Unthinking Majority wrote:
I don't know anything specific about that case, nor do I care enough to learn, but people should have freedom of speech, protest, and assembly. People should be free to organize and protest peacefully without state violence.
Good to hear. I'd just like to point out that this is standard operating procedure for the state, *any* state -- as soon as organized rebellion, like from the 'Yellow Vests' in France, begins to challenge its power, the state uses violence and physical force. Consider Palestine, etc. The use of violence from the state is inherent to the capitalist state's interest in maintaining its own rule.
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Ok Let's say there's a proletariat revolution. Where would new businesses, owned by workers, get investment money, and what would be the rewards for such risks be?
Well this, too, is a misnomer -- while *some* advocate an ill-conceived 'market socialism', my position is that markets, and all currency / exchange values need to be eliminated as quickly as possible, since that's a 'hands-off' approach to economy, the 'invisible hand'. As seen in my 'Emergent Central Planning' illustration, there can be individual / consumer daily *prioritization* of ranked items (#1, #2, #3, etc.), which, mass-aggregated, can reveal to the public information about where people's political and consumer preferences are, over any given geographical area(s). This information can then be used by liberated laborers for their decision as to what production policy to actually fulfill, through their gifted efforts for the public good. (All productive machinery / factories would be *collectivized*, so what would remain is policy-by-policy decisions and scheduling for who gets to use what factories, for the fulfillment of what policy package.)
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Who gets to work as an usher at a sports stadium (awesome job) and who gets to work as a garbage collector (shitty job)? Do we reward someone who works harder or more productively? What's the incentive for doing such?
Yes. This is why I developed the 'labor credits' instrument, which is basically an 'IOU' that applies to liberated-labor work hours *only*, at some rate of labor credits per hour, per work role (a 'multiplier'). If the communistic gift economy can operate entirely without the use of labor credits, then fine, but if not, then the passing-forward of labor credits from liberated laborers to liberated laborers confers a kind of *political* power in that post-capitalist context, since it provides the work-role organizing / 'funding' function that is done by wealthy capitalist investors today, under capitalism.
The idea here is that if really no one wants to work around garbage -- and society would then have a *collective* incentive to *automate* all such work roles, to eliminate the need for human labor around them -- then the labor credits multiplier for such would ultimately *float* higher, to provide a supply-and-demand dynamic that means those who *do* do those roles, at higher rates of labor credit compensation, would receive proportionately greater social organizing power in that society, going-forward. Here's an excerpt from the F.A.Q.:
-> Why should anyone give a shit about labor credits?
Let's say that 'work-from-home mattress testing' is the *easiest* work role ever known, and so the multiplier for it is a '1' -- one hour of liberated-labor yields 1 labor credit.
'Spreading manure on a field' happens to be a '4' according to the mass work-role exit survey, but, as things turn out, people have *not* yet automated this kind of farmwork, yet *many* people are demanding beer, which requires this role, and other kinds of farmwork, for its production.
While engineering students and a worldwide legion of hobbyists unobtrusively work in the background on automating this task once-and-for-all, some others note the disparity between supply and demand and opportunistically announce that *they* will do this kind of work, to produce an abundance of beer for the greater region, but only at a multiplier rate of '6'.
Why would *anyone* give a shit about labor credits and agree to do shitwork, even for an increased rate of labor credits, you ask -- ?
Because anyone who can command a *premium* of labor credits, as from higher multiplier rates, are effectively gaining and consolidating their control of society's *reproduction of labor*. Most likely there would be social ('political') factionalism involved, where those who are most 'socially concerned' or 'philosophically driven' would be coordinating to cover as much *unwanted* work territory as possible, all for the sake of political consolidation. Increased numbers of labor credits in-hand would allow a group to *direct* what social work roles are 'activated' (funded), going-forward.
Perhaps it's about colonizing another planet, or about carving high-speed rail networks that criss-cross and connect all seven continents underground. Maybe it's a certain academic approach to history and the sciences, with a cache of pooled labor credits going towards that school of educational instruction. Perhaps it's an *art* faction ascending, funding all kinds of large-scale projects that decorate major urban centers in never-before-seen kinds of ways.
