|
human garbage bag posted:
Are these frictionless spherical managers and employees? Managers can not only fire employees (by creating a paper trail of bad reviews), they can also just make their lives a living hell by denying them advancement and giving them the worst tasks/shifts available and denying them all of the perks.
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 05:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 15:59 |
|
|
Ruggan posted:This. Or the 99 doctors agree to pay the janitor a pittance and the janitor has no real say - but they can’t get any other job in the area. This method doesn’t seem to help minority disenfranchised groups. Depends on what type of political organization underpins your socialism. If it's a vanguard party-state, they will probably mandate that everyone makes certain amounts determined by a central planning organization (or draws a certain number of goods vouchers, or whatever) and they send the cops or paramilitaries to gently caress you up if you try to horde. If it's more like a syndicalist union federation, then the grocery store federation gets together with the other point-of-sale federated unions and freezes out the gizmo factory's distribution channels until they get an agreed cut of those proceeds. But overall, the answer you're looking for to "what happens if group x tries to use local advantage to gently caress over group y" in a more syndicalist type of political economy is "general strike". An injury to one is an injury to all after all.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 05:28
|
|
|
BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Oh yeah, I'd say most societies have room for anti-social behavior, because there are lots of antisocial people who still live in those societies. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to suggest that a significant percentage of humanity just wants to be left alone. Treating that as some kind of sickness to be cured, that's the kind of scary stuff I hear people say about socialism, and I don't want to believe it because those people believe all kinds of wacky conspiracy nonsense. But if you're telling me the society's goals will engulf my own if mine are too selfish, that brings up questions of enforcement that lead scary places, and I'm left wondering if there's some truth to the classic suburbanite fears. This is sort of a weird question since if you just want to keep to yourself, draw your paycheck or goods voucher, do your work, and punch a clock then the only difference for you under socialism vs capitalism is that the rest of society - the engaged part - is going to try make sure what you are taking home equates to the value you added through your labor.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 05:31
|
|
|
readingatwork posted:
I'm curious how this take contacts the reality of the EZLN and survives, or do you not consider them "real" anarchists?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 05:39
|
|
|
BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Yeah but that's the whole point: what if my work, or even my entire existence, adds only subjective or even dubious value? What then? However, all the people in your community for whom you busk are continuously impoverished by the value extraction of capitalism. They might want to put more in your hat or to provide other benefits to the community at large (like make access to the hospital something they make free for all by communally paying the doctors and the nurses and janitors, or provide free meals to all no questions asked by providing a communal fund to the cooks), but they lack the economic means to make those things real without destituting themselves. Or they might not - socialism as an economic order to things doesn't solve every problem that exists. For example, as an economic order socialism in a vacuum doesn't address things like bodily autonomy, racism, and so on. That's generally why "socialism" in common parlance is usually hiding a few other descriptors that attach a political ordering to the economic component. Ultimately, the basic needs of society like food, water, and so on need to be provided for the society to be stable. Some societies are so impoverished that they will struggle to provide those even in a perfectly equitable distribution method. However, the amount of surplus modern society generates that is siphoned off by the owning class is so staggeringly huge that recapturing it for labor allows the possibility - though not the guarantee - of a society that can easily fund programs of universal kindness (for food, housing, medical care, and a no-questions-asked stipend) such that an artist who wants to just do a walkaway and go paint in their apartment is free to do that.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 06:09
|
|
|
readingatwork posted:Which is a big problem if you ask me because one of Capitalism's biggest selling points is that you can do the stupid thing you like and potentially make ten million dollars doing it. What does Communism offer a YouTube video creator? This is a prime example of all the value of work (that in this case being ad revenue) being siphoned off by the capital owners who then then pay a pittance to the laborers in comparison. You can make the exact same comparison to professional sports teams. Labor is labor. If the art is valued (this being in direct contradiction to the example above where no one values the art being produced), that value is being stolen right now.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 06:23
|
|
|
readingatwork posted:I don't know what this is but I am interested in hearing more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Zapatista_Autonomous_Municipalities They're an anarchist-adjacent popular indigenous insurgent movement in Mexico that's managed to more or less take control of about half of the state of Chiapas through ultra-low-intensity warfare.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 06:37
|
|
|
Pentecoastal Elites posted:
