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One of the major things to question whenever you come up with something like, for example, "What about doctors and janitors," is to turn that back on the current system that we are living under. Right now, people who have enough privilege and security can decide to become doctors. Becoming a doctor gives you a well-compensated, well-regarded position. People who do not have the privilege and security to become doctors can become janitors. Becoming a janitor gives you a poorly-compensated, poorly-regarded position that is still better than not having a job, which, under capitalism rules as written, should be a death sentence. Doctors often become doctors not because they genuinely want to help people, but because the job is available to them and grants them financial security; janitors often become janitors not because they genuinely want to clean buildings, but because the alternative is starving to death in the street, or going to jail. Because, let's be clear here- capitalism is perfectly fine with people dying because there is not enough work for them, and it benefits the class of bosses to deliberately make sure there is not enough work for them. That means that they can offer the poorest less money to do more work, and because the alternative is death, people will take that deal. The more desperate the non-boss class gets, the more cruel the boss class can get away with. https://www.thegamer.com/gamestop-cancel-tiktok-contest-extra-labor-hours-backlash/ This is GameStop deciding that the backlash against giving away ten labour hours as a prize in a TikTok competition was too much and dropping it. Giving away, not ten hours of compensation, but ten hours of work, given away as a prize for free advertising labour from their workers. Work for us on your own time, and we might reward you with more ability to work for us on our time. The current system leads to this, because it is entirely rational for bosses to extract as much labour as possible from their workers, using whatever means are available, and the only thing that slows it down is the public recoiling in disgust.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:19
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Cpt_Obvious posted:So, what you're saying is that without the coercive nature of capitalism - the threat of homelessness and starvation - people would only be willing to do the necessary job of "janitor" for fair compensation? It's entirely possible that the hard, dirty, continuous, risky and unsatisfying work of janitorial cleaning would have to be better compensated if the people doing it were able to choose not to do it and not die for making that choice, yes. Slanderer posted:It's not "proving" anything, other than pointing out that some aspects of altruism are largely believed to be learned behaviors. With a clipped, unsourced headline apparently from noted academic journal Today's Parent. E: Which actually sources something from Betsy Mann, an actual expert, which directly, explicitly contradicts your point: "Sharing is learned as children’s social, emotional and cognitive development increases." Somfin fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 23:28
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This article does not support your argument. It basically refutes it. I'm real fuckin' sick of people in D&D googling the first article on a subject, not reading it, and posting it as though it's evidence in favour of your argument: In this case, that "toddlers don't share, therefore, altruism is a taught behaviour." This study just shows that between the ages of 18 months and 24 months, people become drastically more pro-social. the study posted:Thus, although “mine!” is a favorite refrain of toddlers, by age two they readily share their toys when supplies are abundant, and even 18-month-olds share when their companions’ needs are made clear.
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Nov 6, 2020 00:12
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And even if we accept was that the presence of teaching advice proves that something is not natural, there's advice out there about teaching your child to walk and speak. Does this mean that humans are not actually bipeds or vocalisers, and that therefore a society built on the idea that they are is not in line with human nature?
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Nov 6, 2020 00:32
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ronya posted:conversely, the all-political-struggles-as-class-struggles framework is a method but not a set of uniform conclusions - one can propose any number of new classes and propose how they would interact, subject to the sole proviso that each class is defined in relation to their role in economic production, and none of these conclusions need be particularly left-wing This is one of the most important fuckin' things that we don't get taught in schools until tertiary: analytical frameworks not as solutions to problems but as ways of examining problems and solutions. It's something I've actually had to use as a programmer and that moment of someone saying "if we analyse this solution through this lens and it's fine then the solution is fine"- when my default lens that I didn't even know I was using told me otherwise- was a severe increase in my ability to deal with poo poo.
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Nov 9, 2020 23:14
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Yah, I had a crack-ping moment about half a year ago when trawling through DnD that my worldview was fundamentally different than those of big L Liberals. It's why I started the OP the way I did, because if you reframe clashing worldviews as philosophical viewpoints and not political teams, people are far more willing to engage in good faith instead of kneejerk reject everything. I did very much like your breakdown of liberalism- it might be good to get a post about neoliberalism and the idea of a default or subconscious framework going at some point. I've had one argument in D&D where someone responded to my accusation that they were approaching the issue at hand from a neoliberal viewpoint that unless you went to a right-wing tertiary institute you can't be considered a neoliberal, which is obviously wrong, but it's also the sort of statement that would take a couple of paragraphs to explain why it was wrong.
