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It creates a significant pressure to find ways to make widgets that doesn't depend on the whims of a few people, which is better for reliable productivity. Or alternatively it collapses the widget market if the demands of the widget makers are too onerous for the rest of the labour force to bear, and society has to realign around limited widget availability. The latter being the structural left wing form of environmentalism and workplace safety.
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Nov 5, 2020 13:15
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I don't think so, for both reasons, if the economy is bottlenecking around some kind of production limitation then either the production limitation will be overcome, or it won't, in which case why would a decentralized economy not reorient around productions that are not bottlenecked? If anything wouldn't you consider the tech boom to be a problem of centralization as all the investors hop on the same bandwagon? Isn't that why those sorts of booms/bubbles tend to crash afterwards? Because they're just trying to make as much money as fast as possible without regard for the long term viability of the business? If businesses are in the hands of local groups of workers surely there would be less impetus to have everyone making loving apps?
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Nov 5, 2020 13:25
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Yes there will always be people whose skills are very desirable and that affords them greater bargaining power, but they're still bargaining against the rest of the labour force and so you are, at least, getting an actual fair market value for their skills. If they are taking the piss to the point they annoy everyone they work for then I think you are more likely to get an economic realignment away from things that require them on the basis that the grief they give everyone they work with is not worth the effort. As opposed to under capitalism where so long as they make the owners more money all the other workers can eat poo poo. It may not be perfect but I think it sounds like an improvement?
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Nov 5, 2020 13:33
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I believe that's what cybernetics was but I don't think many people have attempted to pursue it seriously on a state sized level for many decades because everyone in power believes markets are the best axiomatically. You could probably adapt internal industrial equivalents however given that there are corporations out there that are on the level of small countries. I don't see why you couldn't take advantage of modern electronic networking to do a centrally planned economy nowadays, they once made a surprisingly effective high level economic model of the UK using water. But again nobody seems super interested in modeling that sort of thing any more outside of "how can we exploit it to get free money" 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. Less economic activity is not a bad thing, people working less is not a bad thing. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 17:18
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Okay so are you saying ALL greed is the result of social conditioning? Or just that our cultural prevalence of it is? I can see the latter but not the former. Because again, squirrels horde food, and they forget where like 4/5 of their food caches are every year which seems like a pretty clear-cut example of desire outstripping actual material need. Unless your argument is that the squirrel is justified in hedging his bets against disaster, in which case why not argue the billionaire humans are doing the same thing? A squirrel does that because it is stupid and has evolved an inefficient instinct to keep itself alive. But humans are not squirrels, our responses are heavily dependent on how and where we live, and how and where we grew up in our formative years, and the other people we spend time around. The squirrel is neither justified nor unjustified, the squirrel doesn't have a concept of justification, it just does things. Humans can have the ability to make judgements and what judgements they make depends on how they interpret the world around them. Our society depends on people, for the most part, making similar judgements about the world around them so that we can all live in some sort of consensus reality. The goal of would be social revolutionaries therefore seems like trying to figure out what concept of reality we all want to share, because yes the ones we have at the moment are both fragmented and harmful to us and others. Humans may have a nature, as a squirrel does, but it is quite hard to figure out what it is because humans, unlike squirrels, are intelligent and highly malleable in how we act, much of how we act is in response to social conditioning which we learn over time, we aren't born with it.
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Nov 5, 2020 20:53
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Slanderer posted:now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens are you ok?
