- 25 May 2013 00:39
#14242376
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.
What should I call my ideology? It’s rather complex.
Essentially, it’s founded on a realisation about the state of technology in the 21st Century and where it is headed. While I do not ascribe to the vagaries and extremities of the Singularity concept writ large, I believe that we are in the midst of an AI revolution right now. Once, during the Industrial Revolution, machines extended our physical strength like never before, now they are on the path to match our dexterity and challenge the exclusivity of our mental abilities.
Such is the nature of exponential progression, or what appears to be. Eventually, Moore’s Law will run out, but I accept the brain as a physical construct, and it should be encompassed given enough time, and as information technology feeds into itself, this time can grow shorter.
That may be all besides the point though. You don’t need androids walking around conversing and thinking at our level to see that each individual advance means another specialized capability that we thought was once our preserve alone, has been intruded on.
What we see achievable today are systems that automate cooking in fast food restaurants, systems that automate warehouses, systems that automate call centers, and checkouts. Some of these systems are well in their infancy, but the evidence of their improvement is all around us.
Here are just a few examples of the revolution in automation, AI, and technology occurring right now:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/09/smallbu ... /index.htm
http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/11 ... _food.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_%28computer%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_Project
http://www.technologyreview.com/feature ... lar-robot/
http://www.economist.com/node/15048711
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/06 ... e-workers/
What are the implications of all this economically and politically?
Previously, it has been argued that any increase in technology will always just create new jobs. It happened before. In the Industrial Revolution, the displacement of skilled artisans and the invention of mass factory processes simply created more jobs in cities. In the 20th Century, the limited automation of some developed world industry simply freed up jobs for a burgeoning service sector.
In time, the notion that technological progress could destroy labor became known as the “luddite fallacy”. Well, I’m here to say that the “luddite fallacy” being a fallacy is entirely conditional on their being sufficient sectors to still move people to, and for the marketable abilities of labor, of humans, not being replaced by capital, or machines. It is clear that this is no longer a safe bet.
However, I am not a Luddite. Luddites are afraid of the future. I want to help forge it. They are right though, that eventually automation will take more jobs than it makes, and the labor market will thin to technicians and engineers.
Let’s us delve into that pessimism a little. It seems that left to run on its own, there is little way for us to progress in the standard Western capitalist mode. Firms may reduce costs in the short run through automation, but doing so at the expense of jobs, means that the disposable incomes of people being put out of work will fall, and so then too will consumer spending, and the enterprise will either quietly become unprofitable, and we will either enter a depressing stasis in which there is exactly the right amount of automation and unemployment for profits to be maximized without destabilizing the economy, or head for a more dramatic crash. Either outcome has potentially revolutionary consequences. Not pretty ones either.
Marx it seems was right that Capitalism will eventually unravel itself. Against this backdrop, in which the means of production have been monopolized, a socialist (genuinely socialist – not the “government doing anything at all!” socialism that the US right hypes as a threat, but the good old “mass collectivization of the means of production” socialism) upheaval may loom.
I do not want this. A centralized economy “for the greater good” in which everybody owns everything and therefore nothing is not a solution.
A real solution would attempt to resolve the tension between the collective and the individual. And how is that possible, you might ask? We’ve struggled with this issue since the human condition came be. Tweaking this social lever or using that pressure seems to do little to resolve the contradictions inherent in society.
It may be that this time could change many political motivations and new coalitions could form. Positions lurking under the surface of the current divisions may also explode to fracture current coalitions.
The forces opposed to extreme technological advances, the luddites, and to a lesser extent the bio-conservatives (of the left and right, decentralizing or centralizing), may form a new axis with techno-progressivism as the forward “wing”, bio-conservatives occupying the center, and the luddites the backwards position. It may seem unthinkable now, but fringe positions come to the fore in extreme times.
So, that is the problem I see ahead. Technological change begats social disarray begats upheaval and backlash against technological progress, or authoritarian capture of it.
That is the background to my politics. So what is my solution? Any solution for me must be the spurring of a technological revolution, not a mere revolution of spirit, and there must be an end goal that respects the rights of citizens to private property, while enabling the weak and downtrodden to find sure footing.
