Is this where the West is heading? - Page 5 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15187031
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:It's as if these are the first stupid people you've come across, and now you're frightened they'll control your life (despite them belonging to a fringe group in one country). If you bothered to read further, you'd have seen I already pointed out that stupid people have been in positions of power for your entire life. But this is just stupidity (being a waste of time) about how they'd like to be seen. It's not dangerous.

These stupid people are not especially dangerous, since their chances of ever having any real power or influence over anyone outside their own coterie are virtually zero. But most stupid people are dangerous, if only because they often vote for stupid or dangerous people. And stupid people in position of authority do things that can be extremely dangerous, for themselves and for others.
#15187032
Potemkin wrote:These stupid people are not especially dangerous, since their chances of ever having any real power or influence over anyone outside their own coterie are virtually zero. But most stupid people are dangerous, if only because they often vote for stupid or dangerous people. And stupid people in position of authority do things that can be extremely dangerous, for themselves and for others.

Well we're fucked then. Stupid cunts somehow fail upwards into being the head of nations.
#15187033
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:and now you're frightened they'll control your life


I stopped reading here.

Read my initial posts. I've already stated, I suspect these people will not raise to any power/influence. That basically means, I'm not frightened. ;)

That said, we did see the raise of MAGA, which makes me doubt that suspicion. Which means, this stupidity could spill over into our cultural and political lives.

Anything beyond that, you are imagining shit.... no surprise. All of this feels like you just trying to tell me to shutup in some weird round about way.
#15187034
In Hungary the DSA would be called a putty club, which comes from a youth novel by Ferenc Molnár (Frank Miller in English) called The Paul Street Boys. The whole club is about the members chewing a piece of putty in rotation in order to keep it soft, which is literally the whole point of the club, while regularly having club meetings with never-ending procedural debates.
#15187038
Noumenon wrote:But on the other hand, these thinkers didn't exactly offer much in the way of solutions. So that can help explain why the woke left's "solutions" are so childlike and utopian. I think that we will begin to see intellectual thought move in the direction of positive and constructive approaches, since we've been at peak deconstruction for quite awhile now.

I'm not as optimistic. All I see is culture war and moralizing.
#15187045
Unthinking Majority wrote:I'm not as optimistic. All I see is culture war and moralizing.


Maybe we need to accelerate the culture war. Just get everyone out there fighting like Proud boys vs antifa. Everyone gets it out of their systems and we move on.
#15187046
Noumenon wrote:
I agree that the system needs more democratic control. But I don't think that implies it is conscious.



Correct -- as things are now the political system uses *representatives* / politicians, meaning that any person's default political involvement is just voting every other year for one or another official professional for a set term of office.

Once capitalism / finance / business is done away with, that would free up everyone's time to take care of social matters *consciously* and *directly*, collectively, potentially on a *daily* basis, depending on the individual.


Noumenon wrote:
Democracy is a chaotic complex system in itself, involving social rules, symbols, struggles for power. What emerges out of that system at the end was not what anyone in particular intended. Just look at the chaos in American democracy and the vast array of anti-progressive forces. Marxists want to just say we can banish capital and then all the sudden worker rationality would emerge. I think that is very far from correct. While the people don't have as much control as capital in a lot of respects, in a lot of other respects they do, and we see the results of it. I think we should focus primarily on what constitutes progressive action and secondarily on how we get there, to what degree that is democratic or not. For instance, I think that cap and trade as a means to limit carbon production is a perfectly reasonable solution. We don't have time to wait for the communist revolution.



Hmmmm, I think you're forgetting that it's the *workers* who do the actual work for society, so when it comes to *work*-related matters, it's the workers who should primarily be the ones deciding things for the workplace (and over many workplaces in common, by extension).

As things are now, one must definitely have a personal *surplus* of money (capital) to take part in the economy, which certainly isn't democratic *at all*.


Noumenon wrote:
Systems determine what tasks are delegated to workers though. A labor credit system I presume would replace the monetary system, and it would delegate tasks differently. But I don't see how that implies any more worker control over which tasks they're allowed to do.



Actually, the labor credits would be perfectly socially *inert* themselves, not implying *any* economic value whatsoever, because communism is known for being *moneyless* and not-having capitalist exchange values whatsoever.

The underlying material-economic basis of this post-capitalist model is the communist-type *gift economy*, meaning that there are *zero* exchanges, *zero* money, and *zero* abstract exchange-value valuations (finance). Anything produced will be for the social commons, by definition, and not economically valuated in the least.

What the *labor credits* do is to formally keep track of work-role hazard / difficulty / distastefulness, in the form of a work-role *multiplier* (ratio) (per hour), times the hours voluntarily worked, yielding the total number of labor credits for the work done.

Those who work more, to accumulate more labor credits, would have relatively more *socio-political power* going-forward, because they could use those in-hand labor credits to fund 'this', and not 'that'. Here's from the FAQ:



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://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338



---


Noumenon wrote:
I think that we should experiment with different systems, and try swapping out one system for another to see if it generates better results. But I am fatalistic in that I don't see democratic control being possible with advanced post-industrial production. I think that as especially as automation replaces labor on a large scale, we should construct micro-spheres that replicate the artisan communitarian ideal as much as possible. If human happiness is the goal, then we have to directly face the contradiction that the vast variety of goods we produce are at the same time necessary and psychologically punishing to produce.



Sure, this has *conventionally* been the case, but society is almost at the point of no longer needing labor anymore *whatsoever*, thanks to the wide-scale implementation of automation / computerization / robotization over industrial mass production, for the goods and services that people need and want.


Noumenon wrote:
Democratic control over which buttons you get to press in front of a screen is not inspiring. We should think less "liberation in work" and more "liberation FROM work" - into a different, more naturally rewarding and authentic kind of work where we can see people face to face, work with our hands and apply our creativity in the actual sunlight and fresh air. This work should be thought of as the ultimate "product" of the system, producing all the moving pieces in an automated fashion in order to create the conditions that we can have micro-democratic and independent-artisan control over our luxury work. It would be a kind of dual system, where you can purchase commodities with say a UBI in the macro-sphere, but the micro-spheres are artificially constructed so that the precise set of commodities produced within it are protected from macro-sphere competition, and you are forced to say buy fruit and veggies from your neighborhood farmer instead of from GlobalCorp.



Liberation-from-work is the key term here.

If no one has to work to get the things they need throughout their lives then capitalism / markets / profit will have no way to exist any longer, nor could there be 'competition', really, because 'competition' itself implies *scarcity* -- the 'prize' for 'winning' the economic competition.

If there *is* a 'macro-sphere', then that implies *economies-of-scale* that are impossible at the sheerly local level, from strictly artisan-type production. (See my 'Emergent Central Planning' graphic regarding economies of scale.)

Here's from my favorite political essay, on the topic:



Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.



https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/



---


Noumenon wrote:
I think we do need a post-capitalism, at least a post-this kind of capitalism. I do think that cultural mythology is an independent variable in material conditions, or it was in the past when it made things like communist revolution possible. But now that particular mythology is ineffective. Because the fact is it has too many negative associations, and there is a lot about capitalism people like quite a bit, especially from the consumption side.

My system I proposed above would be kind of like a "fully automated luxury communism" though - except without the necessity of direct collective control over macro-production - that would be automated too. The systems would be designed for collective benefit with as little input as possible



Okay, sure, we certainly should be freeing ourselves from monotonous attentions to every little detail -- that's where the automation of production and AI are relevant.


Noumenon wrote:
(maybe think something like blockchain?) so that we can focus our mental energies on the micro-spheres where we find community and meaningful work. Ideally, robots and AI could do all the work in the macro-sphere, including managing and directing it, perhaps only necessitating democratic intervention at certain regular intervals.



If we're talking *production* here (of goods and services) then such a system of comprehensively networked automated production wouldn't be 'political' in the least -- it would strictly be the direct material fulfillment of people's explicitly expressed personal needs and wants.


Noumenon wrote:
I think actually what I'm proposing could be considered a version of "fully automated luxury communism" (FALC), but one where the democratic communal control is on the micro level instead of the macro. Or rather, direct control on the micro and indirect on the macro.



Okay, yeah, I think I see where you're coming from. Please feel free to elaborate around the political-versus-material-economic aspects, if you like, and check out my 'labor credits' FAQ, too, at the link.
#15187049
ckaihatsu wrote:Correct -- as things are now the political system uses *representatives* / politicians, meaning that any person's default political involvement is just voting every other year for one or another official professional for a set term of office.

Once capitalism / finance / business is done away with, that would free up everyone's time to take care of social matters *consciously* and *directly*, collectively, potentially on a *daily* basis, depending on the individual.


The problem I see with that is that it privileges and grants more power to people who are "professional" activists, the most zealously ideologically invested in determining everyone's affairs. Trust me, 99% of people would be utterly worn out by that and would rather do almost anything else. This is why people complain about meetings at work.

Whereas the advantage of just voting is that in being the lowest-investment possible activity, it equalizes power among all voters regardless of how personally invested they are in politics. And it inherently sets up an incentive structure where those who are the most invested, have to convince the less-invested that they deserve their vote and the chance to represent them.

I think it makes more sense to attempt to expand the sphere of representative democratic control over the economy, particularly in terms of regulation to force prices to reflect social costs. Imagine if we could just do a direct vote on what the carbon tax should be. One and done, major blow to global warming potentially without having to redesign everything from the ground up.

Of course the issue is power. And that's true regardless of if you're talking reform or revolution. Right now we can't coordinate people together to exert the power they actually do have. It is better to try to rally everyone around the simplest possible message and solution in order to exercise our collective power. The problem with complex solutions is that everyone is going to have different personal visions of utopia and therefore our power vectors are not aligned, but scattered chaotically in different directions.

At one time it was possible to align large numbers of people (though importantly, not everyone) under the banner of a single ideological doctrine. This is because a single source could be accepted as the authority (scripture) and one interpretation accepted as official (the priesthood). This is how Marxist-Leninist revolution was possible in the 20th century. But if Nietzsche announced that god is dead in the 19th century, that is now even more true. You can't get everyone to accept one authoritative account of utopia.

I'd suggest that the biggest obstacle to getting damn near anything done in a progressive direction is less lack of a utopian vision, and more the existence of a vast array of reactionary forces, that comprise at least 50% of the electorate. This means that even in its current limited state, democracy isn't solving anything. What makes you think that extending the scope of democracy wouldn't just multiply this schism across everything?

Reactionary forces are very good at all coordinating behind one message or talking point and making that the frame of the debate. Whereas progressive forces are always in disarray and struggling to react to the reactionaries.

