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readingatwork posted:While watching this I had a question in mind: "in the ideal society how do the toilets get cleaned?" and I never got a great answer. Nobody is going to go around town cleaning toilets for fun*. You will need to goose people into doing it somehow either through coercion or (more ideally) though increased compensation. Even then it's not exactly something you'll love doing. One partial answer to this could be automation. Full luxury gay space communism could develop some kind of toilet-roomba, and then the job would be baby-sitting the robot rather than scrubbing the bowl yourself. It might be a pretty chill job if that's all it was, you could just watch cat videos on nationalized Youtube while the robot does its thing, but perhaps efficiency would demand that you'd need to do other janitorial work too.
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Nov 5, 2020 07:38
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 12:51 |
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Somfin posted: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. I'm not sure if this is the same thing, but a trope that gets thrown around a lot in bad faith "debunks" of socialism is that the government will take away your toothbrush, or that you have to share it with your neighbour. There is a distinction between private and personal property. If I own a tooth brush, or a book, or even a computer (maybe?), that is fine in socialism or communism, since it's my personal property that doesn't take away anything from anyone, nor can I use a tooth brush to oppress workers to my will. Private property would be me owning a steel mill, a uranium mine, or a cattle ranch, and employing people to utilize this property to generate wealth for me. Consumerism is a sickness inflicted on people by capitalism, in that they have a manufactured desire to own the latest smart phone, and the "watch" that goes along with it, and so forth. And these wadgets are also used as a social signifier of one's "worth" in a consumerist society, so it's understandable that the brunch crowd get upset when it's hinted that actually you are not the car you own or the watch you wear.
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Nov 11, 2020 21:54
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Are we really arguing that Stalinism wasn't actually a thing? That the man didn't rule the country with an iron grip, during and after the "Great Patriotic War"? That Lenin didn't explicitly slag him off and told his supporters that Stalin was bad news in his testament? Okay then!
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Nov 14, 2020 05:14
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witchy posted:The "Lenin's testament" you're talking about is mostly likely a fake (per Kotkin). The other stuff Ferrinus is claiming is off though, as Stalin definitely did leverage his position as party secretary and close confidant of Lenin to consolidate power even before his formal ascension to leader of the USSR. Characterizing the succession as an open referendum ignores that it was pretty much a factional struggle among the elite central committee. The other thing about the NKVD remaining stagnant also has me scratching my head when it was disbanded in 1930 and then reconstituted wholesale in 1934 with the OGPU rolled into it to boot. My bad on the testament. Though writers like Lewin have argued that there's other evidence of Lenin's disillusionment about Stalin, but I suppose it doesn't really matter either way since Josif made his way to the top anyway, and killed off pretty much everyone who could've even tried to stop him. Acerbatus posted:How, then, does communism improve on the current system where a cult of personality can dictate everything? These probably aren't the best of examples, but Brezhnev was a joke while he was still alive, despite attempting to manufacture a cult of personality (which obviously didn't turn out so great), and Andropov was very much a faceless technocrat leader, though his earlier actions may have given him an "aura" of Bad Dude, Do Not Mess With, I suppose. At the same time, "Western democracy" was enraptured by the likes of Reagan, Bush 1 and Thatcher, not exactly shining examples of humanity there. And if that is too whataboutey, we could just posit that the end goal of full luxury communism would be installing an AI to actually govern human affairs, but there's a lot of cultural baggage against that sort of thing.
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Nov 14, 2020 12:38
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How! posted:There is nothing a 3d printer can do that is worth a poo poo. Hope that helps. For what it's worth, I 3D printed a lot of throw-away lab equipment type stuff at one point, because if I needed a custom fit for a certain sized item, it was just plain easier to make a CAD model and wait a few hours, and then get to business. But YMMV I guess!
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Nov 23, 2020 08:37
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 12:51 |
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Ferrinus posted:The rate of profit is simply expressed as s/(c+v), where s is surplus value, c is constant capital, and v is variable capital. If you divide the numerator and denominator by v, then you get (s/v)/((c/v)+1); that is, the numerator is the rate of surplus value, and the denominator is the ratio of constant to variable capital plus one (don't ask me what the "one" is, I don't know myself). v/v = 1 
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Feb 26, 2021 08:34
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