Actually under capitalism it's pretty likely that some monied individuals will dial 911 and have their bought-and-paid for goon squad come and gently caress you up if you do a single thing they don't like. The economic asymmetry of the society allows the Haves to dictate everything to the Have Nots; they don't need to wait for loud artists to die.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 06:40
|
|
|
Ytlaya posted:
A hospital contains a few highly compensated doctors (attending physicians and medical directors), a few more slave-labor doctors typically poo poo money (residents and fellows), a lot of RNs, PAs, nurses, PTs, therapists, pharmacy techs, and other para-doctory type skilled labor who earn less than the top echelon of doctors but frequently more than the residency/fellowship chain gang doctors, and a lot of support staff like receptionists, cafeteria workers, schedulers, orderlies, and so on.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 06:56
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted: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" Allende's government in Chile was using computerized central planning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn quote:The system was most useful in October 1972, when about 40,000 striking truck drivers blocked the access streets that converged towards Santiago. The strike was supported by the Patria y Libertad group and at least partly funded by private donors who had received money from the CIA.[3] According to Gustavo Silva (executive secretary of energy in CORFO), the system's telex machines helped organize the transport of resources into the city with only about 200 trucks driven by strike-breakers, lessening the potential damage caused by the 40,000 striking truck drivers.[4] Obviously a socialist using a computer to beat the CIA couldn't be allowed so they had him couped.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 17:35
|
|
|
Slanderer posted:What counts as "hoarding" is entirely subjective. It's not complicated!! What counts as being greedy depends on who you ask, their current wealth and a bunch of social factors. You can't eliminate greed because greed is redefined based on material circumstances. The point isn't that a socialist economy will define and ban hoarding as a universal concept, it's that the reward incentive structure to hoard capital wealth that exists in capitalism won't. Socialist economies will still have people trying to collect all the bottlecaps, keep more food than they 'need,' and so on. What a socialist economy makes extremely difficult is the snowball effect where hoarding control of factories and data centers and so on provides an unbounded, compounding ability to dictate terms to everyone else and thus incentivizes that specific type of capital hoarding.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 20:55
|
|
|
Slanderer posted:now replace "squirrels" with kulaks and "food" with grain, and an interesting thing happens Pentecoastal Elites posted:
If we're going to allow a discourse of "a socialist country did murder, therefore socialism is murder" in this thread then I'm just going to reply to every one of these posts with the historical record of how the US sponsored or directly conducted a genocide on behalf of capital interests since as we all know and agree, if your nation-state nominally subscribes to a mode of economic organization and does bad things, that mode of economic organization is bad.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 21:05
|
|
|
BoldFrankensteinMir posted:So if my own personal rinky-dink abuses of capitalism aren't really what we're out to defeat, what can I do to move us towards these transformative overarching goals? If all we're changing is stuff at the top, I don't see how I can have any effect on it (but I'd love to be proven wrong!) You're not a capitalist unless you own things for a living. I'll say that again: if you do labor either directly for others (via painting houses, busking, shoeing horses, sucking dicks, or designing websites), or you draw a wage from somewhere, you're not a capitalist. No matter how much money you have, if you are not capable of supporting and growing your livelihood without your own labor, you are not a capitalist because you are not living off of the value stolen via the capital wealth siphon. And as such, you are not really able to benefit from the run-away snowball effect of capital accumulation. People aspire to this via investment, savings, 401k, buying real estate, etc. but only a very tiny fraction of the population actually achieves a capital runaway where their wealth grows without limit without their own labor. Even if you believe you can retire and live a lavish lifestyle on your investment savings and returns, if there's a "planning threshold" where those savings eventually give out, you're not a capitalist and economically you are closer and have more common interests with the guy in the gutter than you are to Jeff Bezos. Everyone else is a member of the lower class and is just bribed (with a large salary and some thin promise of protection from deprivation) and/or propagandized (via ethno-nationalism most typically) to sympathize more with capital interests than with others around them and their various plights. As far as what you can do, check out the mutual aid and organizing thread at the top of this very forum. Solidarity starts at arm's length.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 21:17
|
|
|
Slanderer posted:It's similarly easy to solve the problem of prison abolition if you ignore rapists Prisons protect women from rapists about as well as capitalism protects people from economic bad actors, yes.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 21:30
|
|
|
uncop posted:The capitalist middle class literally lives on those dividends just as it lives on the compensation for its own labor, so telling it to refuse those dividends and wholeheartedly join the workers is naive at best, and doesn't work in any case. The capitalist middle class is not a fixed quantity, either in size/importance or stability. In some times and places, the material reality is that the capital dividend (or bribe from the rulers of the social order, however doctrinaire you want to be about framing it) is so large and so distributed that the extracted class simply does not have the numbers or the material ability to affect change. In others, the opposite is true. Mao's take was right for China in the early 20th century; it is not universally right. quote: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. 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.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 22:15
