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A lot of these posts seem to hint at, or address, or be concerned about the existence of a market or money-based economy under socialism. For example, the concern about janitors vs. doctors under a socialist economy was concerned about potential inequalities and differences in pay, and that in order to satisfy certain labor market conditions, certain jobs would have to accept differential pay scales. But what if there could be a way to completely do away with pricing and a money market system? But without the inefficiencies of some centralized Gosplan that might mess up and get completely wrong signals about what every part of the economy needs? If you think about it, the money signal is not very good. A dollar doesn't tell you where something needs to go, or how much of a thing is needed. It's just there as a blank - a way to represent exchange value for different commodities. If we could get by on barter it would be more efficient to just exchange needed goods directly. What if we could do that? I think we have the solution at hand right now -- the communication protocol. A socialist economy that depends heavily on automation with an already-existing industrial internet of things could develop an interoperability protocol that links together "point of sale", purchase request systems, shipping trackers, and other logistics, such that whenever an item was "needed" at the end-point of a user, it could cascade a set of orders and commands that would trickle up the chain of production all the way to the raw material producers. Currently we have a whole myriad of separate systems for these logistics, which are all tied together with companies trying to maximize their dollars going in. With an "Industrial Interoperability Protocol" a socialist economy could do away with trying to divine supply and demand needs using market signals and operate directly on the level of raw inputs and outputs.
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Nov 5, 2020 16:51
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OwlFancier posted:I would prefer a decentralized system though. Efficiency be damned, the important thing is people's welfare, capitalism is extremely good at maximising production, the problem is that it it is not good at deciding what should be produced or how it should be produced so that both the end product and the mode of production meets people's needs. It produces poo poo that breaks because that facilitates more production, more purchasing, more economic activity and economic activity is how the people at the top siphon off their profits. It keeps people working long hours and then sells them solutions to their lack of time, because the alternative of people solving their own problems does not enrich the people at the top. Centralization I think leads to that sort of thinking, you put some people in charge of making country-wide decisions about production and relegate others to being told what to do and that's a recipe for recreating the system we have. This is where I think that basing a socialist economic system on extensive automation and facilitated with a digital protocol would excel, in fact! I could see smart contracts being used as a decentralized way to ensure that orders for goods and services are routed and executed as needed. So, for example, if I have a state-owned store and several people come in to buy tomatoes and mason jars because they all read an article and are now into a fad of home-preserving your own basil tomato sauce, every time they walk out of the store with a bag of tomatoes and a mason jar, I would ring them up at the counter by scanning the UPC codes on all of the items. Every time I do so, the POS device at the checkout counter talks to the shipment supplier's computer and says that state-owned store ABC needs X units of tomatoes and Y units of mason jars, with a digital signature that stamps that this unique store ABC made this unique order at this unique time. Then the supplier bundles together the accumulated requests and sends them on their way. When I receive these shipments from the truck, the system closes the order by uniting the unique shipment with the uniquely stamped request, thereby fulfilling the smart contract. The supplier would have their own system running on the same protocol and it would talk to the computers for their suppliers as well, all the way down the chain.
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Nov 5, 2020 18:08
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Basically, imagine if we took all the big data that Google and Amazon have invented to drive profit, and instead refitted them for efficiency? A bit deeper than that. Google et al's data harvesting runs at a higher level than what I'm proposing. They harvest and monetize user behavior, like click-throughs for ads, and sell this data to advertisers via behavioral prediction markets. What I'm talking about isn't necessarily related to predicting the behavior of consumers in any way, but a protocol to ensure that goods are manufactured and delivered to where they need to go.  It'd live, I think, somewhere in the 6th or 7th layer of the OSI model. The protocol would be a kind of cryptographic handshake between two endpoints that ensures that specific demand and supply signals are paired up and executed in every instance. So you could actually ensure, if you wanted or bothered to investigate the contents of the "industrial packet", that the soda bottle you get from the store is actually, literally linked to a particular soda bottle that was made at a factory at some point in time. I see it as a kind of TCP/IP for industrial-scale production, where at some point in the chain, the act of purchasing a soda bottle links directly to the signal that makes a robot arm grab an item off of a conveyor belt. It's not a "big data" solution, but rather an "infrastructure solution", which takes the job of purchasing, requisitioning, or planning out of human hands and puts it into the hands of automated signals. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 18:25
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The Oldest Man posted:E: like we're talking a lot about Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and vanguard revolutionary thought here but a) that's not the only philosophy of advancement toward socialism and b) participation in bourgeoise liberal democracy has put explicitly Marxist socialist regimes in power more than once. A lot of the anti-liberalism in ML writing is real world and hard learned lessons from dealing with liberal wreckers who talk a good game and then pipe-wrench the revolution as soon as they're in a position to benefit from that. Wait, I am interested in this. Which ones?