SO, WITH THAT PRIMER…
WHAT DO I ADVOCATE FIRSTLY?
I advocate a synthesis of left and right concerns, combined with a commitment to technological progress for the end goal of an old and neglected philosophy. A “forward synthesis” towards distributism.
What is distributism?
Let’s look at socialism first. Socialism is a broad concept that contains many tendencies (one being orthodox Marxism, or “communism”) united around this principle: “the common ownership, or collectivization of the means of production”. This means in theory that every worker owns the factories he works in. In practice, the more centralized, representative variant of socialism has been dominant in its historical expression. In centralized forms of socialism, the state is representative of the worker’s will, and the workers nominally own the factories through the will of that state. I think some of the tensions evident there are obvious.
Why then is not a more direct socialism the answer? Well, I don’t oppose the natural blossoming of such a socialism in the market, with the caveat that it be in the form of a libertarian market socialism. However, there are doubts as to its productive efficacy. Moreover, a decentralized socialism which seeks to reject markets and price signals is no less authoritarian in practice than a centralized bureaucratic socialism. Even if we seek a market socialism it should not be sought as an ends unto itself, but only a potential means. It does nothing to resolve the tension between the collective and the individual, and while you can imagine the ethically righteous workers taking the capital from the evil boss, you can equally imagine a hard working entrepreneur who took risks and traded freely and built his business up like so many few, only to see it all taken from him by a revolutionary hoard.
That is not a real answer.
So, distributism is not socialist? Is it capitalist, then? Well, capitalism is a system that protects private ownership of the means of production, and as I’ve noted it’s in for a rough ride due to sea changes in the way work operates. It has served us for great good as much as ill, but it can no longer resolve the tensions inherent to it on its own.
So, to be a little reductive, the principle of socialism is “common ownership”, and the principle of capitalism is “private ownership.” In the extremes of the communist states, and the laissez faire Gilded Age, we can see the greatest expressions of much of the societal tension that drives left vs right politics, and authoritarian vs libertarian politics.
For a while, the mixed economy appeared to have it solved. Communism had fallen and the left moderated to social-isms, while the neoliberal gravy train sailed through the 90s without derailing. Unfortunately, we know that this was not the “end of history”, and here we are to bear witness to the unveiling of the underlying tensions in the Western social-capitalism model.
Don’t mistake me! It was the best model yet, but for me it can only serve now as a vessel for my goals.
So what is distributism? What is its principle? It is “private ownership of the means of production being in as many hands as possible”. That principle like capitalism respects private property, while adding the caveat of what could either be seen as directly anti-monopolistic, or perhaps simply aiming for self-sufficient society. That principle is ripe for many tendencies. Only it is a neglected philosophy as I said. Why is that so?
You could have wiki’d distributism, by now, of course. You’ll find that it was originally a philosophy that stemmed from the Catholic Church, and the teachings of popes like Pope XIII, and was adopted by "Ye Olde Tory Party" back in the ages of time. Distributism as believed back then was coupled with anti-enlightenment and ruralism views, and in the non-economic axis, with social conservatism.
There’s a great irony in someone seeking to fuse technological solutions to society’s problems with such an old philosophy. Yet, I find the principle of distributism ripe for a new, modern tendency. The very reason it has been largely lost to time (apart from some minor fascist interest), is because it shouldn’t actually work without technology.
Could each worker of the Industrial Revolution have his own factory? Could the means of production actually work in a decentralized manner whilst providing the same produce? No. Society would have to go back to the level of subsistence farming. After all, it is only through pooling our efforts that humans can accomplish great things, and the tensions of ownership will just have to remain with us, always.
I don’t accept that. In the past, it could never have worked, but the very technology which may one day threaten modern capitalism, allows the means of production to be ever miniaturized and customized.
3D printers, perhaps overhyped at the moment, heading into their trough of disillusionment, still have a long slope of enlightenment to climb. Who knows how high their plateau of productivity will be?
How high does it have to be to resolve much of the individual-collective tension? 3D printers are still primitive and mocked in some quarters, but they represent the Ford Model T of self-replication devices. Already, the RepRap project seeks to replicate more and more of its own 3D printer parts, and going into the future more and more of production can be put into the hands of individual people, in a form that can be shared. The achievement of a self-replicating machine is a scientific goal, but it can also be a political one.