Simplifying the message to a handful of radical reforms has the advantage of unifying the progressive forces and enabling them to set the terms of the debate. While leaving out radical utopian visions removes the easiest mode of attack that the reactionaries can use. And since the radical reforms are the most ideologically neutral, it becomes possible to wear down the reactionaries and getting some of the more moderate leaning ones on your side, creating a broader coalition.

Effectively, I am suggesting that the only real world effect of communist utopian theorizing is to provide easy ammo for the right to shoot down the progressive agenda. Even if you could prove something could work in theory, you have to convince everyone first. And this is extremely difficult in a stressful hostile environment where there exist right-wing and capitalist forces to present your idea in the worst light possible.

It's kind of like trying to hold a university seminar in the middle of a battlefield. The conditions simply aren't right for everyone to get in the right state of mind to rationally deliberate. First the hostilities have to cease between the group of agents (workers) who you are proposing must work together for your plan.

This incidentally is one reason why I think the DSA is so misguided. By entertaining all these wild ideas, which may be exciting to young college students, they are ensuring they are only relevant to a very small subset of the population. That's why its all white, liberal, and middle class.

I think everyone else would prefer a democratic battle plan on how to actually defeat republicans.

ckaihatsu wrote:Hmmmm, I think you're forgetting that it's the *workers* who do the actual work for society, so when it comes to *work*-related matters, it's the workers who should primarily be the ones deciding things for the workplace (and over many workplaces in common, by extension).

As things are now, one must definitely have a personal *surplus* of money (capital) to take part in the economy, which certainly isn't democratic *at all*.


I think that a lot of people including myself would rather have pure autonomy over their work. I don't want to have either a boss or a democratic committee telling me what to do. Because this it is very difficult to achieve that with large scale production, that's why I believe we should try to automate that as much as possible, while creating micro-spheres where we can exercise our desire for autonomous labor. Perhaps each of the micro-spheres might work a little differently, some more communal and others more individualistic.

If Amazon replaced all of its workers with robots, I personally wouldn't care about managing its internal business decisions. I think it would be enough democratic control to be able to set external regulations and limits to what it can do.

ckaihatsu wrote:Actually, the labor credits would be perfectly socially *inert* themselves, not implying *any* economic value whatsoever, because communism is known for being *moneyless* and not-having capitalist exchange values whatsoever.

The underlying material-economic basis of this post-capitalist model is the communist-type *gift economy*, meaning that there are *zero* exchanges, *zero* money, and *zero* abstract exchange-value valuations (finance). Anything produced will be for the social commons, by definition, and not economically valuated in the least.

What the *labor credits* do is to formally keep track of work-role hazard / difficulty / distastefulness, in the form of a work-role *multiplier* (ratio) (per hour), times the hours voluntarily worked, yielding the total number of labor credits for the work done.

Those who work more, to accumulate more labor credits, would have relatively more *socio-political power* going-forward, because they could use those in-hand labor credits to fund 'this', and not 'that'. Here's from the FAQ:


I think your system sounds somewhat reasonable. I think you and others who are like minded should have the freedom to create this as an economic experiment in your own micro sphere. There's only so much that can be worked out hypothetically without trying something out in practice. Having it start in a micro sphere mitigates the risk if it fails. And it allows people with other ideas to experiment with their own in different micro spheres.

Once they have a chance to develop in a microcosm, different microspheres could decide democratically to unify under the same system once its proven to work.

Eventually, they could all vote democratically to implement one of the systems on the macro level. This would be after it is already tested and proven on multiple scales.

The formation of microspheres or autonomous zones could be an example of a possible radical reform, after we achieve some basic victories that expand our scope of what is possible.


ckaihatsu wrote:Sure, this has *conventionally* been the case, but society is almost at the point of no longer needing labor anymore *whatsoever*, thanks to the wide-scale implementation of automation / computerization / robotization over industrial mass production, for the goods and services that people need and want.


Well, I'm actually not sure how easy its going to be to achieve 100% automation. I think that 50% is a more reasonable target to shoot for. I work in test automation and it is a lot of work to get the automated tests running smoothly. And I very much rely on the manual testers to cover the immediate testing needs because its way quicker to run one manually than program it. The automation saves the manual testers from having to do tedious and comprehensive regressions of testing the same thing over and over. But the existence of novel situations I'm starting to believe will always guarantee the existence of non-automated work.

And some of us would like to be liberated from having to either do the manual work or maintain the robots...

ckaihatsu wrote:Liberation-from-work is the key term here.

If no one has to work to get the things they need throughout their lives then capitalism / markets / profit will have no way to exist any longer, nor could there be 'competition', really, because 'competition' itself implies *scarcity* -- the 'prize' for 'winning' the economic competition.


I think that it could be a workable system, for a subset of workers to do manual labor and robot maintenance in the macro sphere, while others could do more "primitive" but perhaps more creatively rewarding work in the micro spheres. Not everyone wants to be "liberated" from economies of scale - great, they can have it.

Even if competition reigned in the macro sphere, the micro spheres could be a safe refuge from it. And I think they would produce goods that simply would not be possible in the world of alienated capital outside, so it would be a mutually beneficial relationship.

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, yeah, I think I see where you're coming from. Please feel free to elaborate around the political-versus-material-economic aspects, if you like, and check out my 'labor credits' FAQ, too, at the link.


I would leave the details of the political economy of each micro-sphere up to the people in it. Some of them may have their own kind of money, others no money at all. But my idea kind of is that they would all get a kind of UBI in macro credits which can be used to purchase a limited amount of goods from the macro-sphere. And maybe those who work in the macro-sphere would get a number of credits to purchase custom artisan goods produces by the micro spheres. But generally the pace of social economic change would be slower and more conservative in the macro-sphere, more evolutionary than revolutionary. But in the micro-spheres you can let your imagination run wild if you get together some people who think like you.

I'm kind of coming up with all this on the spot lol, so I'll have to flesh it out more.
#15187054
Noumenon wrote:
The problem I see with that is that it privileges and grants more power to people who are "professional" activists, the most zealously ideologically invested in determining everyone's affairs. Trust me, 99% of people would be utterly worn out by that and would rather do almost anything else. This is why people complain about meetings at work.

Whereas the advantage of just voting is that in being the lowest-investment possible activity, it equalizes power among all voters regardless of how personally invested they are in politics. And it inherently sets up an incentive structure where those who are the most invested, have to convince the less-invested that they deserve their vote and the chance to represent them.

I think it makes more sense to attempt to expand the sphere of representative democratic control over the economy, particularly in terms of regulation to force prices to reflect social costs. Imagine if we could just do a direct vote on what the carbon tax should be. One and done, major blow to global warming potentially without having to redesign everything from the ground up.



Okay, I can appreciate all of this -- the *downside* to representation, though, is that those who *are* professional politicians / activists / whatever, have proportionately *more* political power through their 'mindshare' / publicity / notoriety within the population. This power imbalance automatically *confers* a social hierarchy, and such people of privilege are usually at the head of *patronage* networks, which are arguably just as bad as any wealth-based economics.

To clarify, I don't mean to say that everyone *should* be doing politics 24/7/365, but it's just that those who *do* do politics more often will simply be able to 'swim faster'. In the context of my labor credits model, those who are more politically active would be the de facto 'movers-and-shakers' in terms of effecting material-world projects / developments, and social policy.

Ironically you're calling for more *direct* participation and determinism at the end of this section here, rather than really *arguing* for the prior stance of 'expand[ing] the sphere of representative democratic control over the economy'.

I have a graphic for this kind of thing, btw:


Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms

Spoiler: show
Image



I'll also point out that there objectively are really only *three* 'levels' of socio-political 'modes' of social involvement and activity -- one's own life ('lifestyle'), the *means* for enabling that life / lifestyle ('logistics'), and the prevailing authority of societal *policy* over those logistics and those lives and lifestyles ('politics'). (Meaning what *else* would one do, besides politics, if not for the sake of one's own life, and securing the *means* for one's own life?)


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Noumenon wrote:
Of course the issue is power. And that's true regardless of if you're talking reform or revolution. Right now we can't coordinate people together to exert the power they actually do have. It is better to try to rally everyone around the simplest possible message and solution in order to exercise our collective power. The problem with complex solutions is that everyone is going to have different personal visions of utopia and therefore our power vectors are not aligned, but scattered chaotically in different directions.



Well, this is borderline political marketing -- I'll remind that the political spectrum itself is only *1-dimensional*, a straight line from left to right. No one's calling for 'complex solutions', and there wouldn't *be* any such thing, anyway, because politics is really about supporting one policy platform, or another, in common.


Anatomy of a Platform

Spoiler: show
Image



Anatomy of a Platform: The News Cycle -- Anti-Trump-Dynasty

Spoiler: show
Image



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Noumenon wrote:
At one time it was possible to align large numbers of people (though importantly, not everyone) under the banner of a single ideological doctrine. This is because a single source could be accepted as the authority (scripture) and one interpretation accepted as official (the priesthood). This is how Marxist-Leninist revolution was possible in the 20th century. But if Nietzsche announced that god is dead in the 19th century, that is now even more true. You can't get everyone to accept one authoritative account of utopia.



How about the politics of ending the *class divide* -- ? Is that 'utopian' enough -- ?


Noumenon wrote:
I'd suggest that the biggest obstacle to getting damn near anything done in a progressive direction is less lack of a utopian vision, and more the existence of a vast array of reactionary forces, that comprise at least 50% of the electorate. This means that even in its current limited state, democracy isn't solving anything. What makes you think that extending the scope of democracy wouldn't just multiply this schism across everything?

Reactionary forces are very good at all coordinating behind one message or talking point and making that the frame of the debate. Whereas progressive forces are always in disarray and struggling to react to the reactionaries.



Ehhhhh, you're just describing the constraints of 2-party politics. Consider also the empirical balance of power between those who have a personal interest in *higher wages*, versus those who have a countervailing interest in *lower wages*.


Noumenon wrote:
Simplifying the message to a handful of radical reforms has the advantage of unifying the progressive forces and enabling them to set the terms of the debate. While leaving out radical utopian visions removes the easiest mode of attack that the reactionaries can use. And since the radical reforms are the most ideologically neutral, it becomes possible to wear down the reactionaries and getting some of the more moderate leaning ones on your side, creating a broader coalition.

Effectively, I am suggesting that the only real world effect of communist utopian theorizing is to provide easy ammo for the right to shoot down the progressive agenda. Even if you could prove something could work in theory, you have to convince everyone first. And this is extremely difficult in a stressful hostile environment where there exist right-wing and capitalist forces to present your idea in the worst light possible.



Whoooooaaaa, where's all *that* coming from? Recall, this all started because of *this* concern of yours:


Noumenon wrote:
No one has a real answer of "what happens after the revolution."