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Nov 5, 2020 20:56
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:I'm curious how Marxist thought has grappled with the rise of the military-industrial complex and what that means for revolution of the working class and ability for capitalism to yield to socialism. With technology advancing so significantly in terms of weapons and surveillance, and becoming so concentrated in the hands of the capitalist ruling class, it seems that the only way to move to socialism let alone communism would necessarily have to be very slow and incremental, because workers would be so outgunned in a violent revolt. Technically if everything is automated and the owners of the machines kill all the workers rather than surrendering control of the machines because their labour and consumption is no longer required, then that has also resolved the bourgeois/proletarian conflict but from the other direction 
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Nov 5, 2020 21:33
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There is a whole thread on police abolitionism if you are interested in which I wrote far too many words.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:39
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I would tend to agree also that the middle class is real and is kind of opposed to the working class material interest wise. I would essentially view it as a bet. As lower/working class, the bet I am offered is "work your whole life and you will almost certainly get nowhere, if you're lucky you might still have a state pension for a few years before you die" and I rightly think that is a loving terrible bet. But if I was middle class, the bet becomes "work for a few decades and you might be able to retire early with a nice house and live for quite a while in a life of luxury" which is actually a pretty good bet, certainly a lot better than what I am being offered, so it is irrational for people to accept that? I don't think so. Yes in theory we could all work together and ensure nobody has to risk destitution and we could all live happier, but that's a big "in theory" whereas the retirement package is on offer now to the middle class and they probably know a lot of people who have made out pretty well with it. I don't think it's surprising they support the system. I don't think it's false consciousness or anything, I think they've just picked what reasonably seems like a good bet for them.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:48
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Hey Marx said it was unstable and he was right, he just didn't imagine that it could be unstable in both directions It's still fully automated communism, just on a rather smaller scale than we hoped. The Oldest Man posted:This is closer to where I sit on this issue. It's obvious that an appeal to the better angels of anyone's nature is going to fail when their material reality tells them the opposite. However, material interest isn't the whole story on this issue because propaganda has gotten so good that there are large swathes of modern society for whom the bribe/dividend is flatly a lie, but one that they believe in because capital and the state have mythologized it for them. In this case, the appeal is not to their better natures but to re-evaluate their material reality. That appeal becomes more and more powerful the larger and louder the lie has to be in order for them to ignore the collapse of their conditions. This is true, a lot of people believe their odds are better than they are, and yes as how rigged it is becomes more obvious it does (we hope) prompt a re-evaluation, though it can also just lead people to become more and more unhinged.
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Nov 5, 2020 22:17
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Just throwing this out there, what if a meaningful section of society is just, on a personal level, completely and totally bat-poo poo wrong about how their interests and actions are connected? Like what if an understanding of basic causality is not a safe assumption for a huge number of people? I think this is true, but I also think it is probably a product of material conditions too. I don't think I am very smart but I think I am relatively capable of seeing what my interests are in a situation. Leftism clicked for me extremely quickly once I was introduced to it because it built on a lot of pre-existing feelings that I had about my situation and the world. So the question then becomes why do some people seem to have so much trouble with it? I think quite a few of them actually are materially doing well under capitalism, and I think a significant portion of the remainder are subject to a tremendous amout of propaganda and other things that limit their conceptual space. This is another good argument, I think, for the low level community organizing approach, because that sort of thing is basically a training mechanism for thinking about the world in left wing ways. It reaches people directly and it cuts through all the bullshit with mainstream politics (that a lot of people rightly hate) and that is why a lot of people think it is an important basis for wider left wing politics. Cpt_Obvious posted:Socialism assumes this to be true. In fact, it has explanations for religion and faith as "Opiates of the masses", which contextually means that they are ways to make ourselves feel better about our lovely material conditions. So, you're poor and are scared that you'll lose your home, so you put your faith in a lucky rabbit foot to feel better. If you make sure nobody is scared about losing their homes, then irrational behavior is reduced to an anomaly rather than the norm. Sort of, I think that there is a pretty significant issue where depending on how you meet people's needs, you can actually just make them very reactionary. It is actually a pretty good criticism of some aspects of the welfare state, which is that a lot of people who have benefitted from it seem to view the concept of it with contempt because they don't realise that they have, they think they did everything on their own. So it is important for people to understand how their welfare is maintained and to feel they have common cause with others in that regard. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 23:12
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Perhaps if janitorial work were better paid it would be less hard, continuous, and unsatisfying, as there would be more incentive to make it easier, people could afford to do it less and still survive, and that might create a greater sense of satisfaction.
