probably be huge pieces of poo poo within the calendar year. We, on the whole, just aren't that resilient.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:40
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DrSunshine posted:That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more? I haven't read it myself but IIRC something similar to this is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. PerniciousKnid posted:What's the difference between capitalism and older societal structures like ancient Egypt? Aside from things like, the Egyptian elites were not just metaphorically but literally deified. One of the biggest differences is that in a feudal system your labor was socially determined. You do what you to because of who you are in relation to the nobility. Born to serf parents? Barring getting into the clergy or marrying above your station, you were going to be a serf. You farmed a plot of land and the local nobility got whatever excess you produced beyond what you needed to keep yourself alive. Under capitalism, though, your labor is determined by the market. After the advent of liberalism you're no longer socially bound to a structure of nobility, you're an independent actor with rights that can enter into contracts with whomever. Unfortunately, if you don't have anything to sell aside from your labor your life isn't going to look much different (in broad strokes) from the serf, but your fate isn't nearly as determined. Capitalism does actually pull a great deal of people up out of the mean conditions of serfdom as it incentivizes new technologies and logistics structures and specific market relationships -- the problem, though, is the wheels fall off when you run out of resources to exploit.
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Sep 11, 2021 17:05
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