Now… What about raw materials? This would be the last domain to be in free hands, but this step by step process can even encompass that eventually. 3D printers and their descendants can potentially print with any powdered material. Already a 3D printer exists which can print with salt and sugar cane. Carbon is something that is also vastly abundant.
People may still rely on each other, but our modern lazy ass populace will be able to bypass the skills and hardship of traditional self-sufficiency through the transformative effect and resource liberation of technology. Cheap solar cells will be first easy to buy and then easy to replicate. Automated machinery will become cheap and replicable through datafiles without expert knowledge. In the future, even the lazy can automate their own plots and produce their own food. Eventually, we will have our robots and…
Okay, so I’m basically saying “the future could be awesome!” That’s not an ideology – except is is. It could be awesome, but we have to get to that particular future without blowing up along the way. The whole problem with automation putting people out of jobs is exactly what could stall this future, or turn it into a bad future, either by having a technological backlash, or through people using overly authoritarian and centralized means to tackle the problem.
If we get this right, and we use centralized and decentralized structures to funnel the funds into the right technological problems, as well as putting technology up there as part of the goal to reduce bureaucracy and cost, as well as provide, we can end up with a future in which the left and the right can be more satisfied, and the collective can create the means of freeing people from necessary service to it. That is the closest we can get to peaceful anarchy. There’ll never be a world without crime, but in a world where most wants are met, we can reduce towards crimes of passion rather than the crimes of want which are so abundant. This shows the way to the dream of libertarians (left or right), the irony being that the state is best situated to minimize itself, as it is best situated to funnel funds to the technology that can liberate people from necessary reliance, and create a more voluntary and peacefully cooperative society.
So, that’s my utopian hope, and my end goal. I have some short range politics too, as to prepare to the way.
IN THE SHORT TERM:
In order to reduce societal tension and handle the “Great Transition” (dogma!) correctly, I aim to create a synthesis of what I value in left and right wing politics. Not a wishy washy compromise, but a synthesis and ordering of concerns that attempts to cut to the core of the tensions, while still hewing to a roughly Keynesian analysis of the economy with the government using counter-cycle policies within the overall unorthodox framework. Unfortunately, as politics is inherently divisive, micro-tensions must be created in the short term so as to reduce the main underlying tensions in the long term.
I advocate a Basic Income Guarantee. A societal minimum so as to provide everyone a means of survival. The BIG has many advocates on parts of the political spectrum you might not expect. The left can easily favour it, but it’s also been advocated by classical liberals/right libertarians as a means to provide a simpler, more effective welfare, that reduces bureaucracy. It also does not create the same levels of disincentive to work that other welfare may. If you lose your welfare when you work, and the welfare is too lucrative, then you may lose money by working, or you may gain little extra, and risk not getting your welfare again. In contrast, the BIG is provided to everyone without means testing, and the funny thing about that is that it can provide more incentive to work then a means tested welfare, as it is supplemental to work, following the “work always pays principle”. The rich pay more as part of a progressive tax system, but everyone gets it, and this could help reduce tensions between the middle and lower classes.
If left wing ideological reasoning is allowed to dominate, however, and other spending goes untouched, then it may all be too much. It is also imperative that the BIG itself be a social minimum that allows staples to be purchased and people to survive, and that it be dialled up in recessions and dialled down during booms, so as to avoid demand-pull inflation, while providing support for consumer spending when the private sector is weak.
In the long term, government should plan to reduce its own costs through automation, but it the short term it can afford cuts. Here the right wing side of me comes out.
I would accept large cuts to healthcare (the NHS as I’m in the UK) in non-essential areas in favour of more welfare spending, however moderate tax rises on the rich are acceptable also. The state must operate on a hierarchy, with the essentials at the top, while making minimizations elsewhere. While I which to provide welfare (in the short term) as the left does, I don’t like their seeming desire for everything to be done at once and for the state to lack clear targeting. There is such a thing as opportunity cost, and some of their goals can be better serviced at the cost of other far less vital ones. Unfortunately, the right which understands opportunity cost wants to cost the wrong opportunities.
