[Noumenon]

The far leftists don't know how to create an alternative to capitalism so they're achieving social change the only way they can make gains, which would be to guilt-shame people and organizations into compliance or else call them racists, sexists, transphobes and the like. Businesses don't want the bad PR of being called racist on twitter, so they will comply without a fight. So the left is using the profit-motive of capitalists for their own political gain, which is a brilliant tactic discovered by accident but no less useful. And it can be used not just toward businesses, but to anyone who cares about reputation, which is most people. People don't like being called a racist homophobe.

Basically a kind of secular Calvinism. You prove your right to the divine graces of capital by performing woke rituals. But anti-wokeness itself is now just the mirror image, and they deserve each other. We need to de-condition ourselves from emotional reactivity and carefully define the goal we're trying to work towards, that is realistic. Abolishing prison and police is emotionally motivating to hardcore activists and that's about it. For the rest of us its a goal so disconnected from reality that it is totally meaningless. Once you define the goal, you need to define what counts as meaningful progress towards that goal and how it can be achieved. The woke ideology prevents all this because it insists on deconstructing everything and revealing it to be the inner workings of privilege, failure to "recognize" some identity or another. But recognition is not a goal. Black people and women were recognized as such for centuries and that didn't stop them from being subjugated.

[ckaihatsu]

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

Hi, I'd like to proffer the following, which I've developed over the years precisely as a way to answer / address this question. It's a post-capitalist political economy *framework*.


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show

labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show

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


communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

Spoiler: show

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

[ckaihatsu]

Again, that's an *internal* matter -- you and your ilk keep projecting this interpersonal culture out onto an imaginary 'DSA government' or 'DSA world', implying that authoritarian / Stalinist means would be implemented to *force* *everyone* to abide by this particular organizational / civil culture -- that's *mixing contexts*.

Well, if you go back to my original point(s). My suspicion/hope is that these people will likely not ascend to any sort of real power/influence, hence they aren't much to worry about. However, we did say that about the MAGA types some years (arguably decades) ago. In other words, sure it's an internal matter for the moment, however it does have the potential to affect us all in the future. Thus, it's worth talking about. Stop trying to pin me in your stupid little box. Fuck your box.

Why are you trying to shut me up? Why don't like my thoughts that are different from your own? WHy do you hate diversity of thought? Why are you not respecting my wishes to be heard? You monster.

What 'box', exactly -- ? What are you freaking out about?

I think I *did* just encapsulate your position correctly, so I don't know what it is you're objecting to. You're being vague about your complaint with me.

To reiterate, I'm saying that the DSA (for example) internal political culture would not necessarily be appropriate for *civil society*. I don't think a revolutionary or post-capitalist society would have to 'dictate social mores', as you and your line tend to imply, repeatedly.

What really matters is the *politics*, meaning the social policy / practices that *prevail*, for everyone, by whatever means. An example would be the historically recent BLM movement addressing the decades-long festering government policy of defending police brutality and killer cops.

[ckaihatsu]

If there was zero chance I'd ever have to personally deal with the solutions to the social problems the DSA is trying to solve I wouldn't really care other than laughing. What alarms me is that there's young people solving organizational problems with, IMO, such terrible solutions. That people this illogical exist is a problem in its own right. That someday these solutions will be implemented in an organization that actually does affect me is a bigger problem I'm worried about. Time to criticize them before that happens, before they become acceptable norms I'll be asked to comply with or else lose my job or otherwise be thrown out of whatever room i'm in.

Again, I think you're inappropriately *mixing contexts* -- here's what I just said to Rancid, and it applies to your line as well:

To reiterate, I'm saying that the DSA (for example) internal political culture would not necessarily be appropriate for *civil society*. I don't think a revolutionary or post-capitalist society would have to 'dictate social mores', as you and your line tend to imply, repeatedly.

---

I'm not telling the DSA to do anything. I'm discussing solutions to social problems that the DSA is highlighting. I don't agree with some of their solutions, and I don't want these solutions imposed on me some day, which is the point of this thread. The fact that some groups of young people are this bad at problem solving should be alarming to us, especially when the youngins and leftists start shame/guilting the rest of us into complying with their solutions or else label us racist transphobes and whatnot. This isn't isolated to the DSA, it extends to a lot of the woke nonsense.