So, in the interests of having something to 'shoot for', post-20th-century, I proffered my post-capitalist 'labor credits' model framework.


Noumenon wrote:
It's kind of like trying to hold a university seminar in the middle of a battlefield. The conditions simply aren't right for everyone to get in the right state of mind to rationally deliberate. First the hostilities have to cease between the group of agents (workers) who you are proposing must work together for your plan.



WTF? You think I 'need workers' to 'work together' 'for [my] plan' -- ?

That's quite a presumptuous assumption on your part. I think I've made clear that the point of having a post-capitalist model like mine is so as to be *clear* about how a post-class political economy *could* feasibly function. That's it, nothing more.


Noumenon wrote:
This incidentally is one reason why I think the DSA is so misguided. By entertaining all these wild ideas, which may be exciting to young college students, they are ensuring they are only relevant to a very small subset of the population. That's why its all white, liberal, and middle class.

I think everyone else would prefer a democratic battle plan on how to actually defeat republicans.



Sure. Why not just end capitalism and use the productive machinery for people's needs?


Noumenon wrote:
I think that a lot of people including myself would rather have pure autonomy over their work. I don't want to have either a boss or a democratic committee telling me what to do. Because this it is very difficult to achieve that with large scale production, that's why I believe we should try to automate that as much as possible, while creating micro-spheres where we can exercise our desire for autonomous labor. Perhaps each of the micro-spheres might work a little differently, some more communal and others more individualistic.

If Amazon replaced all of its workers with robots, I personally wouldn't care about managing its internal business decisions. I think it would be enough democratic control to be able to set external regulations and limits to what it can do.



Yes, agreed on all of this.


Noumenon wrote:
I think your system sounds somewhat reasonable. I think you and others who are like minded should have the freedom to create this as an economic experiment in your own micro sphere.



I think you're missing the point here -- the model can only *function* in a post-capitalist world because a prerequisite is that workers are in full control of the means of mass industrial production, worldwide. My model is fundamentally incompatible with the practice of private property.


Noumenon wrote:
There's only so much that can be worked out hypothetically without trying something out in practice. Having it start in a micro sphere mitigates the risk if it fails. And it allows people with other ideas to experiment with their own in different micro spheres.

Once they have a chance to develop in a microcosm, different microspheres could decide democratically to unify under the same system once its proven to work.

Eventually, they could all vote democratically to implement one of the systems on the macro level. This would be after it is already tested and proven on multiple scales.

The formation of microspheres or autonomous zones could be an example of a possible radical reform, after we achieve some basic victories that expand our scope of what is possible.



Oh, okay, so with this you're basically an *anarchist*, then. Got it.

I have no problem with individual 'permaculture', and artisan crafts and whatever, but, *politically* there has to be a form of political social organization that can rival the *bourgeoisie's* social organizing, since it's *their* class that's currently in power now, for the past few centuries.


Noumenon wrote:
Well, I'm actually not sure how easy its going to be to achieve 100% automation. I think that 50% is a more reasonable target to shoot for. I work in test automation and it is a lot of work to get the automated tests running smoothly. And I very much rely on the manual testers to cover the immediate testing needs because its way quicker to run one manually than program it. The automation saves the manual testers from having to do tedious and comprehensive regressions of testing the same thing over and over. But the existence of novel situations I'm starting to believe will always guarantee the existence of non-automated work.

And some of us would like to be liberated from having to either do the manual work or maintain the robots...



Yup, that's exactly what AI is for.


Noumenon wrote:
I think that it could be a workable system, for a subset of workers to do manual labor and robot maintenance in the macro sphere, while others could do more "primitive" but perhaps more creatively rewarding work in the micro spheres. Not everyone wants to be "liberated" from economies of scale - great, they can have it.



Yup, I tend to agree here -- without the sinkholes of private property accumulation (offshore accounts, corporate cash, etc.), society would have *plenty* regardless of how hard or how little everyone chose to work.


Noumenon wrote:
Even if competition reigned in the macro sphere, the micro spheres could be a safe refuge from it. And I think they would produce goods that simply would not be possible in the world of alienated capital outside, so it would be a mutually beneficial relationship.



Yup.


Noumenon wrote:
I would leave the details of the political economy of each micro-sphere up to the people in it. Some of them may have their own kind of money, others no money at all. But my idea kind of is that they would all get a kind of UBI in macro credits which can be used to purchase a limited amount of goods from the macro-sphere. And maybe those who work in the macro-sphere would get a number of credits to purchase custom artisan goods produces by the micro spheres. But generally the pace of social economic change would be slower and more conservative in the macro-sphere, more evolutionary than revolutionary. But in the micro-spheres you can let your imagination run wild if you get together some people who think like you.

I'm kind of coming up with all this on the spot lol, so I'll have to flesh it out more.



Just out of curiosity why would *any* locality want or need to use money at all? And why the 'rationing' approach? Do you think that there would be a *shortfall* of productivity, here in the 21st century? Why not just a general 'gift economy', so that people can produce-for, and take-from, the commons.

Okay, lemme know.
#15187092

In places where the rising was crushed it was not only Franco’s followers who suffered defeat: ‘The state, caught between its insurgent army and the armed masses of the people, had shattered to pieces’.219 Although the official government still held office in Madrid, real authority in the localities was in the hands of a multitude of revolutionary committees. The workers who held power in an area used it in their own interests: factories were taken over and collectivised; peasants began to divide the land, knowing that the workers’ militias would protect them; armed workers arrested local dignitaries with a record of hostility to their demands. With the disintegration of the army, the bourgeoisie seemed finished throughout most of the republican areas, hence the conditions Orwell found in Barcelona. Effective power was in the hands of the workers’ organisations, while the official republican government held office without effective power. This was also true of the autonomous government of Catalonia, the most important industrial region. Its president, Companys, invited the leaders of the most powerful workers’ organisation in Catalonia, the CNT, to a meeting at which he told them:

You are the masters of the town and of Catalonia, because you have defeated the fascist soldiers on your own… You have won and everything is in your power. If you do not need me, if you do not want me to be president, say so now, and I shall become just another soldier in the anti-fascist struggle.220


A situation of ‘dual power’ existed—as in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and at points during the German Revolution of 1918-20—with the official government dependent on networks of revolutionary committees and organisations to get things done. However, the republican government did have one advantage over the revolutionary committees. It had a centralised structure and they did not. This was a vital matter. The fascist armies were centralised and so able to pursue a single strategy across the whole country. The anti-fascists needed to be centralised as well, otherwise the fascists would be able to win the war simply by moving their troops to points on the front where the opposing forces were weakest, knowing the anti-fascists would not be able to respond by concentrating their forces.

This anti-fascist centralisation could have been achieved by drawing the committees together. There were coordinating committees of anti-fascist militias in many localities. But there was no establishment of an all-Spanish committee of militias and workers’ delegates comparable to the Russian soviets of 1917.

The reason for this failing lay in the politics of the workers’ organisations. The most powerful, the anarcho-syndicalists, had always insisted that any centralisation of power would involve a crushing of the workers by a new state. It would be wrong to follow this path now, they said. In the words of one of their leaders, Santillan, ‘Dictatorship was the liquidation of libertarian communism, which could only be achieved by the liberty and spontaneity of the masses’.221 Rather than go along that path, they argued to leave Companys’s government intact and collaborate with it. Even the ablest and most militant of the CNT leaders, Buenaventura Durutti—who had been involved in two unsuccessful risings against republican governments—did not dispute this logic. He had played a decisive role in crushing the fascists in Barcelona, was the hero of the city’s workers, and was to lead an impromptu workers’ army of tens of thousands which swept across the Catalan border into Aragon and towards the fascist-held city of Saragossa. But he was not prepared to confront the question of power, and left his CNT colleagues free to share it with Companys’s bourgeois government.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 503-505
#15187125
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:It's as if these are the first stupid people you've come across, and now you're frightened they'll control your life (despite them belonging to a fringe group in one country). If you bothered to read further, you'd have seen I already pointed out that stupid people have been in positions of power for your entire life. But this is just stupidity (being a waste of time) about how they'd like to be seen. It's not dangerous.


None of this makes sense. Don't know what you're on about.
#15187133
ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, I can appreciate all of this -- the *downside* to representation, though, is that those who *are* professional politicians / activists / whatever, have proportionately *more* political power through their 'mindshare' / publicity / notoriety within the population. This power imbalance automatically *confers* a social hierarchy, and such people of privilege are usually at the head of *patronage* networks, which are arguably just as bad as any wealth-based economics.

To clarify, I don't mean to say that everyone *should* be doing politics 24/7/365, but it's just that those who *do* do politics more often will simply be able to 'swim faster'. In the context of my labor credits model, those who are more politically active would be the de facto 'movers-and-shakers' in terms of effecting material-world projects / developments, and social policy.


Political campaigning is definitely trash. I think we should ban all political advertisements and instead set up a public forum where the candidates can explain their policy agenda at length (not debates either, cause those are just pro wrestling). They can also present a simplified version which constitutes their message, so that non-policy wonks can get a picture of what they're about.


ckaihatsu wrote:I'll also point out that there objectively are really only *three* 'levels' of socio-political 'modes' of social involvement and activity -- one's own life ('lifestyle'), the *means* for enabling that life / lifestyle ('logistics'), and the prevailing authority of societal *policy* over those logistics and those lives and lifestyles ('politics'). (Meaning what *else* would one do, besides politics, if not for the sake of one's own life, and securing the *means* for one's own life?)


I agree those are 3 objective levels, but it is too easy for those deeply invested in politics to assume that everyone must be. Most people's attention is 95% on lifestyle and logistics within the given parameters determined by society. They have opinions on the remaining 5% of politics proper, but since its not something they have direct control over, they don't spend too much time on it. The sheer amount of political issues is overwhelming, so I think that direct control over everything would be equally demotivating (paradox of choice). I think you can maximize involvement by rallying around a few issues people can get really excited about (like legalizing marijuana

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, this is borderline political marketing -- I'll remind that the political spectrum itself is only *1-dimensional*, a straight line from left to right. No one's calling for 'complex solutions', and there wouldn't *be* any such thing, anyway, because politics is really about supporting one policy platform, or another, in common.


Effective action is to a large extent defined by the parameters of the given system. We live in a consumer based society, where decisions are based on branding and deeper identification with the "product." Even outside that, in a certain sense that's going to be the case no matter what. You're not going to get anywhere if your political message doesn't generate excitement and cause people to see themselves in it. And if you want to get to a place where people's brains are less advertising-addled, you have to think strategically of how to counter all the messages they're bombarded with every minute living in capitalism.