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Nov 6, 2020 17:12
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vyelkin posted:Two that come to mind immediately are Salvador Allende in Chile and Communists' repeated victories in the Indian state of Kerala. gradenko_2000 posted:Unless I'm mistaken the most obvious example would be the Bolsheviks participating in the Provisional Government. As Lenin explained in "An Infantile Disease", even if you don't set out to actually win any legalistic victories via your participation in bourgeois democracy, at the very minimum, their sandbagging of the efforts of the communists will serve as an example to the people that the bourgeois democracy needs to be overthrown, because LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING, THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK. Ahh, right. I just finished reading Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, and was wondering what folks thought about the plan that he sets out? The first thing that sort of struck to me is that it seems like while it'd work for an industrialized economy in the late 19th century or early 20th when it was written, with a modern economy that relies on global logistics to get certain rare earth metals and other goods essential for various advanced and critical technologies, a system of mutual aid based on local production of all goods might not be feasible. For example, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries and solar power plants require certain elements like platinum alloys, neodymium rare earth magnets, lithium and so on, the deposits of which are located only in very specific places - mostly in China, or Africa. While it was feasible for a country that only needed coal, iron, leather, agricultural products, and so on, to have a kind of anarchist autarky like Kropotkin describes, I am skeptical if this would be possible in the modern day without some kind of global uprising.
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Nov 6, 2020 17:55
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dex_sda posted:This is one of the chief predictions of Marx: the rate of profit, defined as profits per investment capital, has a tendency to fall long-term and it is pretty verifiably looking good when you check historical data. Where would someone find this?
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Nov 6, 2020 22:17
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Trollipop posted:I don't know if this is the right thread for this, but does anyone have any good resources on starting a worker owned co op? And can a worker owned co op be considered a non profit business? I've been mulling over some things, and I see a good economic opportunity where I am to put something like this into practice if I weren't just one person with an idea. You might want to ask about this in Business, Finance, and Careers, they have threads on management and running nonprofits, and people with business and leadership experience. Making your own business, even a nonprofit, is a complicated undertaking! Great idea, though, and best of luck! Hope it's a success!!
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Nov 9, 2020 02:58
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Seeing the latest rise in COVID cases makes me wonder - how would a decentralized anarchist society solve something like this, an emergency which requires immediate, directed, centralized coordination at the national scale in order to solve?
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Nov 12, 2020 23:10
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The Oldest Man posted:Ed: by the way, the idea that this pandemic needs some kind of space program to solve it is bunk. The best solutions available right now are cheap or free: people stay apart, keep to their own homes, and use mutual aid from the community's pooled resources to ensure everyone remains housed and fed such that the desperation of one does not jeopardize the safety at all. It's common knowledge that lockdowns are a necessary but not sufficient condition for controlling a pandemic. People staying home and self-isolating works to level the curve and slow the community spread, but only enough to buy time so that scientists, doctors and government authorities can roll out a cure, treat the sick, and perform contact-tracing. I guess it would resemble some kind of open-source project? Some group would create a centralized information aggregation source, like a website, where all the federations doing virus work could upload their data and communicate. The national union of Epidemiologists and Virologists would decide on a course of action and start researching a vaccine, while the national union of Doctors and Nurses would staff the hospitals, and recruit community volunteers to do contract tracing. EDIT: Cpt_Obvious posted:
I take issue with this. Have you ever been to Vietnam? I have, lots of times, to visit my extended family. The place is capitalist as all hell! Everybody is always hustling to make a buck, there's peddlers everywhere, everyone and their mother (and grandmother!) has converted the front of their house into a store or restaurant of some kind, and the youth loves going out to eat at trendy cafes and buying stuff at the malls. It's really hard for me to reconcile the idea that Vietnam isn't a capitalist country when you see the kids of local rich folks driving around in imported luxury vehicles and killing people in hit and run accidents. I'd say (and hearing my relatives talk) it's only communist insofar as the name of the party that's in charge. Substantively, materially, it doesn't differ substantially from any other developing market economy. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 00:20
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Cpt_Obvious posted:They have worked, and will work, to successfully stop the spread of the disease. Even Biden's advisors agree with that: I think you're misunderstanding me. I didn't say that lockdowns wouldn't stop the spread of the disease - I said that lockdowns alone wouldn't stop the spread of the disease. This is backed up by expert opinion. You don't just need to stop all social activity, you also need to be doing other things, like contact tracing and vaccine research.