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Nov 5, 2020 23:30
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Cpt_Obvious posted:He didn't starve anyone, famines happened in China just like famines happened in the United States. Blaming Mao for famines is like blaming FDR for the Dust Bowl. Like, sure, they both had policies that affected those occurrences, but he didn't just wave a magic wand and murder people. Is there not some sort of link between revolutionary centralized communism and famines though? I always figured it was just the massive social disruption and attempts to radically change how land and industry works means that they gently caress up the food supply in the process (and often end up subjected to trade embargos either deliberately or just because people are reluctant to risk it in unstable places). Which isn't to say you shouldn't change how land is owned and used, but just that you gotta be careful about it. It is, admittedly, also why I don't personally like the idea of big violent revolutions because they have a lot of collateral damage, not that I imagine very many people like them when they happen, rather they happen because all the alternatives are suppressed.
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Nov 6, 2020 09:11
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To be sure I absolutely would not suggest that capitalism doesn't cause famines, more just that in the current time I do worry about the effects of things like embargos and major industrial rejiggering on a society that relies on global trade for food security (which is a lot of societies) Of course we might be getting that anyway if the current UK government keeps on with brexit lol. And also yes "don't be communist or the capitalists will deliberately starve you to death" is not exactly a ringing endorsement of capitalism.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:09
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No I agree, especially given that capitalism looks set to cause catastrophic disruption to our ability to feed people anyway. But that is broadly why I would prefer it if the change came from the bottom up rather than in a great fiery rush from above, not least because the last few decades have put me off the idea of ardent ideologues of any stripe wielding central government power. I think that structurally makes them very prone to loving people over and loving things up even if they don't intend to. I trust people who work in an industry to be more capable of ensuring it functions than I do anyone sitting in a fancy office in the capital deciding that they need to make number go up.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:32
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How do I buy the communist coffee? I really do like nice coffee but I can rarely afford it.
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Nov 6, 2020 18:59
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I like the idea that aristotle thinks the primary use of a sandal is to wear it and that selling it is improper. What a different time
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Nov 6, 2020 22:33
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Sure, I'm reluctant to take any greek philosopher as indicative of the general idea of the time cos they were all up their own arse about something. Just still an amusing contrast with today where selling poo poo is, even for normal people, considered a perfectly normal use for it.
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Nov 6, 2020 22:54
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Yeah what? I was taught the dustbowl was caused through agriculture, not that it just happened? It doesn't normally happen?
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Nov 7, 2020 08:57
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I think it works much better as a criticism than a predictor, and certainly the conclusions you draw from the criticism might mirror marx's own but I think it is a good idea for you to follow whatever train of thought comes to you after being exposed to the idea, not least because just yelling at people to read theory isn't very politically useful. People respond best I think when they can internalize and personalize their politics. You will probably find a lot in common but I think trying to get everyone to adhere to a dogma is a combination of ineffective, dangerous, and needlessly limiting. We should adapt our political theories to our time and place. Also on a personal level I think that the message of personal liberation is a very compelling element of leftist politics and also a very important and enduring one, and also a key road of attack we must pursue against liberals. I don't have very positive associations with orthodox marxists because a lot of the vocal ones seem to be pretty lovely people and very socially regressive, which I think is entirely silly because breaking down social taboos I think is pretty revolutionary, because if you can get people to refuse to subscribe to them you are more likely, I think, to get them to not subscribe to other lovely ideas. Also the right is really throwing its weight in with the social regressives and so I think it is good for us to oppose that and make friends along the way. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 19:25
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Also I think a lot of them are adapted to a time and place and it is very important for them to be, because they wouldn't gain traction if they weren't. The evolution of leftism in a time and place both refines previous approaches and also necessarily incorporates the needs and wants of the people of the time.
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Nov 7, 2020 20:33
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"of the time" I suppose I wonder whether or not that position is more or less forgivable now or then. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 21:17
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Accelerationism, or things peripheral to it, are broadly I think the best materialist argument against lesser evil voting. Basically the idea that the electoral system cannot provide the needed changes because they are outside its scope, and that the longer it dominates political thought in a country the more dangerous the political landscape becomes due it its failure to address the needs of the population. Also depending on the specific electoral system of a country you can make the argument that it is desirable to sabotage the success of particular parties to delegitimize their ideas and install your own, particularly relevant in the UK at the moment. But more broadly the conflict I think is between the obstruction that the electoral system presents in its ability to monopolise political effort and expression on ultimately fruitless endeavours, and the idea that it can give leftists "breathing room" despite the same mechanism also potentially drawing support away from leftism by propping up the legitimacy of the electoral system itself.