I think the political spectrum is more like a right-cloud and a left-cloud, on either side of a critical point that determines which direction material political reality is pulled in. The right has an inherent advantage in that it can utilize pre-existing already-prevalent values, and align all the vectors in the right-cloud to pull in one direction. Because the left is inherently more diverse and free thinking, its more difficult to align its vectors to overpower the rightward pull. Like herding cats. I think the innovation of intersectionalism in the cultural sphere has caused a great alignment pulling culture to the left. But you always have to think about the next strategy. Because since Trump, the right has been very successful at creating an alignment in opposition to intersectionalism. And since the collapse of communism, the left has been in complete disarray in terms of economic alignment. I think that even during that time, the socialist / communist "faith" was effectively a simple political message of preaching the revolution as the ultimate solution. The message needs to be updated. I think Bernie did a great job with his rhetoric about the 1%. It resonated and I think changed the conversation in a very good way. But we need to keep thinking forward, crafting a message that is appropriate to THIS time and place (may be different for USA versus other places). I think the DSA which is an attempt to carry the torch beyond Bernie has failed. It is uniting the most utopian elements of intersectionalism with the most utopian economic ideas. This is all naive far-leftism which assumes one objective political truth that people will be compelled to by the force of pure reason (or something else, whatever is the equivalent for the intersectionalists).

What we haven't come to grips with is the depths of capitalist realism, and the limited power of moral purity. The left has not yet confronted the reality that their god is dead. And thus they cannot even begin the transvaluation of all values in Nietzschean terms.


ckaihatsu wrote:How about the politics of ending the *class divide* -- ? Is that 'utopian' enough -- ?


Yes, I do think that politics should be oriented around the materiality of the class divide, which in reality is somewhat complex. But it should be mythologized into something like the 99% versus the 1%. That is a fantastic political message that it is very easy for people to understand and identify with. The closer we can hew to this complex material reality / simplified political message that gets to the essential core, the better. Everything else is just at best unnecessary and at worst counterproductive. The very elaborate mythology that Marxism constructs *on top* of the material class divide I believe we can leave behind in the 20th century.


ckaihatsu wrote:Ehhhhh, you're just describing the constraints of 2-party politics. Consider also the empirical balance of power between those who have a personal interest in *higher wages*, versus those who have a countervailing interest in *lower wages*.


The political right-left divide cannot be boiled down to material interests. That is vulgar economic reductionism. You have to consider the psychic or what Lyotard called the libidinal economy, where people aren't simply "tricked" by capitalists into fascism. No, they are deeply emotionally invested in it. Desire is material.

ckaihatsu wrote:Whoooooaaaa, where's all *that* coming from? Recall, this all started because of *this* concern of yours:


I'm somewhat trying to form what it is actually believe in the process of this conversation, so I may contradict myself sometimes.

I think that we should definitely have a "utopian" / more complex vision, in that it orients our political direction and allows us to select which radical reform to push for next. But I think that staking too much on it is counterproductive. The utopian vision which is appropriate to the material circumstances has to be reconstructed every time those material circumstances change, so it is regressive to invest too much in a past utopian vision the material underpinning of which has long since passed away. I do think it is productive to pull the theorizing forward which is what it appears you're trying to do. At the same time though I think you're investing too much in it. Even Marx defined communism as something like the "present movement to abolish the present state of affairs." The goal of radical leftism I think should be to locate the razor edge of the existing transformation that is already taking place, and exert pressure there. Anything else is utopian socialism not scientific.


ckaihatsu wrote:WTF? You think I 'need workers' to 'work together' 'for [my] plan' -- ?

That's quite a presumptuous assumption on your part. I think I've made clear that the point of having a post-capitalist model like mine is so as to be *clear* about how a post-class political economy *could* feasibly function. That's it, nothing more.


OK, point taken.


ckaihatsu wrote:I think you're missing the point here -- the model can only *function* in a post-capitalist world because a prerequisite is that workers are in full control of the means of mass industrial production, worldwide. My model is fundamentally incompatible with the practice of private property.


I think that this is a utopian assumption, or it is so far into some Star Trek future that it is basically not relevant to current conditions. I think that something like 10% of our energy should be directed towards utopian theorizing, with the utopia being located just outside the possible, not too far from it. 10% towards deciding what radical reforms make sense based on this theorizing. And then 80% of our political consciousness and energy should be directed towards strategizing and organizing to make that radical reform a reality.

The advantage of my utopian theory of macro/micro spheres, is that on the macro level it is basically social democratic which is not very far at all from the concrete possibilities offered by the Bernie Sanders movement. Since more radical social experiments are inherently more realistic to accomplish on a micro level, it remains close to reality in that sense as well, while providing a productive outlet for radical energies to actually construct something instead of merely theorizing.

ckaihatsu wrote:Oh, okay, so with this you're basically an *anarchist*, then. Got it.

I have no problem with individual 'permaculture', and artisan crafts and whatever, but, *politically* there has to be a form of political social organization that can rival the *bourgeoisie's* social organizing, since it's *their* class that's currently in power now, for the past few centuries.


No. My utopian vision I believe has the potential to unify all radical strands of political thought (as a compromise, none of them get completely what they want). No matter how radical you are, I would hope that you'd recognize someone like Bernie would be a concrete improvement over someone like Trump. So, as long as your preferred total revolutionary solution isn't quite in the cards, social democracy on the macro level is a reasonable compromise. Anarchists want autonomous zones free of police etc. in order to create cooperate forms of political economy. Great, they can have their own micro-spheres for that. Right-leaning libertarians (however flawed their ideology) also want to be free to do their own thing independent of the government. They can have their own spheres for that. Its inherently a pluralistic vision. But also it acknowledges monism in that it aims for solving the universal problems confronting all humankind, most of which involve the problem of the commons, as communists are very much correct in identifying.

But of course the political divide is located in how you see the political divide itself, as Zizek says. I can only offer my utopian vision as one possible one out of many. At the end of the day, the process of coordinating and negotiating different political visions and distilling concrete action out of that is more important than any one person's idea of how to solve everything. So I can at least respect that as something the DSA was trying to accomplish.


ckaihatsu wrote:Just out of curiosity why would *any* locality want or need to use money at all? And why the 'rationing' approach? Do you think that there would be a *shortfall* of productivity, here in the 21st century? Why not just a general 'gift economy', so that people can produce-for, and take-from, the commons.

Okay, lemme know.


That would be up to them to decide. Even if they are making a totally irrational decision in your view, and even if that is objectively the case, my pluralistic compromise would allow you concrete material space to directly implement your vision on a small scale instead of staking everything on the grandest possible transformation of the entire world all at once, and then just sulking in resentment when everyone else doesn't agree with you. The small-scale experiment could provide a foundation for larger scale implementation down the road. Isn't that how capitalism triumphed over feudalism? A world ruled by money didn't just come out of nowhere. It existed in thriving pockets of mercantalist trade and banking. And also much like trade unions, these micro spheres could be a basis for organizing political progressive power on the macro sphere as well. So I'm talking about providing space for the really existing movement to abolish the present state of affairs. That's true communism according to Marx.
#15187139
Rancid wrote:Read my initial posts. I've already stated, I suspect these people will not raise to any power/influence. That basically means, I'm not frightened. ;)

That said, we did see the raise of MAGA, which makes me doubt that suspicion. Which means, this stupidity could spill over into our cultural and political lives.

Anything beyond that, you are imagining shit.... no surprise. All of this feels like you just trying to tell me to shutup in some weird round about way.

I'm responding to your later feelings, where you say these people are "dangerously stupid", which ties in with the doubt you now feel (and you'd already brought MAGA into it).

You say the "stupidity could spill over into our cultural and political lives". My point is that there's stupidity, and there's dangerous stupidity, and no-one has yet shown how this is 'dangerous'. It's a few people wasting their own time with pointless shows of unnecessary accommodation. At the worst, it'll spread and waste other people's time too. But we already live with loads of pointless shows that waste people's time in our lives - anthems, prayers - and they're not dangerous. The DSA performances are even less likely to be dangerous - they don't divide groups into 'in' and 'out'.

Relax - go back to your original position of "these people won't rise to any power or influence". Their love of these pointless shows will probably help ensure that.
#15187140
Noumenon wrote:
Political campaigning is definitely trash. I think we should ban all political advertisements and instead set up a public forum where the candidates can explain their policy agenda at length (not debates either, cause those are just pro wrestling). They can also present a simplified version which constitutes their message, so that non-policy wonks can get a picture of what they're about.



Okay, agreed.

(A 'non-policy wonk' is a contradiction in terms.)


Noumenon wrote:
I agree those are 3 objective levels, but it is too easy for those deeply invested in politics to assume that everyone must be. Most people's attention is 95% on lifestyle and logistics within the given parameters determined by society. They have opinions on the remaining 5% of politics proper, but since its not something they have direct control over, they don't spend too much time on it. The sheer amount of political issues is overwhelming, so I think that direct control over everything would be equally demotivating (paradox of choice). I think you can maximize involvement by rallying around a few issues people can get really excited about (like legalizing marijuana



Well, now you're back to your line of *patronizing* -- you'd rather *dichotomize* the population into those who are 'political', and those who are 'non-political', instead of looking to build anti-capitalist consciousness *broadly*.


Noumenon wrote:
Effective action is to a large extent defined by the parameters of the given system. We live in a consumer based society, where decisions are based on branding and deeper identification with the "product." Even outside that, in a certain sense that's going to be the case no matter what. You're not going to get anywhere if your political message doesn't generate excitement and cause people to see themselves in it. And if you want to get to a place where people's brains are less advertising-addled, you have to think strategically of how to counter all the messages they're bombarded with every minute living in capitalism.



Patronizing.


Noumenon wrote:
I think the political spectrum is more like a right-cloud and a left-cloud, on either side of a critical point that determines which direction material political reality is pulled in. The right has an inherent advantage in that it can utilize pre-existing already-prevalent values, and align all the vectors in the right-cloud to pull in one direction. Because the left is inherently more diverse and free thinking, its more difficult to align its vectors to overpower the rightward pull. Like herding cats. I think the innovation of intersectionalism in the cultural sphere has caused a great alignment pulling culture to the left. But you always have to think about the next strategy. Because since Trump, the right has been very successful at creating an alignment in opposition to intersectionalism. And since the collapse of communism, the left has been in complete disarray in terms of economic alignment.



No, I think you're being dismissive of left-wing politics here, which has been soundly *anti-austerity*, economically, all along, despite the ongoing austerity regimes of Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump.