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Nov 9, 2020 23:44
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Cpt_Obvious posted:This is true, there are certainly members of the ruling class or the ownership class who might be protected against violence by the state. For example, if a cop shot Jeff Bezos, he'd probably go to jail eventually. I was speaking mostly of working class individuals who are subject to violence by law enforcement based on the whims of those law enforcement officials. Also, the state actually punishing members of its enforcement class is far rarer than the state reacting to their actions and the two should not be considered the same. Paid suspension is not a punishment, it's a holiday; being transferred is almost a punishment but the end result is that the same officer is still being paid by the public to perform the same actions, now on a new population; having to attend classes is again almost a punishment but should not be considered on the same level as prison. Actual charges for doing violence are vanishingly rare, and actual convictions are even rarer- and that latter point is in part because the state has a vested interest in making sure that the people who can be called up for jury duty trust and believe police forces by default, and because media sources who want access to the police need to keep them happy in how they report on actions taken. Just look at what happened to the poor old "bad apples" metaphor.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:05
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fool of sound posted:Basically that theories about how power dynamics work across a society don't nessicarily hold true at an individual level, and that using the layer to critique the former is a waste of time. Think you might have forgotten to type "different" in the original post, chief.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:14
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Disnesquick posted:Edit: don't the Austrians always point to Somalia as their Ancap paradise? Weird that they didn't all loving move there and prove that anarcho-capitalism isn't a fascist lie The Oldest Man posted:Or the rate of profit increasing, that would also falsify one of the core pillars of Marxist economics. According to my girlfriend (who grew up there), Vietnam is severely capitalist with an increasingly thin communist / socialist veil these days; old money slid back into power, corporations did what they do, and the country basically is the joke about selling Che Guevara t-shirts. They're still working on getting universal healthcare up and running. That all said, the people there are pretty gung-ho about communism as both a product and an identity, and it's a pretty obvious place to look and and see that communism and socialism do not in any way mean the end of the glorious consumerism that liberals hold dear. Actually a quick post that helps folks separate consumerism from capitalism would be pretty handy, since a lot of folks get fed a line of bullshit about how socialism means the end of products and markets.
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Nov 11, 2020 21:20
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Acerbatus posted:The literal loving CPC described it as 30% natural disaster and 70% human error "Human error" suggests that there were in fact more people involved than just Mao, despite the term being singular
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Nov 12, 2020 05:43
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The hundreds of thousands dead in a single year from corona proves the failures of both liberalism and capitalism. It's too risky to try either one again.
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Nov 12, 2020 07:01
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DrSunshine posted: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. Contact tracing + lockdowns (both at a personal and a regional level) is enough to contain and kill this. Six weeks of strict bubbling and the fucker goes away. New Zealand proves that. An anarchist society would be far, far more effective at just running at a society-wide skeleton crew level and letting people not have to work for those six weeks than our capitalist one.
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Nov 13, 2020 01:23
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Aruan posted:has largely ended Which specific unrest are you talking about here?
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Nov 13, 2020 01:30
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DrSunshine posted:Th-That's what I said!! It is indeed! I guess the important thing is that I wanted to downplay the plural you put in there- it's not "things" in New Zealand's case, it's literally just one other thing in addition to the lockdown. There is another thing, and this is probably a bit more tricky to implement and one of the major reasons that New Zealand could pull this off, which is a society-wide understanding that folks both 1. can and 2. should to talk about where they've been and who they've been in contact with to the authorities. There's no requirement that hospitals report obvious minor crimes like drug taking to the police, for example, and ambulances are specifically third parties to make this even stronger. New Zealand's major outbreaks / breaches / risks (after the initial lockdown) have been folks, usually returning from countries with worse citizen-government relationships, either "trying not to get people in trouble" or "trying to make a point." One of 'em showed up at an anti-lockdown Q rally later on lol. E: Disnesquick posted:Anarchy implies a lack of hierarchy, not necessarily a lack of central leadership. You could very easily have a central / core group whose various qualities mean that they are the people folks turn to when the going gets rough, who are deemed trustworthy by the community, and whose advice is meant to be heeded, without that group needing to be granted authority by some artificial, gameable legitimisation process like voting, or being granted any power. Those tend to show up organically- if you've ever done unionisation or workplace organisation you'll usually find that some of the folks just naturally become low-level authorities on various subjects, and other folks just know to listen to them, or know who to turn to. They're not better than you, they're not in charge, they don't have any additional power to enforce their will; they're just the leaders, and folks pretty easily understand that. Somfin fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 02:35