Okay, you're tending to invoke / characterize DSA politics as being 'Great Leap Forward'-like, which itself was a historical disaster, to put it mildly:

Official Chinese propaganda glossed over the class divisions in the country and the extreme hardship in which most of its people lived. On taking control of China’s great cities in 1949 the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army had followed a policy of uniting all classes, including a section of capitalists, behind a programme aimed at economic reconstruction. In the early 1950s this gave way to a programme of industrialisation, loosely modelled on that pursued by Stalin in Russia and likewise aimed at accomplishing what capitalism had done in the West. Many industries had been state-owned under the Kuomintang regime or been confiscated from their former Japanese owners. The state now took over most of the rest, but paid their old owners fixed dividends (so there were still millionaires in ‘Red’ China). The apparatus of state control was staffed, in the main, by members of the educated middle classes, with most of the officials of the Kuomintang period left in place.There was land reform in regions dominated by landlords, but the better-off peasants were left untouched. The condition of the mass of workers remained much as before.

These measures produced considerable economic growth—12 percent a year according to official figures for the years 1954-57. But this did not get anywhere near the official aim of catching the advanced industrial countries, and a section of the Chinese leadership around Mao Zedong began to fear that unless desperate steps were taken China would subside into being one more stagnating Third World country. In 1958, against the opposition of other leaders such as the president Liu Shoqi and Deng Xiaoping, they launched a ‘Great Leap Forward’ aimed at ultra-rapid industrialisation.

Heavy industry was to be made to grow much faster than before by every district setting out to make its own iron and steel. Millions of new industrial workers were to be fed by removing individual plots from the peasants and forcing people into huge ‘People’s Communes’. In 1958 and 1959 it seemed the ‘leap’ was being made successfully. The official industrial growth rate was almost 30 percent a year, and across the world enthusiasts for Chinese Communism hailed the ‘communes’ as the dawn of a new era. In 1960 reality struck home. China did not have the technical equipment to make the communes viable, and merely herding the peasants together could not overcome centuries-old traditions which set one family against another. Grain output dropped catastrophically and many millions died in famines. The new locally-based industries were of a low technical level, extremely inefficient and damaged the overall economy by using up resources. The Great Leap Forward turned into a disaster for which the mass of people paid a terrible price. Willpower alone could not overcome centuries of stagnation and the de-industrialisation caused by imperialism.

The leadership reacted by shunting Mao away from the levers of power and returning to a more measured approach towards industrialisation. But this policy was hardly a great success. Industrial output was lower in 1965 than in 1960. While the labour force grew by 15 million a year, the number of new jobs grew by only half a million, and the 23 million college graduates found it hard to find meaningful employment.291

As the problems accumulated, the group in the leadership around Mao Zedong once more felt that only urgent action could break the impasse. This time they believed they had found an agency to carry it through—the vast numbers of young people whose hopes were frustrated. In 1966 Mao and a coterie of supporters, including his wife Jiang Qing and defence minister Lin Biao, proclaimed the ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.

China, they said, was being held back by the ‘culture’ of those running the structures of the party and the country. These people had become soft and lazy. Such tendencies had already led Russia ‘down the capitalist road’ of de-Stalinisation, and they could drag China back to its old ‘Confucian’ ways. It was the task of youth to stop this by mass criticism of those obstructing Mao’s policies. The Mao group shut down all education institutions for six months and encouraged 11 million college and high school students to carry the criticism from one region to another on free rail transport.

The ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was in no sense proletarian and in no sense a revolution. The workers were expected to keep working while the students staged mass rallies and travelled the country. Indeed, part of the message of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was that workers should abandon ‘capitalistic’ worries like bonus rates and health and safety issues, since these were ‘economistic’, and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was sufficient motivation for anyone. At the same time the students were instructed not to interfere with the functioning of the military and police apparatus. This was a ‘revolution’ intended to avoid turning the state upside down!

Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 573-575

---

Politics is power relations between people, typically large groups. This extends beyond government policy. If my organization is someday guilt-shamed into applying some of these bad solutions and I'll be fired if I don't comply, this is power and this is politics.

Okay, yeah, I'd say that your concern is definitely about Cultural-Revolution-type excesses, as the excerpt from the book above describes.

I haven't mentioned politics or policy, but you keep bringing it up. I consider this a strawman. Ideology and wokeness, when enforced through social pressure, is politics in my eyes. The DSA way of extreme social accommodation is not isolated to this one event, it's part of a much wider movement.

If you would, then, can you describe or illustrate your concern more fully? What would be the 'nightmare' scenario, based on an extrapolation of current DSA political culture -- ?

I think you're tending to characterize DSA members as being *Maoist*, when in fact they're actually *reformists* -- and, sure, it's a blurry line there anyway.


Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals

Spoiler: show

[Noumenon]

Hi, I'd like to proffer the following, which I've developed over the years precisely as a way to answer / address this question. It's a post-capitalist political economy *framework*.


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show

labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show

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


communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

Spoiler: show

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

Very interesting - but as complex as those graphics are, I don't think you can make them complex enough for a realistic central planning system which can provide the variety of goods and services that capitalism does, but more equitably.

I think it makes more sense to decide on a handful of "radical reforms" that are entirely reasonable but for whatever reason the system pushes back on unreasonably. The simpler the message the better, as more people can get on board and collectively exert pressure. When we all align to exert pressure in the same direction, shit happens. The good thing is that when we actually collectively accomplish something, it is energizing and motivating and allows us to entertain whatever out-there ideas that spur the emancipatory imagination. But in a political climate of cynicism, defeat and despair, the last thing we need to do is place all of our hopes in some distant extremely hypothetical solution to all the problems. Its fine to have that theorizing in reserve, but the decision of which radical reforms to push needs to be first and foremost. And these cannot just have appeal to people who are socialized into a certain leftist milieu. Universalism is the key. Bernie was onto something. But you can't just make a rational appeal to people's economic interest either. They need a story or myth that goes along with it, that inspires passion. I'm not sure that socialism is it. We need a new myth.

[ckaihatsu]

Very interesting - but as complex as those graphics are, I don't think you can make them complex enough for a realistic central planning system which can provide the variety of goods and services that capitalism does, but more equitably.

I hear ya, and I agree with the premise here -- what you're describing, though, is basically the conventional Stalinistic 'blueprint' approach, meaning that every little detail of every component of the entire planned economy would have to be on paper *upfront*, and would have to all perfectly mesh together, before a single gear could turn.

My own approach is *nonlinear* -- I call it a 'landscape of piles of stuff' -- meaning that the 'piles' would have to be replenished by labor / production / automation, and society would have to collectively decide how all produced 'stuff' would be used. No blueprint needed. Are you familiar with complexity theory?

I think it makes more sense to decide on a handful of "radical reforms" that are entirely reasonable but for whatever reason the system pushes back on unreasonably.

Sure -- this would be *nationalization*, or the full de-privatization of all productive implements, so that all social production could be controlled democratically.


Political Spectrum, Simplified

Spoiler: show

---

The simpler the message the better, as more people can get on board and collectively exert pressure. When we all align to exert pressure in the same direction, shit happens. The good thing is that when we actually collectively accomplish something, it is energizing and motivating and allows us to entertain whatever out-there ideas that spur the emancipatory imagination. But in a political climate of cynicism, defeat and despair, the last thing we need to do is place all of our hopes in some distant extremely hypothetical solution to all the problems. Its fine to have that theorizing in reserve, but the decision of which radical reforms to push needs to be first and foremost. And these cannot just have appeal to people who are socialized into a certain leftist milieu. Universalism is the key. Bernie was onto something. But you can't just make a rational appeal to people's economic interest either. They need a story or myth that goes along with it, that inspires passion. I'm not sure that socialism is it. We need a new myth.

I have to characterize this as being *cynical*, though, because you're effectively *dichotomizing* the body politic into 'those who can understand', and 'those who need to be politically *marketed-to*'.