I have a diagram for the dynamics you're describing:


Ideologies & Operations -- Left Centrifugalism

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Noumenon wrote:
I think that even during that time, the socialist / communist "faith" was effectively a simple political message of preaching the revolution as the ultimate solution. The message needs to be updated. I think Bernie did a great job with his rhetoric about the 1%. It resonated and I think changed the conversation in a very good way. But we need to keep thinking forward, crafting a message that is appropriate to THIS time and place (may be different for USA versus other places). I think the DSA which is an attempt to carry the torch beyond Bernie has failed. It is uniting the most utopian elements of intersectionalism with the most utopian economic ideas.



Can you give an example here? I'm unfamiliar with what you're indicating.


Noumenon wrote:
This is all naive far-leftism which assumes one objective political truth that people will be compelled to by the force of pure reason (or something else, whatever is the equivalent for the intersectionalists).

What we haven't come to grips with is the depths of capitalist realism, and the limited power of moral purity. The left has not yet confronted the reality that their god is dead. And thus they cannot even begin the transvaluation of all values in Nietzschean terms.



You're back to wearing your political-marketing-strategist hat again.


Noumenon wrote:
Yes, I do think that politics should be oriented around the materiality of the class divide, which in reality is somewhat complex. But it should be mythologized into something like the 99% versus the 1%. That is a fantastic political message that it is very easy for people to understand and identify with. The closer we can hew to this complex material reality / simplified political message that gets to the essential core, the better. Everything else is just at best unnecessary and at worst counterproductive. The very elaborate mythology that Marxism constructs *on top* of the material class divide I believe we can leave behind in the 20th century.



Corporate taxation is now an international bourgeois-politics phenomenon, so at least that's momentum in the correct direction.

What 'mythology' are you indicating here?


Noumenon wrote:
The political right-left divide cannot be boiled down to material interests. That is vulgar economic reductionism. You have to consider the psychic or what Lyotard called the libidinal economy, where people aren't simply "tricked" by capitalists into fascism. No, they are deeply emotionally invested in it. Desire is material.



You *just acknowledged* the class divide in the previous segment, and now you're backtracking already. Should 'politics be oriented around the materiality of the class divide', or is it 'vulgar economic reductionism' -- ?


Noumenon wrote:
I'm somewhat trying to form what it is actually believe in the process of this conversation, so I may contradict myself sometimes.

I think that we should definitely have a "utopian" / more complex vision, in that it orients our political direction and allows us to select which radical reform to push for next. But I think that staking too much on it is counterproductive. The utopian vision which is appropriate to the material circumstances has to be reconstructed every time those material circumstances change, so it is regressive to invest too much in a past utopian vision the material underpinning of which has long since passed away. I do think it is productive to pull the theorizing forward which is what it appears you're trying to do.



Yeah, we *have* been doing it, in discussing automation and robotization, etc.


Noumenon wrote:
At the same time though I think you're investing too much in it. Even Marx defined communism as something like the "present movement to abolish the present state of affairs." The goal of radical leftism I think should be to locate the razor edge of the existing transformation that is already taking place, and exert pressure there. Anything else is utopian socialism not scientific.



Okay, fair enough. I don't disagree.


Leftism -- Want, Get

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Noumenon wrote:
OK, point taken.



ckaihatsu wrote:
I think you're missing the point here -- the model can only *function* in a post-capitalist world because a prerequisite is that workers are in full control of the means of mass industrial production, worldwide. My model is fundamentally incompatible with the practice of private property.



Noumenon wrote:
I think that this is a utopian assumption, or it is so far into some Star Trek future that it is basically not relevant to current conditions. I think that something like 10% of our energy should be directed towards utopian theorizing, with the utopia being located just outside the possible, not too far from it. 10% towards deciding what radical reforms make sense based on this theorizing. And then 80% of our political consciousness and energy should be directed towards strategizing and organizing to make that radical reform a reality.

The advantage of my utopian theory of macro/micro spheres, is that on the macro level it is basically social democratic which is not very far at all from the concrete possibilities offered by the Bernie Sanders movement. Since more radical social experiments are inherently more realistic to accomplish on a micro level, it remains close to reality in that sense as well, while providing a productive outlet for radical energies to actually construct something instead of merely theorizing.



Sanders is ultimately a Democratic Party member, and not 'social democratic'. He's caved *twice* now to the political machine instead of looking to build his base outside of the 2-party system.


Noumenon wrote:
No. My utopian vision I believe has the potential to unify all radical strands of political thought (as a compromise, none of them get completely what they want). No matter how radical you are, I would hope that you'd recognize someone like Bernie would be a concrete improvement over someone like Trump. So, as long as your preferred total revolutionary solution isn't quite in the cards, social democracy on the macro level is a reasonable compromise. Anarchists want autonomous zones free of police etc. in order to create cooperate forms of political economy. Great, they can have their own micro-spheres for that. Right-leaning libertarians (however flawed their ideology) also want to be free to do their own thing independent of the government. They can have their own spheres for that.



Funny. What about *civil society* -- ? Who has the authority to put people in jail?


Noumenon wrote:
Its inherently a pluralistic vision. But also it acknowledges monism in that it aims for solving the universal problems confronting all humankind, most of which involve the problem of the commons, as communists are very much correct in identifying.



You're thinking of the *right wing* -- communists, like myself, don't see any "problem" with a fully anti-capitalist, de-privatized commons, for all to contribute to, and to take from.

An easy way to conceptualize it is to think about what is *already*, today, de-privatized, like public education, civil society, roads, infrastructure, etc. Then just *expand* that sphere to include everything that's *currently* in the private sector today, like manufacturing, housing, transportation, etc.


Noumenon wrote:
But of course the political divide is located in how you see the political divide itself, as Zizek says. I can only offer my utopian vision as one possible one out of many.



*Your* "utopian vision" is "Vote for Sanders".


x D


Noumenon wrote:
At the end of the day, the process of coordinating and negotiating different political visions and distilling concrete action out of that is more important than any one person's idea of how to solve everything. So I can at least respect that as something the DSA was trying to accomplish.



I have to point out that government nation-state power is *monolithic*, meaning that government enforces *one* standard of legal norms, and nationalist practice, for everyone.

*Cultural* pluralism, which is what you're describing here, is all fine and good, but then you're not really dealing with state power, and which class, the bourgeois ruling class, or the working class, gets to wield that state power in their own interests.


Noumenon wrote:
That would be up to them to decide. Even if they are making a totally irrational decision in your view, and even if that is objectively the case, my pluralistic compromise would allow you concrete material space to directly implement your vision on a small scale instead of staking everything on the grandest possible transformation of the entire world all at once, and then just sulking in resentment when everyone else doesn't agree with you. The small-scale experiment could provide a foundation for larger scale implementation down the road. Isn't that how capitalism triumphed over feudalism? A world ruled by money didn't just come out of nowhere. It existed in thriving pockets of mercantalist trade and banking. And also much like trade unions, these micro spheres could be a basis for organizing political progressive power on the macro sphere as well. So I'm talking about providing space for the really existing movement to abolish the present state of affairs. That's true communism according to Marx.



You don't seem to understand that proletarian revolution is a politically mass-*conscious* movement, unlike all previous, ruling class, revolutions in human history, like the past bourgeois ones (English, American, French, etc.).

In other words, a working class revolution can't 'emerge', or unconsciously 'slip into' existence -- it has to be a mass-*willful* action on the part of the working class itself, to consciously assert its independence and labor power, over bourgeois ruling class interests to continue *exploiting* that labor power, economically.
#15187177
ckaihatsu wrote:Well, now you're back to your line of *patronizing* -- you'd rather *dichotomize* the population into those who are 'political', and those who are 'non-political', instead of looking to build anti-capitalist consciousness *broadly*.


I think such consciousness is built precisely by the conscious crafting of a political message by the more-political to bring the less-political on board too. Consciousness is not spontaneous. Its a result of ideological warfare in symbolic space. Propaganda is not necessarily a bad word, if it is done the right way. I.e. not in a patronizing way. I don't see where opposition to this would come from. Communists have always propagandized. I think they've just gotten really bad at it cause they've lost the plot.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, I think you're being dismissive of left-wing politics here, which has been soundly *anti-austerity*, economically, all along, despite the ongoing austerity regimes of Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump.


Ok, yes anti-capitalist and neoliberal sentiment has been mobilized significantly, yes. But not effectively, in a way that translates into actual gains. I think in the US context we almost got somewhere with Bernie. But turnout failed, young people didn't show up to vote for him in the 2020 primaries. There is something missing in the message. Despite all the compromises, he has made things like universal health care and green new deal a centerpiece of the conversation. We weren't anywhere close to that before 2016, we were like talking about a 1% rise in the minimum wage or something, whatever would be palatable to the Hillary-type people. The space has been opened up for I think a new universalist politics which has the potential to bring everyone into the fold as much as possible. It is critical that the politics we craft is external-facing and appropriate to the current consciousness of the broad electorate, while at the same time providing something exciting and new.

ckaihatsu wrote:"I think the DSA which is an attempt to carry the torch beyond Bernie has failed. It is uniting the most utopian elements of intersectionalism with the most utopian economic ideas."

Can you give an example here? I'm unfamiliar with what you're indicating.


Intersectionalism I think is utopian when it relies on the fantasy of recognition as a sufficient politics unto itself. The handwringing about not giving the slightest offense we saw in the OP video is an example. It is materialist when it focuses on the actually-existing antagonisms which exist along racial, gender etc. lines.

Its economic policies I think are generally reasonable and not utopian. But I think that because it exists in a certain ideological left microcosm, it doesn't really give fair consideration to say, cap and trade for carbon emissions, nuclear energy, or a Universal Basic Income. Because these are symbolically coded as neoliberal and therefore rejected out of hand. What is really needed for the next stage of universalist politics is to shatter this bubble of radically-inclined white millennial (my demographic) domination of the allowable parameters of discussion. There exists a dialectic with the broader liberal discussion, that the radleft-sphere should not close itself off from and therefore limit its appeal.


ckaihatsu wrote:Corporate taxation is now an international bourgeois-politics phenomenon, so at least that's momentum in the correct direction.


Agreed.

ckaihatsu wrote:What 'mythology' are you indicating here?


Basically everything in the core tenets of Marxism, except for the existence of class antagonism and stratification which is a concrete reality no matter which way you look at it. Tendency of profit rate to fall, labor theory of value, rate of surplus value, we don't need any of that.

ckaihatsu wrote:You *just acknowledged* the class divide in the previous segment, and now you're backtracking already. Should 'politics be oriented around the materiality of the class divide', or is it 'vulgar economic reductionism' -- ?