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Nov 13, 2020 01:07
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Somfin posted:Contact tracing + lockdowns (both at a personal and a regional level) is enough to contain and kill this. Th-That's what I said!! DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 02:03
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Cpt_Obvious posted:However, since it was raised, I do wonder how one would quantify what the collapse of capitalism would look like materially. What signs in the world around us signal the cracks in the foundation of capitalism, and what would we expect to see in the future as those cracks grow (if they even exist)? Materially? Like, physically? I mean, I would imagine something like the rich building bunkers because they've lost faith in their safety for the near future as they see the writing on the wall caused by rising unemployment. The collapse of basic infrastructure as more and more resources are diverted to rent extraction rather than fundamental growth. The pace of technological advancement slowing down due to underinvestment in basic sciences that don't pay off immediate returns and the financialization of the intellectual capacity of generations as the best and brightest minds are sucked into nonproductive, parasitic sectors. The rise of unproductive bullshit jobs as millions of workers need to get paid and pretend to work because wage-slavery is held as an ideological norm, but actually physically produce nothing of value. The wholesale abandonment of necessary and productive technological adaptations to deal with imminent existential risks. The decline of birth rates due to a crisis of affordability. I think there's a lot of signs that show the physical crack-lines already emerging.
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Nov 13, 2020 04:06
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Could liberal capitalism eventually square the circle someday by using steadily more advanced technology? Marx and the other socialist, communist and anarchist writers could not have envisioned that we would someday have machines that could do all the work that a human could do. What if the following happens: 1) more and more jobs get automated, 2) UBI is instated as a palliative measure to prevent violent uprisings, 3) all work is automated and people are reduced to merely consuming in order to drive the engine of capitalism. This strikes me as a possible future given ongoing trends.
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Nov 13, 2020 15:45
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I'm working on a piece which takes on the topic of existential risk and effective altruism from a socialist, leftist standpoint. I want to argue that the best way to reduce existential risk and support long-term flourishing would be to adopt socialism. What arguments can be made which support this view? Can Marx's theory of crises and contradictions in capitalism be applied to analyses of long-term existential risk? I feel like I have the beginnings of this in an ecological argument based on the current progression of climate change thanks to unchecked liberal capitalism, but I was looking for more solid theoretical foundations.
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Nov 14, 2020 17:47
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Baka-nin posted:Sounds like you're trying to recreate Bookchin's ideas from scratch. I think you'd benefit from looking at his Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, and Post Scarcity Anarchism Thank you!
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Nov 14, 2020 18:41
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Baka-nin posted:Sounds like you're trying to recreate Bookchin's ideas from scratch. I think you'd benefit from looking at his Ecology and Revolutionary Thought, and Post Scarcity Anarchism I just wanted to thank you again for these recs. It's exactly the sort of structure I'd like to build my thinking upon! Ecology and Revolutionary Thought posted:Obviously, man could be described as a highly destructive parasite, who threatens to destroy his host the natural world and eventually himself. In ecology, however, the word parasite, used in this oversimplified sense, is not an answer to a question but raises a question itself. Ecologists know that a destructive parasitism of this kind usually reflects a disruption of an ecological situation; indeed, many species, seemingly highly destructive under one set of conditions, are eminently useful under another set of conditions. What imparts a profoundly critical function to ecology is the question raised by mans destructive activities: What is the disruption that has turned man into a destructive parasite? What produces a form of human parasitism that not only results in vast natural imbalances but also threatens the very existence of humanity itself? Key to the ideas that undergird my thinking is the central point that consciousness, sentience, and the ability for conscious beings to evaluate their conditions based on utilitarian calculus - what brings them pleasure or avoids pain - are natural phenomena, but without which the universe would lack objective meaning. It is the interpretations and sensations of conscious beings that give rise to a universe where "valuable", "moral", or "good" have any meaning at all. And since we find consciousness naturally existing (else we wouldn't be here to talk about it) the question should be - how do we maximize good for conscious beings? In that light, I, and thinkers that adopt the label of "effective altruism", tend to think about questions like "What actions can be taken that maximize the number, lifespan, and goodness for conscious beings? What will help bring about the maximum number of conscious beings to exist in conditions that they find pleasant and good?" Obviously because, as Bookchin writes, the present existential risks which are faced by the human species, and by large numbers of conscious creatures on this planet, are caused by the way that human beings have chosen to organize their society, it would behoove us to change our social organization to one which would better support flourishing and decrease existential risk. In the very long term, since the ultimate existential risk would be the increasing intensity of the sun as it matures over the next billion years, it would be the greatest benefit to spread life to other worlds on this timescale. It's my belief that only a post-scarcity society that has been organized on democratic and communist principles would be the best and only way to achieve this.