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted: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. Fascism is also a solution to collapsing material conditions! For a few people, anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 22:21
|
|
|
Slanderer posted:Cool, then come up with a better solution in your policy proposal instead of treating even the most anodyne critiques of it as bad faith attacks. This is a bad faith attack, in both venues. It's simply diverting attention from real ongoing harms that have solutions toward harms that exist currently and may well still exist in the future in either case. It's also a pretty good example of middle class and white perfectionism, on both issues. "I won't buy into your project that <prevents your family's being made homeless/prevents your incarceration for life for use as slave labor/prevents your children starving> because <insert issue unsolved in current system that I find more important to solve than your issues>." The equivalent line of attack in the debate over slavery in the antebellum United States was that there was just no feasible way to guarantee freed slaves would find productive employment rather than turning to crime and vice. If that sounds like an absurd rationale to keep people in bondage in retrospect now, so too will arguments that some people will act in bad faith in a socialist economy. They will; so what? But ultimately the goal of socialists and abolitionists both is not to convince everyone in the middle class and everyone who is white that their issues will be solved by the change, it's to create the conditions under which the obstructionists and the wreckers do not have enough material power to stop the change from occurring. Co-opting some of the white and middle class to those respective causes can be a part of that strategy, but it's not absolutely necessary and co-opting the whole of those groups is a laughable objective since many of them have the totality of their material interests vested in the status quo.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 22:39
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted: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. I think the Posadist wildcard variable in play that's genuinely novel is that capital is going to make the planet more and more uninhabitable over time and if you make common cause with that agenda or fool yourself into thinking that liberalism can (or would even want) to reign that in enough stave off disaster, you're more or less condemning yourself to a collapse in conditions at best and signing your own death warrant at worst. Hell, I'm no different than any other human being in my material self-interest. I wouldn't have the leanings I do if I wasn't so sure the leopards were going to eat my face too.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 22:50
|
|
|
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? This is why engagement with revolutionary theory is part of most left movements as well as direct aid. Workers under capitalism exist in a state of constant deprivation by way of their labor value being siphoned off, but the ability to mass-message belongs to capital as well (through advertising, schooling, newsmedia, etc.) So they can and do just make up other reasons why deprivation exists: laziness and moral failings (as a way to blame individuals for their own deprivation) and often domestic or foreign enemies as well, and use the mass media apparatus to make those the consensus explanations for social ills. People in a state of deprivation have little ability (time or means) to dedicate to developing contrary opinions. So any group with revolutionary aims on the economic order must both a) provide direct aid to help remedy these harms, demonstrate that better things are possible, and to give people the material ability (through not being starved or freezing to death, frequently) to contemplate a larger program for their own betterment and b) provide a theoretical grounding for the larger changes they propose as part of that larger program. That's why it's a cliche that every mutual aid group is full of anarchists and/or communists and/or anarcho-communists.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2020 23:25
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:that is to say, the principles of Marxist socialism are not contrary or in spite of normal human behavior; they are in spite of your behavior. as a poor american it's almost distastefully self-centered to consider yourself before others, at least in my family. when you can help others, it is your duty. to me, socialism is about extending that duty to help to everyone. capitalist liberal society encouraging self-first is against not only my principles, but my basic instincts That's not exactly how I read Mao here. I think he's saying that liberalism is corrosive to a revolutionary party and you shouldn't let liberals in it because it's like putting sugar in your gas tank. IE, keep your cafe communists the gently caress outta the vanguard.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 02:07
|
|
|
BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Yeah, this is where you lost me friend. Trying to paint Mao as a champion for the interests of others is just flat-out ignorant. He starved his own people and rewrote the history books to cover it up. None of that is admirable or worth emulating. If you think the political philosophy of mass murderers is bad by the transitive property I have a book called The Jakarta Method for you here
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 06:32
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:
It might help if you talked more about what those specific aspects are that you like and feel are "worth saving," since liberal/neoliberalism encompasses a lot of things and in addition to that it's hard to decouple the dead trees philosophy from the observed reality of liberalism in practice where the dead trees philosophy starts to look like a rationalization for a lot of bad faith action on the part of the powerful. 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. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Nov 6, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 07:51
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:- free trade [I feel too uninformed to have a good take. I find a lot of anti-free trade rhetoric to be xenophobic/racist, but also not sure how free trade exists outside the context of imperialism and neoliberalism] A lot of anti-free trade rhetoric is xenophobic and racist. However, the second part of your gut reaction is basically correct without much further addition. Giving capital owners access to the labor, markets, and resources of countries without the political and economic power to resist them past the border has resulted in full power nation-scale looting with a side order of genocide more or less every single time, going all the way back to the OGs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company And it never stopped and continues right up to this day. Free trade is "free" in the sense that it removes barriers to capital interests going buck wild on exploitable labor, resources, and markets. But consider the following: why are capital flows meant to be free under liberalism while labor is still subject to the boundaries of the nation-state? Why does "free trade" involve protected and privileged legal status for capital when it operates in economically underdeveloped areas? It's because "free trade" is branding for a specific type of brutal exploitation packaged in a way that makes it seem like we're Doing a Freedom and not just continuing to force people off their land and into slavery to take the poo poo in the ground under them and chopping hands off and burning villages when they don't agree to any of that. In conclusion, Avatar was a documentary sent back in time from the future and that's why James Cameron can't deliver the sequels. Edit: I forgot to mention that it's also explicitly a weapon to disempower workers in the developed world by sending their work to places less able to organize resistance, so it's super cool for that reason too. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Nov 6, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 08:48
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:the short answer is why third world maoism is not actually a meme ideology; while typically incoherent angry rhetoric, it's a direct reaction to people have been poo poo on by Dole Fruit or Exxon etc for generations Thoughts on communism and the periphery by My Favorite Communist. quote:The reason for my joining the French Socialist Party was that these “ladies and gentlemen” - as I called my comrades at that moment - has shown their sympathy towards me, towards the struggle of the oppressed peoples. But I understood neither what was a party, a trade-union, nor what was socialism nor communism.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 09:20
|
|
|
The previous post is mine but better so nevermind
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 18:57
|
|
|
Sharks Eat Bear posted:Thanks again, and I promise I'm not being intentionally dense or contrarian on this topic, fwiw. Yeah I mean the idealism grift is that you can do both of these things at the same time. A) start a new country with the following statement of intent: quote:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. B) Own slaves and rape them "And yet you participate in society! Gotcha!" rhetoric is a feature of idealists but not materialists because yeah, of course you loving participate in an unjust society when the other route involves exclusion, deprivation, and death. The idea of a social contract is corrosive because in practical application it's used as a justification to say, in effect, "Well, you're not in armed rebellion, so you consent to what we're doing and therefore we have the consent of the governed and if that changes we'll kill you"
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 19:10
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:How do I buy the communist coffee? I really do like nice coffee but I can rarely afford it. AFAIK this is legit although the Zapatistas are not exactly communist. https://schoolsforchiapas.org/store/coffee-corn-and-agricultural/zapatista-coffee/ Also you can get a painting of this EZLN hummingbird imagining a better world 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 19:35
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:There is a sense in which "consent of the governed" is a valid claim even when made by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, because the working class always outnumbers the ruling class (until they become one and the same, and maybe not even then depending on how you count the peasantry) and there is always some sense in which a critical mass of cashiers, truck drivers, fruit pickers, office drones, etc. are willing to get up in the morning and go do their lovely jobs because as much as it sucks they think it's better than the alternative. Even a government as insanely predatory and dysfunctional as that of the USA has enough passive and/or active support by segments of the middle and working classes that it'd be wrong to describe it as purely run by intimidation or something. Of course, the bargain all those proles and petit-bourgeoisie are making is made in the context of repressive forces which might be brought to bear against them in addition to the ability to nibble on trickling-down imperial spoils or whatever. This issue also applies interpersonally under capitalism. How do you know a romantic relationship is legitimate, consent-based, and not based on intimidation and coercion? If the woman is the chattel property of the man, your modern American