Politics should be oriented around all existing antagonisms, with the acknowledgment that class antagonism is a very central one (but not so central that it overshadows or obscures the others). A major advantage of 99% versus 1% is its universalist appeal, which mitigates against the balkanization inherent in the current incarnation of identity politics. But we can't afford to ignore identity either. That's why it is not enough to just rely on some spontaneous awakening of consciousness. Unifying all these disparate elements across different divides actually requires a positive construction of how to accomplish that.

ckaihatsu wrote:Sanders is ultimately a Democratic Party member, and not 'social democratic'. He's caved *twice* now to the political machine instead of looking to build his base outside of the 2-party system.


He did everything that it was possible to do in the current circumstances, and made the most realpolitik possible choices to amplify his chances of gaining real power. Which he came closer to achieving than anyone since Eugene Debs 100 years ago. He's a gangster with a heart of gold. So he definitely gets way more respect in my eyes than people standing on the sidelines throwing shade.

If there's any chance of creating a multiparty system, it will be after Republicans in their current form are vanquished, and Democrats become the center-right party. That will open up a space for new parties. Hate to be the "lesser of two evils" guy as I was deadset against that logic in 2016 and voted for Jill Stein. But Biden, sadly, was the best option in 2020. Its a reflection of how much work needs to be done to offer people real and not imaginary alternatives.

ckaihatsu wrote:Funny. What about *civil society* -- ? Who has the authority to put people in jail?


Control over the macro-sphere would still be contested the same way it is now. So the "utopian" part of my vision exists more in the micro-spheres which are spaces for free experimentation. You would have to obtain enough power in the first place to implement this autonomous zones though.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're thinking of the *right wing* -- communists, like myself, don't see any "problem" with a fully anti-capitalist, de-privatized commons, for all to contribute to, and to take from.

An easy way to conceptualize it is to think about what is *already*, today, de-privatized, like public education, civil society, roads, infrastructure, etc. Then just *expand* that sphere to include everything that's *currently* in the private sector today, like manufacturing, housing, transportation, etc.


I think this is where communism is behind the times. No one really believes that state control is some magical implementation of the people's will. Again, that doesn't mean its inherently bad. I do think that we should have a greatly expanded public sphere. But I think creating micro spaces where people can *actually* implement their will, without the intermediary of a state, is 1000% more empowering and inspiring than turning everything into the DMV. And I think these spaces will eventually expand our imagination with what is possible on the macro scale as well. So its not like I'm neglecting that as a utopian possibility.

ckaihatsu wrote:*Your* "utopian vision" is "Vote for Sanders".

x D


Well, his defeat (twice) proved that even a New Deal Democrat time-warped from the 1940's was too radical and forward thinking for the sad dystopian nightmare of US politics today. So yes, he ultimately was utopian. But the closest thing within our reach. We need to experience being able to grasp the demonstrably possible before we can think about reaching further. The working class needs some real victories.

ckaihatsu wrote:I have to point out that government nation-state power is *monolithic*, meaning that government enforces *one* standard of legal norms, and nationalist practice, for everyone.

*Cultural* pluralism, which is what you're describing here, is all fine and good, but then you're not really dealing with state power, and which class, the bourgeois ruling class, or the working class, gets to wield that state power in their own interests.


The federal government in the US is way more powerful than state and city governments, of course. But nonetheless these localities have some freedom to implement policy for their geographical region. What I'm proposing would be like that but way more autonomous from either federal or state governments. Police would have no jurisdiction there, except insofar as to ensure people aren't held as slaves and have the freedom to move from sphere to sphere. I'm not saying this would be easy to implement or that the current existence state and police powers would like it one bit. That's what makes it a radical reform.

State and capital I agree, we have to unify to fight against their hegemony. But the autonomous spheres can be places within which to build up that power, which is just inherently difficult with people leading hyper-alienated consumerist existences.

ckaihatsu wrote:You don't seem to understand that proletarian revolution is a politically mass-*conscious* movement, unlike all previous, ruling class, revolutions in human history, like the past bourgeois ones (English, American, French, etc.).

In other words, a working class revolution can't 'emerge', or unconsciously 'slip into' existence -- it has to be a mass-*willful* action on the part of the working class itself, to consciously assert its independence and labor power, over bourgeois ruling class interests to continue *exploiting* that labor power, economically.


I think that was the original conception of revolution in the 19th century. But it didn't happen, at least not in the way people thought. And the rest of Marxist thought in the 20th century has been trying to grapple with that fact.

The power to say "no" to capitalist exploitation, to escape it, I think is the way forward. Whether it is autonomous zones or a UBI or a living wage or universal healthcare, anything that empowers workers to refuse work on the capitalist's terms is good. And in my view, that is the path history is taking going forward. If there is a revolution in the cards, I don't see it. Or it is too far in the future to see.
#15187183
Noumenon wrote:
I think such consciousness is built precisely by the conscious crafting of a political message by the more-political to bring the less-political on board too. Consciousness is not spontaneous. Its a result of ideological warfare in symbolic space. Propaganda is not necessarily a bad word, if it is done the right way. I.e. not in a patronizing way. I don't see where opposition to this would come from. Communists have always propagandized. I think they've just gotten really bad at it cause they've lost the plot.



Many people would actually *disagree* with you here, saying instead that it's *social conditions* that create class consciousness -- those who have to work full-time, and more, are *very* conscious of the fact that they're being exploited by their boss.


Noumenon wrote:
Ok, yes anti-capitalist and neoliberal sentiment has been mobilized significantly, yes.



These are contradictory to each other -- anti-capitalist sentiment is for the *empowerment* of the working class, because capitalism *exploits* and *oppresses* the working class, so workers have an intrinsic material interest in controlling social production collectively *themselves*, without the capitalists. Neoliberalism is *austerity* in government spending, meaning even *less* public funds are directed towards people, for their everyday kinds of needs.


Noumenon wrote:
But not effectively, in a way that translates into actual gains. I think in the US context we almost got somewhere with Bernie. But turnout failed, young people didn't show up to vote for him in the 2020 primaries. There is something missing in the message. Despite all the compromises, he has made things like universal health care and green new deal a centerpiece of the conversation. We weren't anywhere close to that before 2016, we were like talking about a 1% rise in the minimum wage or something, whatever would be palatable to the Hillary-type people. The space has been opened up for I think a new universalist politics which has the potential to bring everyone into the fold as much as possible. It is critical that the politics we craft is external-facing and appropriate to the current consciousness of the broad electorate, while at the same time providing something exciting and new.



Populism, in other words. Understandable, but I have to note that it's no threat whatsoever to the bourgeois nation-state because it leaves that entire apparatus intact, just as we saw with Occupy Wall Street. (Also Myanmar, currently.)


History, Macro-Micro -- simplified

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Noumenon wrote:
Intersectionalism I think is utopian when it relies on the fantasy of recognition as a sufficient politics unto itself. The handwringing about not giving the slightest offense we saw in the OP video is an example.



*Or*, we could just call it 'common civil courtesy', extended to the acknowledgement of people's gender and transgender identities, since that's current in politics.


Noumenon wrote:
It is materialist when it focuses on the actually-existing antagonisms which exist along racial, gender etc. lines.



You may want to *advance*, then, to these actual larger-world antagonisms / politics, regarding issues of race, gender, etc. Black Lives Matter and the women's march (2017) come to mind right away.


Noumenon wrote:
Its economic policies I think are generally reasonable and not utopian. But I think that because it exists in a certain ideological left microcosm, it doesn't really give fair consideration to say, cap and trade for carbon emissions, nuclear energy, or a Universal Basic Income. Because these are symbolically coded as neoliberal and therefore rejected out of hand.



No, sorry, you're mixed-up -- these are *political* issues primarily, not economic / neoliberal ones.


Noumenon wrote:
What is really needed for the next stage of universalist politics is to shatter this bubble of radically-inclined white millennial (my demographic) domination of the allowable parameters of discussion. There exists a dialectic with the broader liberal discussion, that the radleft-sphere should not close itself off from and therefore limit its appeal.



Now you're beginning to sound just as obsessed as UM is, regarding the DSA's internal political culture.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Corporate taxation is now an international bourgeois-politics phenomenon, so at least that's momentum in the correct direction.



Noumenon wrote:
Agreed.



---


Noumenon wrote:
Basically everything in the core tenets of Marxism, except for the existence of class antagonism and stratification which is a concrete reality no matter which way you look at it. Tendency of profit rate to fall, labor theory of value, rate of surplus value, we don't need any of that.



Well, the class antagonism only exists *because* of the economics of capitalism -- which includes capitalism's recurring internal economic crises, like 1929, the '70s, 2000, 2008-2009, 2019, and 2020.

Why do you have problems with the labor theory of value? What's your argument?


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

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Noumenon wrote:
Politics should be oriented around all existing antagonisms, with the acknowledgment that class antagonism is a very central one (but not so central that it overshadows or obscures the others).



'Very central', 'but not so central that it overshadows or obscures the others' -- doesn't this sound at all *arrogant* to yourself? Do you really think that you can just *make shit up* about the real world and the way it works, to suit your own tastes?


Noumenon wrote:
A major advantage of 99% versus 1% is its universalist appeal, which mitigates against the balkanization inherent in the current incarnation of identity politics. But we can't afford to ignore identity either. That's why it is not enough to just rely on some spontaneous awakening of consciousness. Unifying all these disparate elements across different divides actually requires a positive construction of how to accomplish that.



Okay, so you prefer populism over identity politics. Understandable, but still *incremental*, leftwards.


Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals

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Noumenon wrote:
He did everything that it was possible to do in the current circumstances, and made the most realpolitik possible choices to amplify his chances of gaining real power. Which he came closer to achieving than anyone since Eugene Debs 100 years ago. He's a gangster with a heart of gold. So he definitely gets way more respect in my eyes than people standing on the sidelines throwing shade.

If there's any chance of creating a multiparty system, it will be after Republicans in their current form are vanquished, and Democrats become the center-right party. That will open up a space for new parties. Hate to be the "lesser of two evils" guy as I was deadset against that logic in 2016 and voted for Jill Stein. But Biden, sadly, was the best option in 2020. Its a reflection of how much work needs to be done to offer people real and not imaginary alternatives.



But bourgeois electoralist politics is still *ruling class* politics.


---


Noumenon wrote:
No. My utopian vision I believe has the potential to unify all radical strands of political thought (as a compromise, none of them get completely what they want). No matter how radical you are, I would hope that you'd recognize someone like Bernie would be a concrete improvement over someone like Trump. So, as long as your preferred total revolutionary solution isn't quite in the cards, social democracy on the macro level is a reasonable compromise. Anarchists want autonomous zones free of police etc. in order to create cooperate forms of political economy. Great, they can have their own micro-spheres for that. Right-leaning libertarians (however flawed their ideology) also want to be free to do their own thing independent of the government. They can have their own spheres for that.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Funny. What about *civil society* -- ? Who has the authority to put people in jail?