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Nov 11, 2020 01:17
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Basically whether or not you actually reach the point of becoming an acclerationist, the arguments that lead there are pretty important ones because you can't just like, ignore the strucutral limitations of electoralism or the effects that it has by existing.
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Nov 11, 2020 01:27
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Yeah but that's in the sense that you cannot actually do politics or affect things, the material conditions will cause people to have whatever political views they have and you will simply be pushed along by the tides of the world. Which is true in a sense that the world is deterministic and whatnot but humans like to think they have free will and that we have choices in what we want to advocate for politically and that certain ideas may rise to prevalence based on their pre-existing traction at an opportune moment.
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Nov 11, 2020 02:15
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Beauty arguably has a use-value in a similar way that a bed does, or a chair, or anything else we use to derive comfort because humans clearly need that. It also has an exchange value which is socially constructed and heavily dependent on social ideas about what beauty is at any moment in time and all the attendent high society bollocks about fashion. As to how it is produced, well presumably it is produced both in the human brain directly (because a thing isn't beautiful until you look at it and interpret it as such, beauty is a thing in our heads, there is no material particle of beauty) but also in the social sphere because how we are socialised to perceive beauty and what to perceive as beautiful determines how we produce it via perception, something arguably is more beautiful if we are socially primed to regard it as high status. A tree is beautiful (can be used by people to produce beauty in their brains) but trees are all over the place, their beauty is produced at will by anybody who looks at them, thus the socially necessary labour time to produce their beauty is nil. The socially necessary labour time to produce the beauty of an isolated or unique location is equal to the cost of getting people to that location and keeping them there long enough to produce the concept of beauty by experiencing it, so areas of uncommon natural beauty presumably have a higher value than areas of commonplace beauty even if they both have identical use-value. And I'm sure you can wangle something together about how there is money to be made telling people they cannot be satisfied with the commonplace and must desire the extraordinary and whether that constitutes an attack on the ability to produce their own beauty for the purposes of marketing it to them as an exotic thing etc but theory makes my brain hurt so I'm going to stop there. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Nov 11, 2020 |
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Nov 11, 2020 03:32
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Hot take while my brain is still fizzy: The establishment of societal standards of beauty and particularly their centering in the hands of capitalist thought leaders combined with the steady erosion of the public space as a communal space and a space welcoming of human habitation is essentially Enclosure for the human soul, transferring the experience of beauty solely into the realm of high class workplaces, holidays, and residence, your ability to experience beauty is dependent on your ablity to create value for capital and attempts to decommodify this will be resisted.
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Nov 11, 2020 03:55
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The marxism understander has logged on.
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Nov 11, 2020 19:20
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Or even just... an old marxist position, the whole stuff about having a revolution to install your own government with general secretaries and five year plans post-dates him. His views as far as I know were quite centered in democratizing things from the bottom up, pushing out the old hierarchies by the creation of new organizations centered in direct worker power. What can the government do if everyone is unionised and they decide not to cooperate? That's broadly the idea of syndicalists/industrial unionists etc. Who funnily enough had a bit of an issue in the early 20th century with more top-down schools of thought, especially in the wake of the apparent success of the russian revolution.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 00:00
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If the bolsheviks had ate poo poo in the revolution I really would have liked to see how leftism might have progressed in the absence of that ideological weight on the scales. A lot of people were understandably very keen on that method once it seemed like it was getting somewhere though now we know it has a lot of problems. Unfortunatley it defined what leftism was for a long time because obviously you want to pin your ideas to the other world superpower rather than going out on your own. I think that's broadly the basis of the game Kaiserreich which in addition to some first world war counterfactuals, also does not have the victory for the bolsheviks and posits that instead the dominant leftist thought for much of the 20th century would be syndicalism.
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Nov 12, 2020 00:12
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Sorry yes I should have separated those two a bit. Syndicalists as far as I know are not generally strict marxists, what I was meaning is that I think marx's critique lends itself very well to bottom up organizing. I don't honestly really get why so many people seem to apply it to some sort of state-capture-as-the-starting-point idea because I don't honestly see how it's supposed to work that well. Much prefer the idea of attacking the problems at ground level and at the level that people intrinsically understand.