This is disingenuous -- why not just build for full political / revolutionary consciousness for *everyone*?

[Unthinking Majority]

Basically a kind of secular Calvinism. You prove your right to the divine graces of capital by performing woke rituals. But anti-wokeness itself is now just the mirror image, and they deserve each other. We need to de-condition ourselves from emotional reactivity and carefully define the goal we're trying to work towards, that is realistic. Abolishing prison and police is emotionally motivating to hardcore activists and that's about it. For the rest of us its a goal so disconnected from reality that it is totally meaningless. Once you define the goal, you need to define what counts as meaningful progress towards that goal and how it can be achieved. The woke ideology prevents all this because it insists on deconstructing everything and revealing it to be the inner workings of privilege, failure to "recognize" some identity or another. But recognition is not a goal. Black people and women were recognized as such for centuries and that didn't stop them from being subjugated.

Yes that's exactly it.

"Abolishing prison and police is emotionally motivating to hardcore activists and that's about it. For the rest of us its a goal so disconnected from reality that it is totally meaningless.".

Yes that's exactly correct, its naive idealism that sounds good to the heart until you actually think about for 2 seconds and what would happen in our society by creating a power vacuum via defunding police rather than fundamental reforms. There is a disconnect from reality.

Again these are all social problems and the solutions people on the woke left have for them are sometimes just illogical. People that don't know very much about the world think they have all the solutions to fix it. Few things as dangerous as people who don't know what they don't know, which isn't any different with the nutbars on the right making conclusions about vaccines and voter fraud based on some Facebook memes.

The world is very complex and interactive, we should be humble to its complexity and of our understanding of all the interacting variables. The arrogant and ignorant fools who sent armies charging into Vietnam and Afghanistan looking for an easy victory, where are they now?

[Unthinking Majority]

If you would, then, can you describe or illustrate your concern more fully? What would be the 'nightmare' scenario, based on an extrapolation of current DSA political culture -- ?

I think you're tending to characterize DSA members as being *Maoist*, when in fact they're actually *reformists* -- and, sure, it's a blurry line there anyway.

I don't actually care about the politics of this group, its mostly irrelevant to my point. I'm not here to crap on Marxists. That this is the DSA in the video or some other random organization I don't really care. There's no Marxist economic policy discussed in the video, just over-sensitive people trying to organize a conference, badly. The video is the result of overly-sensitive people trying to accommodate everyone's overly-sensitive needs. Our society is creating and cultivating the least resilient people in human history. If every sensory input is becoming offensive to people soon we won't be able to speak. Life doesn't come with a trigger warning.

And yes, it all comes back to psychology. Sheltering young people from every hardship is not good for their psychology. The world can be a very mean and dangerous place, you have to be pretty strong to fend off the wolves and they won't give a darn about your sensibilities. I'm speaking from experience.

[ckaihatsu]

I don't actually care about the politics of this group, its mostly irrelevant to my point. I'm not here to crap on Marxists. That this is the DSA in the video or some other random organization I don't really care. There's no Marxist economic policy discussed in the video, just over-sensitive people trying to organize a conference, badly. The video is the result of overly-sensitive people trying to accommodate everyone's overly-sensitive needs. Our society is creating and cultivating the least resilient people in human history. If every sensory input is becoming offensive to people soon we won't be able to speak. Life doesn't come with a trigger warning.

And yes, it all comes back to psychology. Sheltering young people from every hardship is not good for their psychology. The world can be a very mean and dangerous place, you have to be pretty strong to fend off the wolves and they won't give a darn about your sensibilities. I'm speaking from experience.

Okay, I think I'll leave-off here, then -- I'm here for the *politics*, and the DSA internal political culture is only *superficial* to whatever it is that they say and do as an *organization*, politically.

[ckaihatsu]

Alleged non-Western political 'propaganda' is 'cyberwar', according to you?

Do you *approve* of the Democrats scapegoating other countries -- ? Doesn't this smack of infantile 'playground politics' (my term) -- ?