Noumenon wrote:
Control over the macro-sphere would still be contested the same way it is now. So the "utopian" part of my vision exists more in the micro-spheres which are spaces for free experimentation. You would have to obtain enough power in the first place to implement this autonomous zones though.



I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I'll *rephrase*, for the sake of clarity -- what would prevent a person committing an anti-social crime in *one* locality / 'micro-sphere', and then just traipsing over to *another* 'micro-sphere' to escape any potential government 'justice' -- ?


---


Noumenon wrote:
Its inherently a pluralistic vision. But also it acknowledges monism in that it aims for solving the universal problems confronting all humankind, most of which involve the problem of the commons, as communists are very much correct in identifying.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You're thinking of the *right wing* -- communists, like myself, don't see any "problem" with a fully anti-capitalist, de-privatized commons, for all to contribute to, and to take from.

An easy way to conceptualize it is to think about what is *already*, today, de-privatized, like public education, civil society, roads, infrastructure, etc. Then just *expand* that sphere to include everything that's *currently* in the private sector today, like manufacturing, housing, transportation, etc.



Noumenon wrote:
I think this is where communism is behind the times. No one really believes that state control is some magical implementation of the people's will. Again, that doesn't mean its inherently bad. I do think that we should have a greatly expanded public sphere. But I think creating micro spaces where people can *actually* implement their will, without the intermediary of a state, is 1000% more empowering and inspiring than turning everything into the DMV. And I think these spaces will eventually expand our imagination with what is possible on the macro scale as well. So its not like I'm neglecting that as a utopian possibility.



So you're a *hippie*, then.

Outside of *lifestylism*, though, how would this formulation of yours conceivably address actual material *political* and *economic* issues, like the class divide?


Noumenon wrote:
Well, his defeat (twice) proved that even a New Deal Democrat time-warped from the 1940's was too radical and forward thinking for the sad dystopian nightmare of US politics today. So yes, he ultimately was utopian. But the closest thing within our reach. We need to experience being able to grasp the demonstrably possible before we can think about reaching further. The working class needs some real victories.


Noumenon wrote:
The federal government in the US is way more powerful than state and city governments, of course. But nonetheless these localities have some freedom to implement policy for their geographical region. What I'm proposing would be like that but way more autonomous from either federal or state governments. Police would have no jurisdiction there, except insofar as to ensure people aren't held as slaves and have the freedom to move from sphere to sphere. I'm not saying this would be easy to implement or that the current existence state and police powers would like it one bit. That's what makes it a radical reform.



So, regarding a 'universal' pluralistic vision, you're content to let such be *locally balkanized*, into 'micro-spheres' -- ? Doesn't it occur to you that these are *contradictory* sentiments? Recall:


Noumenon wrote:
Its inherently a pluralistic vision. But also it acknowledges monism in that it aims for solving the universal problems confronting all humankind,



Your universal baseline here is simply *anti-chattel-slavery*. Here in 2021 are you certain that we can't be more socially progressive than *that*, universally, over *all* localities / 'micro-spheres' -- ?


---


Noumenon wrote:
State and capital I agree, we have to unify to fight against their hegemony. But the autonomous spheres can be places within which to build up that power, which is just inherently difficult with people leading hyper-alienated consumerist existences.



Um, what "power", exactly -- ?


Noumenon wrote:
I think that was the original conception of revolution in the 19th century. But it didn't happen, at least not in the way people thought. And the rest of Marxist thought in the 20th century has been trying to grapple with that fact.



So what's changed, since then? Has the class divide gone away now?


Noumenon wrote:
The power to say "no" to capitalist exploitation, to escape it, I think is the way forward. Whether it is autonomous zones or a UBI or a living wage or universal healthcare, anything that empowers workers to refuse work on the capitalist's terms is good. And in my view, that is the path history is taking going forward. If there is a revolution in the cards, I don't see it. Or it is too far in the future to see.



'Escapism' is the way-forward?

If all workers somehow *abstain* from laboring, and still manage to have a decent standard of living that way, who then does the actual *work* for the production of commodities that people need, as consumers?

And who exactly decides what should be made, and how to make it, while workers are 'escaping' -- ?

How does 'escapism' advance the 'universal' progressive social norms that you advocate?

Do you really think that capitalism can be made to be *suitable* for everyone, universally, while still economically *exploiting* the working class and *oppressing* its social minorities (blacks, women, LGBTQ, etc.) -- ?



The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society — we are on the eve of universal change.

Open letter to the American Railway Union, Chicago Railway Times (1 January 1897)



https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
#15187194
ckaihatsu wrote:Many people would actually *disagree* with you here, saying instead that it's *social conditions* that create class consciousness -- those who have to work full-time, and more, are *very* conscious of the fact that they're being exploited by their boss.


Well, maybe its just my social condition as a middle class "professional", but I feel like I am fairly compensated. Its having to work doing the same thing all day that sucks. No amount of democratic control over the workplace would change the nature of the work to be done. The problem isn't so much with capitalism but with the division of labor. Hence, escape seems like the only solution.

PMC's and the actual working class (service industry, day laborers, etc.) have differing class interests. Of course if you are the working poor and you lack the basic means of economic survival, that is your overriding consideration.

But once that threshold is satisfied, then you are confronted with the soulless void that is work under capitalism in itself. Regardless of what the boss does. Although a bad boss can make things 10 million times worse, don't get me wrong.

ckaihatsu wrote:These are contradictory to each other -- anti-capitalist sentiment is for the *empowerment* of the working class, because capitalism *exploits* and *oppresses* the working class, so workers have an intrinsic material interest in controlling social production collectively *themselves*, without the capitalists. Neoliberalism is *austerity* in government spending, meaning even *less* public funds are directed towards people, for their everyday kinds of needs.


I'm aware of the difference, I meant anti- "capitalist and neoliberal" together. Sorry, confusing wording.


ckaihatsu wrote:Populism, in other words. Understandable, but I have to note that it's no threat whatsoever to the bourgeois nation-state because it leaves that entire apparatus intact, just as we saw with Occupy Wall Street. (Also Myanmar, currently.)


If the politics of a democratically elected leader don't matter, then why did the CIA bother to assassinate Allende?

There was a concerted effort to push Bernie to the center precisely because his politics were a threat. Although of course not as much of a threat as overthrowing the whole government, that's not a fair comparison.


ckaihatsu wrote:*Or*, we could just call it 'common civil courtesy', extended to the acknowledgement of people's gender and transgender identities, since that's current in politics.


Current in very particular circles. The reasonable courtesy like to respect trans pronouns becomes part of the larger culture, but the nonsense beyond that like being afraid to clap your hands does not and is irrelevant. And it undercuts the seriousness of the movement.


ckaihatsu wrote:You may want to *advance*, then, to these actual larger-world antagonisms / politics, regarding issues of race, gender, etc. Black Lives Matter and the women's march (2017) come to mind right away.


It would be interesting to analyze the difference between those two movements, because they strike me as massively different. BLM was/is an authentic ongoing demand for real justice. The women's march was an ephemeral gathering of liberals on one day like a flash mob, only to disappear without any larger effect. #metoo would be more comparable to BLM.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, the class antagonism only exists *because* of the economics of capitalism -- which includes capitalism's recurring internal economic crises, like 1929, the '70s, 2000, 2008-2009, 2019, and 2020.


Not so sure about that. Hasn't every society going back to Babylonian times had rich versus poor? That's class struggle. Granted, the size of the gap between them becomes exponential with capitalism.

ckaihatsu wrote:Why do you have problems with the labor theory of value? What's your argument?


I don't think that human labor is any different from machine labor. A human is simply a biological machine performing certain calculations and movements that is effectively no different from a sophisticated AI or robot. Therefore it makes no sense whatsoever that only the labor of human-machines produces value while the labor of non-human machines does not.

Also, we live in Techno-Feudalism now. The primary source of profit is not the exploitation of labor (although that of course occurs), but in obtaining a monopoly over a certain virtual space and charging rent to access it. This is the model for all tech companies. Labor simply maintains the virtual space.



ckaihatsu wrote:'Very central', 'but not so central that it overshadows or obscures the others' -- doesn't this sound at all *arrogant* to yourself? Do you really think that you can just *make shit up* about the real world and the way it works, to suit your own tastes?


Why would assuming the existence of multiple antagonism and not asserting the absolute primacy of any one of them be more arrogant than assuming one antagonism which overrides all others?

ckaihatsu wrote:I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. I'll *rephrase*, for the sake of clarity -- what would prevent a person committing an anti-social crime in *one* locality / 'micro-sphere', and then just traipsing over to *another* 'micro-sphere' to escape any potential government 'justice' -- ?


That is a technical problem of jurisprudence that would have to be worked out. I imagine that the federal and state governments would have the ability to apprehend people regardless of location for the most serious crimes. The spaces could not be absolutely 100% autonomous. But they could be as autonomous as possible within reason.


ckaihatsu wrote:So you're a *hippie*, then.


Just a wannabe hippie, I'm afraid. More like sad techie. But yeah if I had access to some communal land with actual freedom, like say to build my own house that would be awesome.

ckaihatsu wrote:Outside of *lifestylism*, though, how would this formulation of yours conceivably address actual material *political* and *economic* issues, like the class divide?


If the workforce is not being directly exploited that is a major transformation in the class problem, even if it doesn't disappear in terms of influence over the government for example. People are also worn down by capitalist exploitation, too tired to do anything at the end of the day. Spaces where people are energized by positive collaboration would be able to exert more conscious pressure on the larger powers that be.

ckaihatsu wrote:So, regarding a 'universal' pluralistic vision, you're content to let such be *locally balkanized*, into 'micro-spheres' -- ? Doesn't it occur to you that these are *contradictory* sentiments? Recall:

Your universal baseline here is simply *anti-chattel-slavery*. Here in 2021 are you certain that we can't be more socially progressive than *that*, universally, over *all* localities / 'micro-spheres' -- ?


It's not a contradiction, it's dialectical :)

The movement of the universal into the particular and particular into the universal is what I'm after.

ckaihatsu wrote:'Escapism' is the way-forward?

If all workers somehow *abstain* from laboring, and still manage to have a decent standard of living that way, who then does the actual *work* for the production of commodities that people need, as consumers?

And who exactly decides what should be made, and how to make it, while workers are 'escaping' -- ?

How does 'escapism' advance the 'universal' progressive social norms that you advocate?

Do you really think that capitalism can be made to be *suitable* for everyone, universally, while still economically *exploiting* the working class and *oppressing* its social minorities (blacks, women, LGBTQ, etc.) -- ?