Government spending for non-essentials should be cut. Government spending on education is important for laying the way for technological and future economic growth, but I brutally advocate that the STEM fields gain utter primacy, and that when moving into college education, STEM fields are the only things offered. If you think this is unfair, then what about the taxpayers subsidizing your unproductive philosophy degree? Interesting? Then pay your money at a private college. That’s a correct synthesis to me. Not a false compromise.
The government should be barred from spending on things such as monuments and feel good items. That’s taxpayers money, and it is better used in stimulus on giving funds to the genuinely disadvantaged, and making sure the money goes into the most direct stimulus.
Government should embark on more housebuilding, and the essential concerns of the economy should be welfare/the BIG at the top, with subsidization, government programs, and public-private competition/partnerships in technological advances below, with housebuilding, and finally healthcare trailing behind, with appropriate cuts, and cost saving measures, not to reduce the state, but to reorder its concerns around welfare and the technological means to reduce its costs and prepare the next stage. The list of silly social crimes and drug prohibitions must be reduced to cost the police less, and in some cases, drugs could then be subject to taxes. The military must necessarily be very small, with a nuclear deterrent, and special ops focused on tackling non-national threats.
Financial regulation designed to separate commercial and investment banking might be a good idea in light of the 2007 debacle. However, more regulation is not the answer, but more of the correct regulation in the right places. I side with the conservative mindset on reducing regulation to businesses and reducing start-up costs to businesses. Higher taxes may be required on the top brackets, but an overview and lessening of a lot of regulation can be used as a cost reducing compromise, where we aren’t talking about highly destructive processes, and more of the wishy washy kind of “just in case” regulation.
In this way, society has a generous social minimum, while respecting the track record of capitalism, and a state that is able to use technological subsidization to minimize its own costs, while creating and developing the means for widespread private ownership of advanced means of production in the long run post-capitalism.
The hierarchical nature of the state budget means that the BIG sits on the top, along with the technological research, and these two fields dictate how far the essentials of housing and healthcare are allowed to push up, and in turn sits atop policing and affects its budgeting, and then all other spending should be highly minimized to accommodate the higher fields in the hierarchy. If the economy collects more taxes by raising taxes but also reducing certain regulatory costs, then this can also create strong welfare, and a preparation for the end of the current order, in a state that has minimized without minimizing the wrong things.
As time goes on, the researching of more and more minimized modes of production and easier ways of liberating raw materials will feed back into the economy, leading to a more liberated and productive people. Except for luddites, who can go cry.
CLIFF NOTES VERSION:
- Technological progress is accelerating towards machines which challenge human ability in vital areas.
- Capitalism (which has a great track record for all its faults) contains contradictions which will ultimately make it difficult for progress to continue without shedding jobs, which in turn hinders progress…
- Socialism is not an ultimate solution, though along with capitalism it can act as a moderated means. As an end, or in the strongest expressions of its means it is flawed, as it also contains contradictions and does not address the tension between the individual and the collective
- ULTIMATELY, the means of production should be in as many private hands as possible. Only technology can make this possible in the long run. Techno-Progressive Distributism?
- In the short run, a mixed economy state should try to minimize the tensions by instituting radical syncretic policies for future growth, or “forward synthesis”. Technological research in AI and automation, and a BIG form of welfare (but not other kinds) should be given budgetary primacy, with housing seeing an expansion, and healthcare seeing an expansion of its most essential units, with a minimized military, streamlined education, and a police enforcing simpler more direct laws. All of these things should have units of the larger automation program applied to them to reduce their costs year by year.
- Generally speaking, economic liberalism, but with stronger key financial regulations (firewalling), and higher taxes (though these should go down over time if everything works)
- Generally speaking, social liberalism. However, immigration could be a sticking block if it threatens to overwhelm the capacity for the social minimum. It’s possible that more policing of this will be required in the short term, but with reductions in other crimes (especially drugs), it may balance out. However, the pragmatic choice might have to be made. I don’t hew to sacred cows of the left or right here.
So… what am I (besides insane)? How can I condense my rambling political views into a convenient label?