liberal would say that's obviously illegitimate. If she's his corporate subordinate, they'd probably still say that but less emphatically. If she's simply unable to materially support herself and her children in our hosed system so she stays with a man who is cruel to her, what would they say then? What if it was emotional cruelty but never physical? What if there was no explicit cruelty at all but he simply does none of the housework even though she works as many hours as he does for wages and she grinds her teeth and lives with that? The facts that there's an unresolvable gap in material power (both personal and indirect) and that she's constantly making every calculation in her whole life in that context in order to support her material needs and those of her children because the other alternative under capitalism is some level of deprivation is simply not considered. "Legitimate" and "consent" are idealistic attributes that allow an exploitative system to cloak itself and its harms by pretending that the economic and political variables that went into getting the more powerful party getting the "yes" from the less powerful party didn't exist.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 19:51
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:This is a great point, and it's always worth nothing the way that capitalism filters down into our interpersonal relationships to both poison them by degrees and generate feedback loops such that not living under capitalism becomes harder and harder to imagine or pursue. This is also why "progressive" liberals are basically just trying over and over again to fit a round peg in a square hole, watching it bounce off and fall on the floor, only to pick it back up to try again. They see some of the toxic outcomes of capitalism and go "whoa! women only make 75 cents for every dollar men make! that's really unfair!" and want to do something about it but are ideologically blocked from asking a) why it's so deadly important that that matters and b) what systems contribute to that asymmetry of economic power. So you end up with solutions like quotas (liberal social dem solution) or mentoring programs/bias training (neoliberal solution) that do exactly gently caress-all but help a few more bourgeoise ladies up a rung or two on the ladder , which doesn't solve the problem to begin with, and then you constantly get revanchist white guys with economic power who use it to tunnel under the supports for even those ineffective programs because you haven't addressed any of the root causes. This isn't to say that workers owning the means of production is a panacea to chauvinism, but it seems to me to be a necessary ingredient in a solution.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 20:35
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:The power dynamics of our capitalist system are honestly the worst part. I'd be able to live with making some piece of poo poo boss rich if there was an alternative better than 'starve in the street'. There's a type of ordoliberal that groks that they could pay the bribe/dividend down to the bottom (or closer to it) via UBI, free medical care, social housing, labor protections and so on and hold on to power "forever" because a person with a full belly and a warm house and some guarantees of safety and a retirement and some basic entertainments is never going to revolt against the system. They similarly grok that the state can act continuously to try to break up accumulations of capital and prevent the onset of late capitalism. This is more or less how Germany operates. It also used to be me. However, that a) doesn't address colonial capitalism at all, and b) it's still unable to resolve the core contradiction of capitalism, which means it's only a matter of time before the truce collapses, accumulation goes into a critical runaway, and the capitalists start turning the crank on the meatgrinder again to keep up their profits. It's sort of like playing endless defense; the ordoliberal state has to succeed every time prevent disaster while the capitalists only have to succeed once.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 20:50
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:To be concrete, the principal contradiction of capitalism is rooted in the fact it requires growth to sustain itself. This in itself is not necessarily bad, but if you believe in the labor theory of value, a curious thing happens. Since value comes from labor, your improvements in process don't actually improve your value: if you invented a paperclip machine that was perfectly able by itself to take resources and produce paperclips with no issues, your produced paperclips instantly are only worth as much as the resource itself (barring monopolies etc.). But, because of the gains in efficiency previous methods of production are no longer viable. So, as efficiency grows due to discoveries and progress, more capital is required to start extracting value, and therefore, proportionally you can extract less of that value. 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. Thank you, this is a great plain-language description of the phenomenon. One specific (relevant to America especially) point on this is that the fall in the rate of profit for capital will inevitably result in every invention being applied to prop up the rate of profitability. In addition to the ones you mentioned like putting workers into a juice machine to wring out the last drop of blood and selling consumers inferior products, that also includes increasing financialization and the widespread adoption of dangerous financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations and insurance swaps and ever more investment being applied to totally worthwhile projects such as "if we get our banking data center a thousand feet closer to the stock exchange data center, we can make arbitrage profits from the .01 millisecond latency advantage we have over other market actors" and "we need to hire the top fifty software engineers from every reputable school every year to optimize our high-frequency-trading algorithms." Liberals will either choose to defend these as somehow adding value in the form of financial liquidity, or decry them as a step too far, but the point is that the incentive to take resources from people in order to build ever-more-pointless profit-taking devices is ultimately unstoppable and the only bound on it is the collapse of the social order.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 21:16