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V. Illych L. posted:programming is shockingly collective in practice, stack overflow and the entire open source movement are extremely encouraging as a completely practical example of communistic organising The best decision ever made re: copyright was that code, as in the actual code that is written, cannot be subject to copyright. It can still be owned, sold, and licensed, but if you reverse engineer a proprietary system, your reverse engineered system is fine and legal. Standing on the shoulders of giants is absolutely, 100%, how programming works, and that's the major reason that it's as powerful as it is. "Learn to code" is absolutely a capitalist dipshit war-cry, but a lot of the folks pushing it are too short-sighted and uninformed to know that the process of learning to code will inevitably put one in touch with a lot of very, very left systems and people. Peel posted:every now and again I reflect on how much free material and encouragement is out there for learning programming It's fascinating; as I've gotten better with writing code, I've been more and more open to both helping folks learn and working through problems with people. There is a genuine sense of "paying forward because of the folks who helped me" that code just puts into the brains of a lot of folks. The other way folks end up is very, very aggressively locking down everything they create; they are universally awful to work with, and these days companies can choose experts who aren't awful to work with. Somfin fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 23, 2020 22:00
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e-dt posted:Code can be copyrighted; that is what the concept of code "ownership" is. Reverse engineering is, however, permitted - but replicating the system from your reverse engineered results may be illegal if there are software patents on it. Or if Oracle wins their lawsuit against Google. I took a bit of a look into this, and you're right- but, there's a fascinating separation between code as creative expression and code as utilitarian necessity and while the former can be copyrighted, the latter cannot be. So, while you can copyright something like Enterprise FizzBuzz in its entirety because the parodic overly-structured nature of it is a creative expression, each individual part of that creative expression is basically fair game because Enterprise FizzBuzz is made up of tiny utilitarian parts that are all doing things in a very standard "enterprise code" way. So, while code that is in itself a legitimate expression of creativity is protected in its whole form as a literary work, code snippets, functional examples that show how to do something, and doing something with the intent of having it function the same way as an existing product but starting from scratch and figuring out solutions to the problems that crop up as you go, are all not protected. Software copyright and patenting are complete garbage nonsense because they actually do stifle innovation, because usually the remit of the protection is far, far larger than was intended in the idea of patent law- see Namco's patent on mini-games during load times in games, which has finally loving expired.
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Nov 26, 2020 23:23
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Here’s my crack, I’m not at all an expert or well-educated source. Definitely open to hear the thread’s input on what I’m getting wrong too One of the moments that really crystallised things for me was the undeniable line, from a Lindsay Ellis video, "the legacy of colonialism is baked into every facet of every culture on the planet." That was one of the things that really started hatching me out of the liberalism egg- the fact that this thing that I had taken to be so stable and so natural was actually constructed, over the course of hundreds of incredibly brutal and cruel years, and that we are now living in a world that exists as it does not because of a divinely-ordained state of affairs but because millions of people deliberately extracted that world from the lives and resources that belonged to hundreds of millions of other people. And, more importantly, that the scars of that extraction are impossible to ignore if you just look for them, something that we are taught not to do. Then you just look at the forces driving and justifying colonialism in the modern era and it's really easy to start looking for literally anything else. The elevator pitch for Marxism becomes "you're right, you're not crazy, it's all been there the whole time, and there's a clear explanation for all of it."
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Jan 20, 2021 02:52
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Even a classless anarchic society would have folks whose job was to make hard decisions, they'd just be people who are good at making those hard decisions, rather than also being given the power to force other people to carry them out. They'd be expected to show their working and explain why they think what they think, for example, why the widgets need to be made even though they're harmful. Anarchies are against unjust hierarchy, not against all hierarchies. Someone being placed in control of a group by assent of that group often makes quite a lot of sense, and sometimes you need a captain whose orders are simply followed- because their job is to figure out what will get us where we're trying to go. If I was in an anarchic society and the crew of smart thinkers, who had been chosen by the community based on their ability to make good calls in the past, put out a call for widgeteers, I'd read their explanation and probably voluntarily sign up for a shift or two. As I've said elsewhere (I think the example in that case was about a mostly autonomous nuclear power plant needing volunteers to monitor it), if a society can't survive without a mechanism for forcing people to work, it might not deserve to. e: small grammar touch-up Somfin fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Jan 20, 2021 |
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Jan 20, 2021 04:40
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fool of sound posted:Covid also provides a object lesson about this: a substantial number of people not only reject experts and leaders in the relevant fields, but accuse them of being tyrannical for merely for making non-coercive suggestions that inconvenience them. If you saw the people making those suggestions as unjustified experts and unjustified leaders held up by unjust institutions, you'd naturally consider their suggestions to also be unjustified; and if you had someone else who you saw as a justified expert telling you otherwise, you'd probably listen to them instead. That's why you rejected Trump telling you to try drinking bleach, but you listened to the CDC folks telling you to wear a mask. We're dealing with a reality disagreement here, not laziness.
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Jan 20, 2021 05:20
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fool of sound posted:I see your point, but I think my question remains the same: how should a society deal with people who suffer under a 'reality disagreement' like this? There are enough of them that they can't just be ignored, enough to throw a wrench into the whole 'leadership by group assent" thing. I don't know. Reality disagreements are a part of my anti-prison stuff; you can't just punish folks in the midst of a reality disagreement into doing what you want, because they do not believe that they're doing anything wrong and all you'll do is make yourself into an enemy, and excluding them from society just makes them more isolated and increases the pace of their divergence. I don't know if deprogramming is inside the scope of the thread.