Whatever the program and motivation, society as a whole would be collectively *ceding ground* if it didn't keep the 'revolution' and collectivism going, with a steady pace of automation that precluded whole areas of production from social politics altogether. Technology / automation empowers the *individual* and takes power out of the hands of groups that enjoy cohesiveness based on sheer *numbers* and a concomitant control of social reproduction in their ideological direction. The circulation and usage of labor credits would be a live formal tracking of how *negligent* the social revolution happened to be at any given moment, just as the consolidation of private property is today against the forces of revolutionary politics and international labor solidarity.
https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338---
ckaihatsu wrote:
Wow. I didn't initially think you were a moralist, but here we are. So you're in the camp of 'Stalinist busywork for all, and let the surplus rot.'
Unthinking Majority wrote:
How is the current system Stalinist if the government isn't forcing anyone to do anything?
I didn't say the *current* system is Stalinist -- I was referring to the socio-political values that you were expressing. The current system is *capitalist*, with private profits being the motivating factor for all productive / economic activity.
Overproduction is the accumulation of unsalable inventories in the hands of businesses. Overproduction is a relative measure, referring to the excess of production over consumption. The tendency for an overproduction of commodities to lead to economic collapse is specific to the capitalist economy. In previous economic formations, an abundance of production created general prosperity. However, in the capitalist economy, commodities are produced for monetary profit. This so-called profit motive, the core of the capitalist economy, creates a dynamic whereby an abundance of commodities has negative consequences. In essence, an abundance of commodities disrupts the conditions for the creation of profit.
The overproduction of commodities forces businesses to reduce production in order to clear inventories. Any reduction in production implies a reduction in employment. A reduction in employment, in turn, reduces consumption. As overproduction is the excess of production above consumption, this reduction in consumption worsens the problem. This creates a "feed-back loop" or "vicious cycle", whereby excess inventories force businesses to reduce production, thereby reducing employment, which in turn reduces the demand for the excess inventories. The general reduction in the level of prices (deflation) caused by the law of supply and demand also forces businesses to reduce production as profits decline. Reduced profits render certain fields of production unprofitable.
Inevitability
Karl Marx outlined the inherent tendency of capitalism towards overproduction in his seminal work, Das Kapital.
According to Marx, in capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of "reserve army of labour" and of “poverty in the midst of plenty”, or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overproduction
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Unthinking Majority wrote:
It's not realistic to think we won't be wasteful under another system. Sometimes supply outstrips demand. Businesses now have every incentive to eliminate that.
Yes, I agree that capitalism tends to do better under conditions of *scarcity*, but it also ultimately leads to an elitist *abundance* of goods and services, as outlined in the 'overproduction' entry above.
Unthinking Majority wrote:
I believe in liberalism, so I don't think might makes right.
Would you care to address the dynamic of capitalist *imperialism*, then? Just as with the state's domestic use of force and violence against organized labor strikes, it uses force and violence to oppress and subjugate *foreign* workers, through its militaries. Take a look at what the U.S. did to Iraq and Libya in the past two decades, under protection-racket pretexts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraqhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Pos ... _Civil_WarUnthinking Majority wrote:
I'm not saying youth can't have money, i'm saying they shouldn't be spoiled, and they should earn it. Letting any child have a hefty allowance without doing work teaches them nothing except that if they do nothing they'll get rewarded for it.
My argument is that since there's no level playing field ('equality') in the economy, it's the wealthy who are the *most* spoiled, since they merely socialize around business matters to provide the social-organization for how and what kinds of production are greenlighted, and they profit off of this. There's no 'earning' going on there, since the rich don't do any commodity-productive work. Until there's some kind of economic equality and a societal ethos of economic egalitarianism, there *isn't* any, because it's a *plutocracy* that prevails as to who gets to use capital, and who doesn't.