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Nov 15, 2020 23:34
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We must seize the means of crispduction.
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Nov 17, 2020 16:20
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What is"praxis"? Why is it always being thrown around in leftist circles? How is it different from "Practice"? Does it mean the same as "execution"? And why don't we use that instead?
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Nov 19, 2020 17:08
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uncop posted:Praxis as CYBEReris explained it is a dialectic but not a materialist one. The thing about materialist dialectics is that the tendential direction of the flow goes from the real world toward the world of consciousness (or alternatively, consciousness and thought aren't involved at all in the dialectic). The explicitly materialist take on praxis is that the process of social practice produces new thought, which is then applied back to alter social practice. But the word "praxis" is more commonly used to talk of an opposite flow that marxists would call idealist: that the process of thought produces new social practice and that feeds back to improve ideas and theory. This is really enlightening and gets at the heart of what I was trying to find out about. So, essentially, in this use, "praxis" means a very specific thing unique to the context of dialectical materialism, which is that it's the converse of the flow of material conditions influencing thoughts. I think I get it now! Thank you!
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Nov 20, 2020 15:31
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NaanViolence posted:Problem with #1 from the OP: humans are not rational at all. Otherwise post looks good! Cool, I guess your sentence means nothing at all, when I look at it, it just melts into a mass of lines and blobs that I can't understand at all because reasoning doesn't exist.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:55
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Disnesquick posted:No. It comes from my love of living things and a desire to see endless varieties of life explode across the vast dome of heaven. Boy do I have a thread for you! 
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Dec 2, 2020 23:10
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Basically, coupons. Coupons aren't money, they disappear as soon as you use them, and they're redeemable for a concrete thing.
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Jan 22, 2021 00:27
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The discussion about labor vouchers and interim stages like socialism as predicted by orthodox Marxism just makes me think that there can't really be an intermediate stage between capitalism and fully automated luxury communism, because having the intermediate stage necessarily implies the existence of a sovereign state power that would open the gates to regulatory capture by elites or the technocrats of the former regime - be they "reformed" elites from the previous system or a new ruling class that evolves organically from those appointed to oversee the transition stage. Basically, if we're already at the point where a clean break from capitalism is possible, we might be forced by material and political necessity to instantiate FALC immediately, without passing through socialism first. What Marx sees as ever-increasing crises of overproduction and the falling rate of profit implies, to me, at least, that the breaking point of capitalism will be the point at which society finds itself in a post-scarcity state by default, but is nevertheless still attempting to maintain the capitalist order by force of arms. I think there's a lot to indicate that we're very close to that point right now. Notice how financial capitalism is forced to invent ever more abstract ways to create profit out of nothing - derivatives upon derivatives. The tremendous amount of material waste that comes from an economic system that is too productive. The way that government policies of the neoliberal order are designed and intended to keep ever larger numbers of people in an impoverished and wage-stagnant state even as labor productivity has increased by more than 250% since the 1970s. The increasing threat of unemployment, underemployment, and precarity created by automation. Jobs exported to the developing world, and then subsequently being exported from there to the underdeveloped world as incomes rise all over the globe. It goes on and on. This simply implies to me that the problems of late-capitalism seem to be the problems of a nascent post-scarcity economy that simply hasn't yet realized that it is post-scarcity. So a revolution would just be a case of updating the political and social order to reflect the current technological and economic situation.