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Jan 20, 2021 12:04
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Very much this, although the key difference being whether the coercion is democratically decided. Whether it is democratically decided and whether it is enforced are also two different things. Like, if you steal someone's poo poo, "we mostly agree that you're not part of our group anymore and any of us can just deny you stuff that you could otherwise expect us to give freely, you might be able to talk to your remaining friends for stuff if you need it, but if we find out they're deliberately funneling you resources from folks who don't want to give them to you there may be consequences for them, please find somewhere else to be" is very different to Capitalism's "the only place you are allowed to exist is this tiny locked box, if you are anywhere else armed people can and will harm you and will be rewarded for doing so." Getting kicked out of a group is absolutely coercive, but there is no group that can exist without the ability to remove people from that group. Like, a fan discord might kick someone out for being a creep, and then if they found out a member was funneling that creepy person photos of the people they were creeping on, that member might also face consequences. This level of facing consequences isn't even bad. Coercive, yes, but it's the minimum that a group can have and still call itself a group; calling it "like Capitalism" is a big fuckin' stretch. If you're going to dictate that true anarchism means you can't even exclude people and must give freely to everyone, whether they're in the group or not, and regardless of what they've done to the group, you're not talking about anarchism, claw out your own eyeballs and hand them to a blind person because you're on some bodhisattva poo poo.
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Jan 20, 2021 22:47
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fool of sound posted:Denial of essentials is one of the prongs of how capital compels labor, and I would argue that it's more corrosive than the other: denial of freedom/threat of state violence. It's interesting that you bring up fan communities, because examples of abusive individuals with an audience avoiding justified shunning or directing unjustified shunning on others are trivial to find. Imagine that when the consequence of shunning isn't expulsion from a social group, but instead a denial of basic rights. That's not really all that different from wealthy capitalists doing the same. Did you misread the part where I explained that being able to expel people from your group is literally necessary for a group to exist? You're a Something Awful moderator, you know that the ability to remove people is a necessary part of how a functional community works. In your response you point out how harmful it can be when an abusive individual is allowed to stay, or direct rightful expulsion at others- both of these are accomplished through unjustified influence. That's something anarchies actively seek to prevent: unjust hierarchies. You also don't bring up the times that abusive individuals have been removed correctly and successfully, because such stories are not noteworthy; they're an assumed correct outcome, from which the first two outcomes are abberations. Capitalism will, by nature, reinforce and entrench hierarchies until the vast majority of individuals are always denied basic rights, even while still within the group. Anarchies would more likely work on a boolean "in or out" rule- you're either part of the group and receive its benefits, or you're not and you don't. Anarchies therefore need the ability to revoke group membership, the same way that every other group needs that ability. You're entirely right it's easy to find stories about removal going wrong. No-one writes about it going right. Defenestrategy posted:I think coercion in and of itself isn't necessarily good or bad. It depends on its application. Contribute to the community when you have plenty or ELSE you may be prevented from taking from it when you do not. Capitalism?
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Jan 20, 2021 23:57
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fool of sound posted:it's less humane than temporary imprisonment and FAR less humane than proper rehabilitative justice. I'm pretty sure that any good society would have "proper rehabilitative justice" as its first port of call, with its worse outcomes being reserved for times when that fails. I'm sorry if I came across as suggesting that "if you don't work, you get expelled immediately" was a good way to run a society. Remember also that "temporary imprisonment" can easily also have the effects of permanent shunning from access to work, multiplied by Cpt_Obvious' point above about that not being something that we have a choice about- every employer gets to choose whether your prison sentence also means you don't get to work there.
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Jan 21, 2021 05:23
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droll posted:Open question to syndicalists that want co ops; how do you respond to an analysis such as Rosa's here? Forgive me for my lack of deeper contextual knowledge here, but is this analysis saying that co-ops are considered failures because they don't last forever?
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Sep 7, 2021 20:26
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Like, yeah, co-ops aren't going to be the one weird trick that undoes capitalism, but they're not meant to be, and we wouldn't want co-ops to be a weapon. They're the better world we're striving for, where companies exist because all of the parts of the company want them to exist and if that desire fades or can't be sustained then the company goes away. Not lasting forever is a feature.
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Sep 7, 2021 20:59
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The Artificial Kid posted:Bring back the days when x Company meant something more like Fellowship of the x, rather than a self sustaining superorganism that continues to eat people decades after x has been made onsolete. This poo poo is why Americans have substandard internet connections
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Sep 7, 2021 21:32
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