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Unthinking Majority wrote:
If I could I would turn the world back to a pre-industrial time, a time of struggle and not comfort. Technology (washing machines, dishwashers, , microwaves, birth control) has finally freed women of domestic duties and allowed them to limit the number of children they have and finally have careers. Seems good on the surface, but now we have strangers raising our kids (daycare workers), strangers taking care of our elderly parents who live longer than ever (retirement homes), women raising maladjusted dogs as their replacement "children", and fully industrialized Western countries have far too few children below replacement rate to the point that Western Civilization is slowly going extinct & replaced by migrants from other civilizations. Meanwhile we are destroying the environment burning energy that has been locked in the ground for millions of years.
ckaihatsu wrote:
And you blame *technology* itself for this state of affairs? Machinery of any kind is just *inert* and doesn't have any internal self-motivation of its own. It has to be put into motion, in one way or another, by *people* who are conscious of what they're doing. I myself would add *warfare* to the list, as with the two world wars of the twentieth century.
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Sure, they do need people to do it. We are not adapting well though, it's sad. The West is filled with overweight fatties who take in too many calories and have everything at their fingertips. We have to go to "the gym" to not be fat, whereas up until the 20th century we simply put in a solid day's work and that was it because we walked everywhere and ate better food. Now we sit in front of computers in cubicles all day and then drive or bus home and have to "count our steps".
Maybe it's just a period of *adjustment* for the advanced world -- I think you're being too moralistic and *dismissive* of this advanced productivity that we now have, thanks to technological development. Revolutionaries *appreciate* technological advances because that materially paves the way for *non-elitist* control over the same, to benefit *everyone* (as with full automation), and not just the elitist 'ownership' class, under capitalism.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
All of these social concerns of yours -- some more valid than others -- are *social* issues, and are caused by capitalism's dynamic of personhood *commodification*, I would argue. As Wilde notes, under capitalism *people* become machines (due to the commodification of labor roles).
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Consumerism has something to do with it. But people will be addicted to their phones and social media under any economic system. Society is fundamentally ill and I believe technology is the main cause:
https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever-113240
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/09/11/end-young-love-dating-decline-among-i-generation-study-finds/
Well, again, I think you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater -- there are tremendous social *advances*, like this message board, due to present-day technology. Offhand I think the greatest is that we're now able to find social interactions based on personal *interest*, whereas that wasn't the case in the past, even with the telephone, fax machine, and photocopier.
Unthinking Majority wrote:
This is true. As someone who believes in liberalism, I would never *force* anyone to live the way I think is ideal. I think we can handle technology but we have to adapt with it, and the you can't put the cat back in the bag anyways. I think technology has moved so quickly that we haven't been able to adapt well enough to it.
It seems very likely that a technological singularity will occur some time in the next 50 years, and the bourgeoisie will be replaced by a machine hivemind overlord of some kind, making this convo moot, and humans being rendered essentially useless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Oh, that's too bad to hear -- please be careful that you don't allow your attitude to trap you into a self-fulfilling prophecy. As things are now I think there's still a lot of *social accountability* (due to the instant communications of the Internet) for what kinds of tech are brought into the world, nation-state militaries excepted, unfortunately, but I'll point out that humanity, and even capitalism, doesn't *need* an AI-based governance so I don't think that there's any inherent *motivation* to implement such, even with baby steps.
Unthinking Majority wrote:
You call me a moralist but you're also a moralist. You're making moral statements about our economy ("it's exploitative") and want to change it for moral reasons, to increase "fairness" and reduce suffering etc.
Yes, I do make *value judgments* over the macroscopic aspects of political economy, but you're focusing more on *socio-cultural* aspects rather than material-originating ones (like political economy, etc.). Per my 'History: Macro-Micro" diagram, I think there are *scale*-indexed 'levels' of lifestyle, logistics, and politics, so the more one is looking at *lifestyle* / moralism, the less they're looking at the overarching 'superstructure' / politics of society, including its mode-of-production and economic 'base' of production.
History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, good to hear -- you may want to elaborate on this further. What kind of policies would you argue for if the world's population could vote on a policy-by-policy basis?
Here we are discussing on the Internet -- something that wasn't even *possible* a few decades ago -- and you're *demurring* to advocate for certain political policies on a *political* message board?
You obviously have some concerns and critiques about society the way it is. Don't you want to *specify* what should be improved, from bottom-up mass concerns and movements? (There was recently a *global* series of populist-type movements that did just that.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_of_2019