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Nov 12, 2020 00:17
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Acerbatus posted:No, I'm the guy who claimed the Dust Bowl was a natural disaster while putting the blame for famines in notably famine-prone pre-industrial China and Russia solely at the feet of the commies, then admitted I was wrong about the dust bowl and provided examples about how the Chinese famine was primarily the CPC's fault when called on it. Acerbatus posted:2. Killing tens of millions of people via starvation 
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Nov 12, 2020 00:33
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The state or a state? Also what kind of central planning, I guess? Can you have a central "economic planning office" that plays the country like railroad tycoon without the state? Probably not, that's a hierarchical way of looking at the world and requires an enforcement structure to facilitate it. Could you network information across the entire economy and democratically develop a consensus plan for what we should use our collective labour capacity to achieve, dividing portions of production towards a great collaborative effort? Possibly. That might constitute a form of state, though how coercive it would have to be is up for debate. Certainly you'd imagine it could probably be less coercive and lovely than our current setup.
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Nov 12, 2020 00:53
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The Oldest Man posted:There's a reason why most anarchists talk about coercive hierarchy and not generally coercion full-stop. You can't do anything without being able to make wreckers, bad-faith actors, and the intransigent go along. You might as well throw up your hands and go home as soon as someone says "I think I have should have the freedom to kill you." There are of course exceptions since anarchists gonna anarchist. Sure, but like, there's a question of how institutionally coercive any massive scale organization would be. If you're dealing with millions of people then whole swathes of them could just be a rounding error. It is easy to imagine such an organization doing institutional harm even if it isn't trying to. As I said though I would expect it to be better even if not perfect. Cpt_Obvious posted:I dunno the difference between the state and a state. I would probably respond with a counter-question, can top down planning meet those needs by its very nature? If you put some ideal benevolent government in charge of any nation on earth, and they decided to devote a bunch of the country's resources to helping people outside the country or even to helping the poorest within the country, would they ever be able to do it? Or would the bulk of people in that country view that as an imposition and resist it? Can you force people to care about others by just telling them they have to and threatening them if they don't? Can you wield the structure of our governments to achieve good things or are they structurally limited to doing bad things because their particular brand of coercion is inherently destructive? Can you create societal cohesion out of nothing by government fiat, basically? I don't think you can. Which, incidentally, is why I think universalism is an important part of any government policy. I think welfare for the poorest is a bad approach because it is often very unpopular with people who don't use it, which means that it is very politically convenient to cut welfare programs and you can easily find a significant portion of the population that will support it. Conversely I think things like universal healthcare are popular once implemented because everyone uses it, everyone relies on it, everyone integrates it into their lives. If you are wanting to build a model under something resembling the current political structure, for ensuring people's welfare, it's very important to make it something that as many people as possible will be affected positively by, you have to create common ground and experiences. I don't think you can use the state to coerce people to be charitable, essentially. If you want to use it to help people I think you've got to make the program universal. And of course even that has the issue of where does the state get its resources from to fund those programs? A lot of western countries with good social programs get a lot of their resources from exploiting people in other countries. If you cut that off, could you make things sustainable by extracting the resources from your own people and land? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 01:13
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The idea that involuntary, hierarchically organized societies are not structurally predisposed towards causing the existential threat that is climate change, might also be something Are such societies even capable of recognizing or caring that millions upon millions of people will die, on a societal level? Are their administrators capable of doing anything other than thinking "well I'll probably be OK cos I'm at the top, so we don't need to do anything"? Basically what do you think is the cause of the inaction on climate change if not the way our societies are structured? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 01:30
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Aruan posted:The cat is already out of the bag - climate change does exist and it has been caused. The way to respond to it is not through anarchism. Again, though, are our current societies strucutrally capable of responding to it?