Essentially, it’s founded on a realisation about the state of technology in the 21st Century and where it is headed. While I do not ascribe to the vagaries and extremities of the Singularity concept writ large, I believe that we are in the midst of an AI revolution right now. Once, during the Industrial Revolution, machines extended our physical strength like never before, now they are on the path to match our dexterity and challenge the exclusivity of our mental abilities.
Such is the nature of exponential progression, or what appears to be. Eventually, Moore’s Law will run out, but I accept the brain as a physical construct, and it should be encompassed given enough time, and as information technology feeds into itself, this time can grow shorter.
That may be all besides the point though. You don’t need androids walking around conversing and thinking at our level to see that each individual advance means another specialized capability that we thought was once our preserve alone, has been intruded on.
What we see achievable today are systems that automate cooking in fast food restaurants, systems that automate warehouses, systems that automate call centers, and checkouts. Some of these systems are well in their infancy, but the evidence of their improvement is all around us.
Here are just a few examples of the revolution in automation, AI, and technology occurring right now:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/09/smallbu ... /index.htm
http://www.thestar.com/business/2012/11 ... _food.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_%28computer%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_Project
http://www.technologyreview.com/feature ... lar-robot/
http://www.economist.com/node/15048711
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/06 ... e-workers/
What are the implications of all this economically and politically?
Previously, it has been argued that any increase in technology will always just create new jobs. It happened before. In the Industrial Revolution, the displacement of skilled artisans and the invention of mass factory processes simply created more jobs in cities. In the 20th Century, the limited automation of some developed world industry simply freed up jobs for a burgeoning service sector.
In time, the notion that technological progress could destroy labor became known as the “luddite fallacy”. Well, I’m here to say that the “luddite fallacy” being a fallacy is entirely conditional on their being sufficient sectors to still move people to, and for the marketable abilities of labor, of humans, not being replaced by capital, or machines. It is clear that this is no longer a safe bet.
However, I am not a Luddite. Luddites are afraid of the future. I want to help forge it. They are right though, that eventually automation will take more jobs than it makes, and the labor market will thin to technicians and engineers.
Let’s us delve into that pessimism a little. It seems that left to run on its own, there is little way for us to progress in the standard Western capitalist mode. Firms may reduce costs in the short run through automation, but doing so at the expense of jobs, means that the disposable incomes of people being put out of work will fall, and so then too will consumer spending, and the enterprise will either quietly become unprofitable, and we will either enter a depressing stasis in which there is exactly the right amount of automation and unemployment for profits to be maximized without destabilizing the economy, or head for a more dramatic crash. Either outcome has potentially revolutionary consequences. Not pretty ones either.
Marx it seems was right that Capitalism will eventually unravel itself. Against this backdrop, in which the means of production have been monopolized, a socialist (genuinely socialist – not the “government doing anything at all!” socialism that the US right hypes as a threat, but the good old “mass collectivization of the means of production” socialism) upheaval may loom.
I do not want this. A centralized economy “for the greater good” in which everybody owns everything and therefore nothing is not a solution.
A real solution would attempt to resolve the tension between the collective and the individual. And how is that possible, you might ask? We’ve struggled with this issue since the human condition came be. Tweaking this social lever or using that pressure seems to do little to resolve the contradictions inherent in society.
It may be that this time could change many political motivations and new coalitions could form. Positions lurking under the surface of the current divisions may also explode to fracture current coalitions.
The forces opposed to extreme technological advances, the luddites, and to a lesser extent the bio-conservatives (of the left and right, decentralizing or centralizing), may form a new axis with techno-progressivism as the forward “wing”, bio-conservatives occupying the center, and the luddites the backwards position. It may seem unthinkable now, but fringe positions come to the fore in extreme times.
So, that is the problem I see ahead. Technological change begats social disarray begats upheaval and backlash against technological progress, or authoritarian capture of it.
That is the background to my politics. So what is my solution? Any solution for me must be the spurring of a technological revolution, not a mere revolution of spirit, and there must be an end goal that respects the rights of citizens to private property, while enabling the weak and downtrodden to find sure footing.
SO, WITH THAT PRIMER…
WHAT DO I ADVOCATE FIRSTLY?