Ain't alleged, sport. There is an annual cyberdefense competition now, where countries send their best to compete against Russian style cyberattacks. Give it a rest.

You're changing the subject.

F.y.i.

In the four years since the US intelligence agencies and major news outlets rolled out their claims that the Russian government conspired with WikiLeaks to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, this narrative has totally fallen apart.

The linchpin of the accusations—that a private research company examined the Democratic Party’s servers and confirmed that the contents of WikiLeaks’ 2016 disclosures were stolen by the Russians—collapsed in congressional testimony when the company made clear it had no real evidence that the data allegedly stolen by Russian hackers was actually transferred from the Democratic Party’s computers and internal network.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... s-s07.html

[Noumenon]

I hear ya, and I agree with the premise here -- what you're describing, though, is basically the conventional Stalinistic 'blueprint' approach, meaning that every little detail of every component of the entire planned economy would have to be on paper *upfront*, and would have to all perfectly mesh together, before a single gear could turn.

My own approach is *nonlinear* -- I call it a 'landscape of piles of stuff' -- meaning that the 'piles' would have to be replenished by labor / production / automation, and society would have to collectively decide how all produced 'stuff' would be used. No blueprint needed. Are you familiar with complexity theory?

I'm only familiar with complexity theory enough to know that we don't understand complex systems very well. That's why I favor the approach of creating a radical intervention, then waiting to see what the results are, and then adjust the plan accordingly. I think of political economy as a more of a continuously evolving emergent system than anything we can design or control. The state itself is such a system. So to control one system by means of another system - where is the planning agent? What I see are two black boxes.

Sure -- this would be *nationalization*, or the full de-privatization of all productive implements, so that all social production could be controlled democratically.

I think that is way more than a radical reform, that is full socialism immediate non-stop. I don't think it ever works out that people have democratic control over production. Its state control. Which in my view is not inherently a bad thing, but its more about balancing public control with private. Democracy is greatly overrated. People should have greater control and autonomy within their micro-spheres of existence. At higher levels, the people's will can only be represented very imperfectly, and really we want it to just function in the background so we can ignore it.

I don't know about other countries, but for the US the radical reforms we need are already immediately apparent: universal health care, green new deal, etc. A growing majority of the populace already agrees with these things. My view is that we just keep pushing until we get it. At that point, we re-evaluate and figure out what the next reform is that makes sense. There's not much point in theorizing much beyond that. We can let our imaginations run wild, sure, but the only productive outlet they have is in figuring out which direction to head next. The idea of radically remaking political economy from the ground up is sorry to say, simply utopian. And in that sense it isn't even Marxist. Even revolution itself - in the very particular circumstances where it becomes possible - is an intervention in a complex system that disturbs it, causes it to move in unpredictable perhaps new directions. But where it ends up is never quite in our control. This relies on the fantasy of rational planning agents. They don't exist. Only systems of systems of systems. And people who once in awhile can agree on something and themselves become a system that exerts a force.

I have to characterize this as being *cynical*, though, because you're effectively *dichotomizing* the body politic into 'those who can understand', and 'those who need to be politically *marketed-to*'.

This is disingenuous -- why not just build for full political / revolutionary consciousness for *everyone*?

You're assuming the existence of one political "truth" that everyone just has to wake up and assent to. The truth is that Marxism is just another story, a political myth. And one that just isn't as compelling to the masses as it once was. But we live in the desert of post-ideology now. We need to construct a myth which is appropriate to current sociopolitical conditions. I think that complexity and cybernetics could be such a myth. But in my view this requires abandoning to some extent the romantic rebellion against the machine and the dream of submitting it to our will. The only path forward is - to merge with and become the machine. But you know, kind of keep our humanity a little bit too. If you find your ideas continue to fail, maybe you have to consider the cynics are possibly right. Then you can create new idea.

[Noumenon]

Yes that's exactly it.

"Abolishing prison and police is emotionally motivating to hardcore activists and that's about it. For the rest of us its a goal so disconnected from reality that it is totally meaningless.".