|
|
|
Sweetyuck posted:I think this is a good point. I'm not familiar with D&D's sympathy (or hostility) toward Marxism, but having a more thorough direction could benefit the thread. As it stands, a thread about "leftist" theory is pretty vague. American democrats consider themselves left of their conservative counterpart, but anyone with a little political literacy would call bullshit on that easily. It would be a lot smoother, I believe, to be up front with the thread's intention. Granted, it seems the point of the thread really is engage with Marxism and then theory in relation to Marxism. This, hopefully, would curtail those "communism killed my dog" posts and endless posting about Chomsky, Foucault, etc. as revolutionary. I think "Marxism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Anarchy" is a pretty good outline of the subjects and a lot of non-Marxist Left theory and praxis is relevant specifically as a critique of Marxism-Leninism so making this thread a Marxist Theory Only thread seems too narrow to me. I think Falstaff was grumping that a lot of posts were "will I be forbidden from playing guitar under socialism?" and "are socialist biotruths a thing?" type tangents, and he's doing real effort-posts about relatively complex texts that can easily be buried under that kind of thing.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 00:05
|
|
|
I actually think the guitar guy was trying to engage in good faith FWIW.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 00:25
|
|
|
Falstaff posted:I'm open to the possibility that I'm being unnecessarily curmudgeonly. It wouldn't be the first time. I think you get standing to say "hey can we talk focus on x" when you're obviously spending time and energy on that, but I also think it's worth the time and energy to attempt to address superficial but good faith questions about socialism from people who don't have any knowledge. The ground state consensus of our society is liberalism. Welcoming curious walk-bys and meeting them where they're at is (within reason) also a worthwhile endeavor.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 01:17
|
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 01:49
|
|
|
dex_sda posted:Better than mainstream economics have ever done as far as predictive power goes - peep the 2018 nobel prize for economics if you want to recognize how much of a joke that is. I don't know if this is what you meant since it was awarded to two people that year quote:According to the original formulation of DICE, staying below the 2°C as agreed by the Paris agreement would cost more in mitigation investments than would be saved in damage from climate change. An updated damage function revised this conclusion, showing that a warming of around 2°C would be "optimal", depending on the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases.[35] Lmao
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 02:32
|
|
|
Acerbatus posted:I'm not sure if I can agree with that, considering the dust bowl was a natural phenomena American farmers created the dust bowl in a matter of a few years through mass mismanagement of the land. quote:With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.[4] During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. In fact, the US government even promoted this through direct economic incentives (Homestead Act) and capitalist land speculators promoted it as well through propagandist claims that cultivation had permanently altered the climate of the Great Plains to make it more attractive to farmers with the "rain follows the plow" sloganeering campaign.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 05:59
|
|
|
Whether or not I believe in the psychohistory-adjacent tendencies of Marxism, that's a bit of a fallacious argument. Thermodynamics predicts that entropy can only increase and yet in local systems it can appear not to for millions out billions of years because of outside inputs.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 19:20
|
|
|
Falstaff posted:
I think anything can be commodified even if no one's figured out how to do it yet. I didn't think guaranteed entropy had exchange value but then bitcoin happened.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 19:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 15:59 |
|
|
Somfin posted: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. I'm sure other people will have different ideas, but my defining feature of "neoliberal" is a post-Keynesian economic outlook. IE, the government should not "manipulate" the economy via spending programs because they distort the market and cause bad unforeseen outcomes, the market is a force of good generally both because it is 'optimal' and because it increases choice (which is itself an a priori good), and government deficits and debt are bad. I most often spot them via the inclusion of market ideology and terminology in non-economics domains. IE, school choice, being able to choose a healthcare plan, "marketplace of ideas," and "the laboratories of democracy" are all flags that someone has internalized a market-centric view of the entire society and is defining "good" as "more market control" and "bad" as "less market control." If someone with that mindset is espousing some kind of government regulation, it's almost always going to be in service of opening more things to market exploitation, like municipal broadband pre-emption laws or using free trade laws to enable business interests to "open markets" (read: stripmine) areas that are trying to resist that. Edit: I think another way I would characterize it is "faith-based laissez faire economics." The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Nov 10, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2020 01:36
|
|