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Jan 22, 2021 22:13
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:This goes back to one the first posts I made in this thread, but what would that hypothetical revolution even look like in the context of a deeply entrenched, highly technologized Military Industrial Complex? Isn't there a problem with getting closer to theoretically being able to move to FALC while still under the current neoliberal capitalist status quo, i.e. the more automation that can be achieved in a capitalist system, the less power/leverage labor has in terms of strikes? Without a quantitative theory of sociology, it might not really be possible to answer some of these questions. It could be that there are certain failure-states that leftist revolutions can find themselves in thanks to the context in which they find themselves. For example, it might turn out (once the necessary mathematical apparatus have been developed) that the existence of competing capitalist states versus a smaller group of embattled communist ones forces the communist societies to adopt a kind of permanent war-socialism just in order to continue existing, which becomes a failure-state under which the revolution cannot continue. The preconditions necessary for a successful communist revolution might be a simultaneous uprising occurring in 50%> of all nation-states. quote:the more automation that can be achieved in a capitalist system, the less power/leverage labor has in terms of strikes? This could certainly be the case. On the other hand, I've read a good point against this in Inventing the Future, where Srnicek and Williams argue that the fewer people needed through automation, the fewer workers needed to drive a successful strike. To wit: if you have a factory with 100 technicians supervising 10,000 robots, then it only takes 100 people to strike to bring the entire production chain to a halt.
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Jan 22, 2021 22:56
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Interesting way of framing it, and much more nuanced than what I was thinking. Thanks! Any recommendations for more reading along these lines? I'm skeptical that such a quantitative model of sociology is achievable, so I guess in the meantime it's speculation and rationalization I'm just going off speculation myself, I'm not a sociologist, but I was basically making an offhand allusion to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Without a science of sociology that is at least as advanced as is depicted in the novels, it's not really possible to make such predictions empirically. However! That's not to say that there isn't promising work being done with simple models. Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies is a great place to start - and it's published as open access too! quote:That's a good point. I do wonder whether in such a hypothetical, would these 100 techs fall into the working class, or the PMC? You might have fewer people that need to achieve class consciousness in order to strike, but you might also be eroding the basis for solidarity with the working class. Again, just speculation, and I appreciate you sharing the references and more nuanced thinking! I think that would depend largely on how well ideas of class consciousness have been seeded throughout society. They might definitely consider themselves more akin to PMC and aligned with the capitalists. Society hasn't quite yet reached the stage at which 1% of the population control the means of production in service of the 0.00000001% who own the means of production, but we're fast approaching that step. I think the work of leftists right now is to increase class consciousness, especially among PMC, engineers, technical and knowledge workers, so that when that happens, they will be more keen to align with the interests of the working class rather than the bourgeoisie. If they're not, then we're kind of screwed, as they, at that point, may be able to usher in a kind of singularity, akin to what happens when you complete the first stage of Paperclip Maximizer.  EDIT: To borrow some terms from the AI Safety/existential risk community, late-stage capitalism seems to be heading towards a kind of instrumental convergence with respect to the accumulation of profit and power to ever-smaller groups of bourgeoisie. The big goal of leftists - or those engaged in leftist theory at least - should be to ensure values alignment amongst a broad spectrum of the working classes. A post-revolution goal should be to design societal institutions such that the structure of said institutions ensure values alignment in accordance with leftist values in perpetuity. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jan 23, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 23:59
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I'm interested in learning about the necessary material preconditions for capitalism's existence. Have any writers identified what environmental states must exist in order for capitalism to exist, or written extensively about the relationship between capitalism and the underlying physical world?
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Sep 10, 2021 21:22
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 14:42 |
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That makes a lot of sense, yeah. I was contemplating more like a third addition to your list: 3) There must be a stable ecology where unlimited taking of resources from the environment can be presumed and factored into future growth (interest) calculations. The capitalist system assumes that the investor is able to leverage the future earnings of a business against present assets, to obtain the investment or loan capital to invest in productive capital. The premium on the time value of money is the interest rate. Therefore, if risk and uncertainty is high (for example, if the risk of extreme weather events, war, and so on is high), and take-able resources are finite and decreasing, the calculations become such that presently existing capital is worth more than the expected value of future returns, thereby undermining the credit-investment-profit loop necessary for capitalism to continue. That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more?
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Sep 11, 2021 14:12
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