I advocate a synthesis of left and right concerns, combined with a commitment to technological progress for the end goal of an old and neglected philosophy. A “forward synthesis” towards distributism.
What is distributism?
Let’s look at socialism first. Socialism is a broad concept that contains many tendencies (one being orthodox Marxism, or “communism”) united around this principle: “the common ownership, or collectivization of the means of production”. This means in theory that every worker owns the factories he works in. In practice, the more centralized, representative variant of socialism has been dominant in its historical expression. In centralized forms of socialism, the state is representative of the worker’s will, and the workers nominally own the factories through the will of that state. I think some of the tensions evident there are obvious.
Why then is not a more direct socialism the answer? Well, I don’t oppose the natural blossoming of such a socialism in the market, with the caveat that it be in the form of a libertarian market socialism. However, there are doubts as to its productive efficacy. Moreover, a decentralized socialism which seeks to reject markets and price signals is no less authoritarian in practice than a centralized bureaucratic socialism. Even if we seek a market socialism it should not be sought as an ends unto itself, but only a potential means. It does nothing to resolve the tension between the collective and the individual, and while you can imagine the ethically righteous workers taking the capital from the evil boss, you can equally imagine a hard working entrepreneur who took risks and traded freely and built his business up like so many few, only to see it all taken from him by a revolutionary hoard.
That is not a real answer.
So, distributism is not socialist? Is it capitalist, then? Well, capitalism is a system that protects private ownership of the means of production, and as I’ve noted it’s in for a rough ride due to sea changes in the way work operates. It has served us for great good as much as ill, but it can no longer resolve the tensions inherent to it on its own.
So, to be a little reductive, the principle of socialism is “common ownership”, and the principle of capitalism is “private ownership.” In the extremes of the communist states, and the laissez faire Gilded Age, we can see the greatest expressions of much of the societal tension that drives left vs right politics, and authoritarian vs libertarian politics.
For a while, the mixed economy appeared to have it solved. Communism had fallen and the left moderated to social-isms, while the neoliberal gravy train sailed through the 90s without derailing. Unfortunately, we know that this was not the “end of history”, and here we are to bear witness to the unveiling of the underlying tensions in the Western social-capitalism model.
Don’t mistake me! It was the best model yet, but for me it can only serve now as a vessel for my goals.
So what is distributism? What is its principle? It is “private ownership of the means of production being in as many hands as possible”. That principle like capitalism respects private property, while adding the caveat of what could either be seen as directly anti-monopolistic, or perhaps simply aiming for self-sufficient society. That principle is ripe for many tendencies. Only it is a neglected philosophy as I said. Why is that so?
You could have wiki’d distributism, by now, of course. You’ll find that it was originally a philosophy that stemmed from the Catholic Church, and the teachings of popes like Pope XIII, and was adopted by "Ye Olde Tory Party" back in the ages of time. Distributism as believed back then was coupled with anti-enlightenment and ruralism views, and in the non-economic axis, with social conservatism.
There’s a great irony in someone seeking to fuse technological solutions to society’s problems with such an old philosophy. Yet, I find the principle of distributism ripe for a new, modern tendency. The very reason it has been largely lost to time (apart from some minor fascist interest), is because it shouldn’t actually work without technology.
Could each worker of the Industrial Revolution have his own factory? Could the means of production actually work in a decentralized manner whilst providing the same produce? No. Society would have to go back to the level of subsistence farming. After all, it is only through pooling our efforts that humans can accomplish great things, and the tensions of ownership will just have to remain with us, always.
I don’t accept that. In the past, it could never have worked, but the very technology which may one day threaten modern capitalism, allows the means of production to be ever miniaturized and customized.
3D printers, perhaps overhyped at the moment, heading into their trough of disillusionment, still have a long slope of enlightenment to climb. Who knows how high their plateau of productivity will be?
How high does it have to be to resolve much of the individual-collective tension? 3D printers are still primitive and mocked in some quarters, but they represent the Ford Model T of self-replication devices. Already, the RepRap project seeks to replicate more and more of its own 3D printer parts, and going into the future more and more of production can be put into the hands of individual people, in a form that can be shared. The achievement of a self-replicating machine is a scientific goal, but it can also be a political one.