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Nov 12, 2020 01:33
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I can't say I can think of a better answer to the question than taking power out of the hands of the minority and spread it around as much as possible... What is climate change if not the result of a society structured to benefit a handful of people at the expense of everyone else? What is the cause of continued inaction if not the unwillingness to change that model of organization? How can that form of organization possibly not result in killing millions of people? Like I do not get why it's just axiomatically "not the answer"? Like yeah it's a loving difficult answer but what other conclusion can you draw? How else do you square the circle of our oligarchic society being the means by which the ecological price of capitalism has been sidelined for decades? Along with every other price it demands? Who benefits from that if not the minority of people our society is geared around pandering to? How do you not look at that and come to the conclusion that that structure is the cause of the threat, the cause of the lack of action towards the threat? How can you possibly respond to the threat without taking apart the things that cause and support it? How can you fight a thing that is demanded by our society without changing that society? Climate change isn't our society just... going wrong inexplicably, it's an entirely logical end point of how our society works? Everyone and everything must be sacrificed to uphold the hierarchy, that is how our society functions. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 01:43
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Nor is there anything about capitalism or top down socialism that gives the decision makers a reason to give a poo poo either. I am sure either of those ideologies would be more than capable of declaring a great many people to be acceptable losses to preserve "society" and I am equally sure that they would be willing to sacrifice even more people to specifically preserve the specific society in which they remain the decision makers. It is not a perfect solution, but I have far more faith in democratic decision making to maximise the welfare of as many as possible than I do any society where those in charge have a vested interest in preserving their own position of being in charge. I do not think hierarchical societies are capable of maximising human welfare because they will always choose to maximise the perpetuation of the hierarchical structure instead.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:03
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Aruan posted:It seems you're arguing that democratic decision making in this context is the best response because it's the most utilitarian response, but doesn't a threat on the scale of climate change necessitate a response of a scope that requires a level hierarchical leadership that is incompatible with this vision of strict democracy or bottom-up decision making? Or, to provide a counter example to that above (why should a factory owner care about sea levels a thousand miles away from their factory): why should a village a thousand miles from a coast care about climate change, even if its democratically run? As I said, why should the central planners or ultra rich care about either? Why should they care about even the people they could save the lives of if doing that diminishes their own immediate wealth or power? Are they just expected to have a more prominent sense of noblesse oblige than the factory commune? What I am asking is what incentive is there for this top-down response to fix the problem? Do you not look at the lack of action thus far, the delays, the ineffectuality of the responses, and wonder why that is? Like do you think the political pushback against climate change is just an inexplicable anomaly or is it not better understood as the logical result of a system whereby people can gain immediate power and wealth from denying it and saying it's a hoax and pushing the burden of it onto other, poorer countries? At the very least I think that capitalist overproduction occurs because of that lack of democratization, that is why we make so much useless poo poo, that is why people have to go to work so much to pay rent which the extraction of is supported by the legal system that exists to entrench the power of the wealthy. That is why people are made to do inefficient commutes because capitalism is predicated on poo poo like land values and rent and selling cars to people and lovely sandwiches from chain stores and why they're desperate to get people back to working in offices rather than from home because the arse has collapsed out of their loving racket while people have been working more efficiently from home. I think democratization has a far stronger chance to scale back human economic activity and production than either capitalism or state socialism, and I think that there is also greater opportunity for democratic organization to create interdependence between different regions and thereby a desire for mutual assistance, rather than just letting everyone loving drown to save wherever the most expensive real estate is, which is already not far removed from what capitalism normally loving does. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 02:21
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 17:00 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm trying to engage with this discussion but I'm kind of lost as to why there seems to be this impression that "top-down socialism" is not also democratized? I have no faith in the ability of the elected representatives in large, hierarchical societies to actually look out for the people below them. I think those sorts of socieities regardless of their professed ideals, structurally encourage the privileged few to lie to and exploit the majority, via the media, state or bourgeois and via the very nature of centralization of power. There may be individual exceptions but I do not think the majority of such a government can actually care about the people it governs. I do not think people can have that much empathy and even if they could, the very attempt to govern millions of people from a central government means people will be discarded simply because it is so easy to do. I am also rather skeptical that society that practice things like mass incarceration can really be considered "democratized" and not simply oligarchies. Why do things like that happen if not to protect the power structure and its component people? As others have noted, I think the existence of things like that are what lead to the slide back towards capitalism, nationalism, and the exploitation of the majority at the whim of the minority. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Nov 12, 2020 |
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Nov 12, 2020 12:55
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