The escapism can never be universal. But it is part of a process in which the social economic machine turns over and progresses to the next iteration. While exerting traditional methods of pushing back on capitalists through unionization is still effective, I think that we are seeing the working class and minorities definitively flexing their power to say "no" to capitalist work altogether, with the Great Resignation in which what was it, 4 million american workers quit their job in one month or something like that? Exploitation relies on you not being able to refuse, or having no other options, or not just saying "fuck it I quit." And you see this was enabled even by the very minimal, far from either basic or universal income from the pandemic checks. Imagine the empowerment an actual UBI (combined with universal health care) could bring. If capitalists want us to work for them, then they may actually have to work for it a bit to sell us on the offer.
#15187217
annatar1914 wrote:These people are coddled and protected by our society, ...

This makes them sound like the evil rich, which isn't the case.

It's more accurate to say that many young people have been ruined by their lack of a real childhood, or real community. They don't learn autonomy by biking to school, don't develop adult role models by playing on city streets with large groups of other kids, and they don't have large, extended families to help their characters develop.

All of this ruination is the result of the War Profiteers, and their complete destruction of traditional ways of living - ie. suburban sprawl, commercial media, and car-based human movement. These have ruined the children of the last 6 decades, and we are only getting worse in terms of isolation, screen addiction, and community destruction.

Stop making it sound like these people got TOO MUCH. They got TOO LITTLE of what nature has been giving humans for 100,000 years. And it was taken away by commerce and the military over a few generations.
#15187224
QatzelOk wrote:This makes them sound like the evil rich, which isn't the case.

It's more accurate to say that many young people have been ruined by their lack of a real childhood, or real community. They don't learn autonomy by biking to school, don't develop adult role models by playing on city streets with large groups of other kids, and they don't have large, extended families to help their characters develop.

All of this ruination is the result of the War Profiteers, and their complete destruction of traditional ways of living - ie. suburban sprawl, commercial media, and car-based human movement. These have ruined the children of the last 6 decades, and we are only getting worse in terms of isolation, screen addiction, and community destruction.

Stop making it sound like these people got TOO MUCH. They got TOO LITTLE of what nature has been giving humans for 100,000 years. And it was taken away by commerce and the military over a few generations.


@QatzelOk ;

I would aver that these people are given a great deal in material goods and utilitarian benefits. But, I would also say that they are spiritually deficient, which is also their legacy from their parents' generations.
#15187300
Noumenon wrote:
Well, maybe its just my social condition as a middle class "professional", but I feel like I am fairly compensated. Its having to work doing the same thing all day that sucks. No amount of democratic control over the workplace would change the nature of the work to be done. The problem isn't so much with capitalism but with the division of labor. Hence, escape seems like the only solution.



This is the crux of *everything* politics, I think -- democratic control of the workplace versus 'the empirical jobs that have to get done'.

Those to the left of you, like myself, argue that the democratization of the workplace *would* have a profound effect not just on the workplace environment, but also on what's considered to be 'work' and 'worth doing'.

A good example is the development of consumer technology over the several past decades -- the communist argument is 'Why don't we just survey everyone to see what functionality they need from a computer, and then *build* that kind of computer from the ground-up, according to spec.' *Instead*, we've had these past 4+ decades of capitalist *incrementalism*, where each tiny 'upgrade' is a whole new market for the capitalists, slowly inching towards the actual functionality that people need and want.


Noumenon wrote:
PMC's and the actual working class (service industry, day laborers, etc.) have differing class interests. Of course if you are the working poor and you lack the basic means of economic survival, that is your overriding consideration.



No, this is a common misnomer -- the 'middle class' is not actually an economic class of its own, rather it's a term of convenience to describe those who may have some *nominal* financial position / interests in the status quo, in addition to being exploited wage labor.

White collar workers like yourself are typically paid a wage or salary, and are not incentivized to share in the health and wealth of the company / employer itself.


Noumenon wrote:
But once that threshold is satisfied, then you are confronted with the soulless void that is work under capitalism in itself. Regardless of what the boss does. Although a bad boss can make things 10 million times worse, don't get me wrong.



I hear ya.


Noumenon wrote:
I'm aware of the difference, I meant anti- "capitalist and neoliberal" together. Sorry, confusing wording.



No prob.


Noumenon wrote:
If the politics of a democratically elected leader don't matter, then why did the CIA bother to assassinate Allende?

There was a concerted effort to push Bernie to the center precisely because his politics were a threat. Although of course not as much of a threat as overthrowing the whole government, that's not a fair comparison.



I guess I just mean to differentiate the *scale* of political magnitude -- Allende and Sanders were at the *national* level, which is relatively more influential / powerful, as you're noting, and significant, while upsurges of *ground-level*, populist-type movements have to be large enough and broad-based enough to have a significant effect on the political machine -- arguably they *did*:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2019_protests


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show
Image



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ckaihatsu wrote:
*Or*, we could just call it 'common civil courtesy', extended to the acknowledgement of people's gender and transgender identities, since that's current in politics.



Noumenon wrote:
Current in very particular circles. The reasonable courtesy like to respect trans pronouns becomes part of the larger culture, but the nonsense beyond that like being afraid to clap your hands does not and is irrelevant. And it undercuts the seriousness of the movement.



I'd chalk it up to 'the challenges of doing politics in meatspace'.


Noumenon wrote:
It would be interesting to analyze the difference between those two movements, because they strike me as massively different. BLM was/is an authentic ongoing demand for real justice. The women's march was an ephemeral gathering of liberals on one day like a flash mob, only to disappear without any larger effect. #metoo would be more comparable to BLM.



The women's march was directly in response to Trump's presidency, and BLM was similar in that it was about preventing his re-election. Populism, again, I would argue.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, the class antagonism only exists *because* of the economics of capitalism -- which includes capitalism's recurring internal economic crises, like 1929, the '70s, 2000, 2008-2009, 2019, and 2020.



Noumenon wrote:
Not so sure about that. Hasn't every society going back to Babylonian times had rich versus poor? That's class struggle. Granted, the size of the gap between them becomes exponential with capitalism.



Yeah, the existence of class society goes back to Mesopotamia (etc.).


Noumenon wrote:
I don't think that human labor is any different from machine labor. A human is simply a biological machine performing certain calculations and movements that is effectively no different from a sophisticated AI or robot. Therefore it makes no sense whatsoever that only the labor of human-machines produces value while the labor of non-human machines does not.



Oh! I just covered this topic over at this thread:


Marx's 1st argument that the common element of commodities for exchange is being products of labour

viewtopic.php?f=83&t=178598


ckaihatsu wrote:
imagine a farm that only uses robotic farm implements (fully automated). If the automated robotic machinery is simply a *one-time* cost -- like buying a slave -- then all resulting production has *no* surplus labor value -- because there's no labor value to *start* with -- and can't be *economically exploited*, as with wage-labor, because the competition would just do the same thing, and the race-to-the-bottom pass-through values wouldn't yield any *premium* / profit on the market, versus any given competitor, for the finished product.



viewtopic.php?p=15183954#p15183954



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Noumenon wrote:
Also, we live in Techno-Feudalism now. The primary source of profit is not the exploitation of labor (although that of course occurs), but in obtaining a monopoly over a certain virtual space and charging rent to access it. This is the model for all tech companies. Labor simply maintains the virtual space.



Good point -- it's a regression to *feudal*-like economics, through the expansion of *rentier* capital, over *equity* capital -- stock buybacks. I've called it 'global medievalism' or 'neo-feudalism' myself.


Noumenon wrote:
Why would assuming the existence of multiple antagonism and not asserting the absolute primacy of any one of them be more arrogant than assuming one antagonism which overrides all others?



Would institutional racism, sexism, etc., be able to exist *without* capitalist class relations? Or, obversely, would interpersonal prejudices themselves be sufficient to *maintain*, or *re-create* the economic-material class divide -- ?


Noumenon wrote:
That is a technical problem of jurisprudence that would have to be worked out. I imagine that the federal and state governments would have the ability to apprehend people regardless of location for the most serious crimes. The spaces could not be absolutely 100% autonomous. But they could be as autonomous as possible within reason.



No, it's *not* merely a 'technical' problem because you're *not specifying* what the 'jurisprudence' would / should be, beyond a baseline of anti-chattel-slavery civil society.

My point stands that anyone so-motivated could simply 'game' the system for their own advantage if the common political structure / culture ('base - superstructure') isn't delineated in advance.

This is precisely why I'm not an anarchist, and I explicitly address this dynamic in this graphic:


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Noumenon wrote:
Just a wannabe hippie, I'm afraid. More like sad techie. But yeah if I had access to some communal land with actual freedom, like say to build my own house that would be awesome.



Here's a book you may want to read. (grin)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies


Noumenon wrote:
If the workforce is not being directly exploited that is a major transformation in the class problem, even if it doesn't disappear in terms of influence over the government for example. People are also worn down by capitalist exploitation, too tired to do anything at the end of the day. Spaces where people are energized by positive collaboration would be able to exert more conscious pressure on the larger powers that be.



Well, similarly to the historical escaping-from-estates, into modern urban centers, we may be approaching a widespread escaping from exploitation due to the prevalence of self-sufficient-enabling technologies today ('off-the-grid'), which, of course, is *escapism*, and is not directly challenging ruling class rule.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
So, regarding a 'universal' pluralistic vision, you're content to let such be *locally balkanized*, into 'micro-spheres' -- ? Doesn't it occur to you that these are *contradictory* sentiments? Recall:

Your universal baseline here is simply *anti-chattel-slavery*. Here in 2021 are you certain that we can't be more socially progressive than *that*, universally, over *all* localities / 'micro-spheres' -- ?



Noumenon wrote:
It's not a contradiction, it's dialectical :)

The movement of the universal into the particular and particular into the universal is what I'm after.



Yeah, fun, but it's still basically *escapism* instead of being politically conscious and organized based on common *class* interests.


Noumenon wrote:
The escapism can never be universal. But it is part of a process in which the social economic machine turns over and progresses to the next iteration. While exerting traditional methods of pushing back on capitalists through unionization is still effective, I think that we are seeing the working class and minorities definitively flexing their power to say "no" to capitalist work altogether, with the Great Resignation in which what was it, 4 million american workers quit their job in one month or something like that? Exploitation relies on you not being able to refuse, or having no other options, or not just saying "fuck it I quit." And you see this was enabled even by the very minimal, far from either basic or universal income from the pandemic checks. Imagine the empowerment an actual UBI (combined with universal health care) could bring. If capitalists want us to work for them, then they may actually have to work for it a bit to sell us on the offer.



Refreshingly optimistic, but I don't think that this is a feasible long-term economic / political strategy -- it's the politics of *anarchism*, which doesn't address / press the question of *power* in society.
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