Now… What about raw materials? This would be the last domain to be in free hands, but this step by step process can even encompass that eventually. 3D printers and their descendants can potentially print with any powdered material. Already a 3D printer exists which can print with salt and sugar cane. Carbon is something that is also vastly abundant.
People may still rely on each other, but our modern lazy ass populace will be able to bypass the skills and hardship of traditional self-sufficiency through the transformative effect and resource liberation of technology. Cheap solar cells will be first easy to buy and then easy to replicate. Automated machinery will become cheap and replicable through datafiles without expert knowledge. In the future, even the lazy can automate their own plots and produce their own food. Eventually, we will have our robots and…
Okay, so I’m basically saying “the future could be awesome!” That’s not an ideology – except is is. It could be awesome, but we have to get to that particular future without blowing up along the way. The whole problem with automation putting people out of jobs is exactly what could stall this future, or turn it into a bad future, either by having a technological backlash, or through people using overly authoritarian and centralized means to tackle the problem.
If we get this right, and we use centralized and decentralized structures to funnel the funds into the right technological problems, as well as putting technology up there as part of the goal to reduce bureaucracy and cost, as well as provide, we can end up with a future in which the left and the right can be more satisfied, and the collective can create the means of freeing people from necessary service to it. That is the closest we can get to peaceful anarchy. There’ll never be a world without crime, but in a world where most wants are met, we can reduce towards crimes of passion rather than the crimes of want which are so abundant. This shows the way to the dream of libertarians (left or right), the irony being that the state is best situated to minimize itself, as it is best situated to funnel funds to the technology that can liberate people from necessary reliance, and create a more voluntary and peacefully cooperative society.
So, that’s my utopian hope, and my end goal. I have some short range politics too, as to prepare to the way.
IN THE SHORT TERM:
In order to reduce societal tension and handle the “Great Transition” (dogma!) correctly, I aim to create a synthesis of what I value in left and right wing politics. Not a wishy washy compromise, but a synthesis and ordering of concerns that attempts to cut to the core of the tensions, while still hewing to a roughly Keynesian analysis of the economy with the government using counter-cycle policies within the overall unorthodox framework. Unfortunately, as politics is inherently divisive, micro-tensions must be created in the short term so as to reduce the main underlying tensions in the long term.
I advocate a Basic Income Guarantee. A societal minimum so as to provide everyone a means of survival. The BIG has many advocates on parts of the political spectrum you might not expect. The left can easily favour it, but it’s also been advocated by classical liberals/right libertarians as a means to provide a simpler, more effective welfare, that reduces bureaucracy. It also does not create the same levels of disincentive to work that other welfare may. If you lose your welfare when you work, and the welfare is too lucrative, then you may lose money by working, or you may gain little extra, and risk not getting your welfare again. In contrast, the BIG is provided to everyone without means testing, and the funny thing about that is that it can provide more incentive to work then a means tested welfare, as it is supplemental to work, following the “work always pays principle”. The rich pay more as part of a progressive tax system, but everyone gets it, and this could help reduce tensions between the middle and lower classes.
If left wing ideological reasoning is allowed to dominate, however, and other spending goes untouched, then it may all be too much. It is also imperative that the BIG itself be a social minimum that allows staples to be purchased and people to survive, and that it be dialled up in recessions and dialled down during booms, so as to avoid demand-pull inflation, while providing support for consumer spending when the private sector is weak.
In the long term, government should plan to reduce its own costs through automation, but it the short term it can afford cuts. Here the right wing side of me comes out.
I would accept large cuts to healthcare (the NHS as I’m in the UK) in non-essential areas in favour of more welfare spending, however moderate tax rises on the rich are acceptable also. The state must operate on a hierarchy, with the essentials at the top, while making minimizations elsewhere. While I which to provide welfare (in the short term) as the left does, I don’t like their seeming desire for everything to be done at once and for the state to lack clear targeting. There is such a thing as opportunity cost, and some of their goals can be better serviced at the cost of other far less vital ones. Unfortunately, the right which understands opportunity cost wants to cost the wrong opportunities.
Government spending for non-essentials should be cut. Government spending on education is important for laying the way for technological and future economic growth, but I brutally advocate that the STEM fields gain utter primacy, and that when moving into college education, STEM fields are the only things offered. If you think this is unfair, then what about the taxpayers subsidizing your unproductive philosophy degree? Interesting? Then pay your money at a private college. That’s a correct synthesis to me. Not a false compromise.
The government should be barred from spending on things such as monuments and feel good items. That’s taxpayers money, and it is better used in stimulus on giving funds to the genuinely disadvantaged, and making sure the money goes into the most direct stimulus.
Government should embark on more housebuilding, and the essential concerns of the economy should be welfare/the BIG at the top, with subsidization, government programs, and public-private competition/partnerships in technological advances below, with housebuilding, and finally healthcare trailing behind, with appropriate cuts, and cost saving measures, not to reduce the state, but to reorder its concerns around welfare and the technological means to reduce its costs and prepare the next stage. The list of silly social crimes and drug prohibitions must be reduced to cost the police less, and in some cases, drugs could then be subject to taxes. The military must necessarily be very small, with a nuclear deterrent, and special ops focused on tackling non-national threats.
Financial regulation designed to separate commercial and investment banking might be a good idea in light of the 2007 debacle. However, more regulation is not the answer, but more of the correct regulation in the right places. I side with the conservative mindset on reducing regulation to businesses and reducing start-up costs to businesses. Higher taxes may be required on the top brackets, but an overview and lessening of a lot of regulation can be used as a cost reducing compromise, where we aren’t talking about highly destructive processes, and more of the wishy washy kind of “just in case” regulation.
In this way, society has a generous social minimum, while respecting the track record of capitalism, and a state that is able to use technological subsidization to minimize its own costs, while creating and developing the means for widespread private ownership of advanced means of production in the long run post-capitalism.
The hierarchical nature of the state budget means that the BIG sits on the top, along with the technological research, and these two fields dictate how far the essentials of housing and healthcare are allowed to push up, and in turn sits atop policing and affects its budgeting, and then all other spending should be highly minimized to accommodate the higher fields in the hierarchy. If the economy collects more taxes by raising taxes but also reducing certain regulatory costs, then this can also create strong welfare, and a preparation for the end of the current order, in a state that has minimized without minimizing the wrong things.
As time goes on, the researching of more and more minimized modes of production and easier ways of liberating raw materials will feed back into the economy, leading to a more liberated and productive people. Except for luddites, who can go cry.
CLIFF NOTES VERSION:
- Technological progress is accelerating towards machines which challenge human ability in vital areas.
- Capitalism (which has a great track record for all its faults) contains contradictions which will ultimately make it difficult for progress to continue without shedding jobs, which in turn hinders progress…
- Socialism is not an ultimate solution, though along with capitalism it can act as a moderated means. As an end, or in the strongest expressions of its means it is flawed, as it also contains contradictions and does not address the tension between the individual and the collective
- ULTIMATELY, the means of production should be in as many private hands as possible. Only technology can make this possible in the long run. Techno-Progressive Distributism?
- In the short run, a mixed economy state should try to minimize the tensions by instituting radical syncretic policies for future growth, or “forward synthesis”. Technological research in AI and automation, and a BIG form of welfare (but not other kinds) should be given budgetary primacy, with housing seeing an expansion, and healthcare seeing an expansion of its most essential units, with a minimized military, streamlined education, and a police enforcing simpler more direct laws. All of these things should have units of the larger automation program applied to them to reduce their costs year by year.
- Generally speaking, economic liberalism, but with stronger key financial regulations (firewalling), and higher taxes (though these should go down over time if everything works)
- Generally speaking, social liberalism. However, immigration could be a sticking block if it threatens to overwhelm the capacity for the social minimum. It’s possible that more policing of this will be required in the short term, but with reductions in other crimes (especially drugs), it may balance out. However, the pragmatic choice might have to be made. I don’t hew to sacred cows of the left or right here.
So… what am I (besides insane)? How can I condense my rambling political views into a convenient label?
A society without toil. A society of robotic property.
- By ingliz
- By Deutschmania
- By litwin