Yes that's exactly correct, its naive idealism that sounds good to the heart until you actually think about for 2 seconds and what would happen in our society by creating a power vacuum via defunding police rather than fundamental reforms. There is a disconnect from reality.

Again these are all social problems and the solutions people on the woke left have for them are sometimes just illogical. People that don't know very much about the world think they have all the solutions to fix it. Few things as dangerous as people who don't know what they don't know, which isn't any different with the nutbars on the right making conclusions about vaccines and voter fraud based on some Facebook memes.

The world is very complex and interactive, we should be humble to its complexity and of our understanding of all the interacting variables. The arrogant and ignorant fools who sent armies charging into Vietnam and Afghanistan looking for an easy victory, where are they now?

I think we're very much on the same page. I think that the left, with all its good intentions, needs to read the opening paragraphs of Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" like 1000 times until it sinks in ("On the prejudices of philosophers"). The thing is that they claim to be postmodern but they haven't even read Foucault, Deleuze etc. who are arguing for something infinitely more nuanced, and who refrain from simplistic descriptions and easy narratives. Probably they're just getting it second hand from their professors, who themselves are interpreting the works through the thick lenses of their pre-existing ideological commitments and sociological biases.

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.

[late]

F.y.i.

Along with that cyberdefense competition, most of those countries have shiny new cyberdefense agencies.

Putin's been busy.

Btw, Putin paid some of the bills in rubles. So you are implying some 3rd party went out and got rubles to implicate Russia. I forgot the name, but people that owned the company Putin used have said they were working for him...

[Rancid]

What 'box', exactly -- ? What are you freaking out about?

What are you freaking out about?

[ckaihatsu]

I'm only familiar with complexity theory enough to know that we don't understand complex systems very well. That's why I favor the approach of creating a radical intervention, then waiting to see what the results are, and then adjust the plan accordingly. I think of political economy as a more of a continuously evolving emergent system than anything we can design or control. The state itself is such a system. So to control one system by means of another system - where is the planning agent? What I see are two black boxes.

Sure, political economy has historically *tended* to be 'emergent' / out-of-direct-control, and that's the *problem*, as we're seeing with the global warming challenge to all of humanity, now.

Revolution *implies* collective conscious direct control, and that's what's needed now, to tackle global warming, etc., because the current capitalist *market* system is too hands-off / emergent.

I think that is way more than a radical reform, that is full socialism immediate non-stop. I don't think it ever works out that people have democratic control over production. Its state control. Which in my view is not inherently a bad thing, but its more about balancing public control with private.

Good point. Well said.

Democracy is greatly overrated. People should have greater control and autonomy within their micro-spheres of existence. At higher levels, the people's will can only be represented very imperfectly, and really we want it to just function in the background so we can ignore it.

I don't know about other countries, but for the US the radical reforms we need are already immediately apparent: universal health care, green new deal, etc. A growing majority of the populace already agrees with these things. My view is that we just keep pushing until we get it. At that point, we re-evaluate and figure out what the next reform is that makes sense. There's not much point in theorizing much beyond that. We can let our imaginations run wild, sure, but the only productive outlet they have is in figuring out which direction to head next. The idea of radically remaking political economy from the ground up is sorry to say, simply utopian. And in that sense it isn't even Marxist. Even revolution itself - in the very particular circumstances where it becomes possible - is an intervention in a complex system that disturbs it, causes it to move in unpredictable perhaps new directions. But where it ends up is never quite in our control. This relies on the fantasy of rational planning agents. They don't exist. Only systems of systems of systems. And people who once in awhile can agree on something and themselves become a system that exerts a force.

Okay, I'm finding this to be quite *fatalistic*, saying that since democratic control over production hasn't really been sustained in history, that it's automatically 'impossible' forever-more.

Theoretically all social production *could* be collectively determined, especially since it's *people* / laborers who are physically doing the tasks that produce commodities. That's what my 'labor credits' framework model addresses, for a post-capitalist political economy.


Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show

Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show

---

You're assuming the existence of one political "truth" that everyone just has to wake up and assent to. The truth is that Marxism is just another story, a political myth. And one that just isn't as compelling to the masses as it once was. But we live in the desert of post-ideology now. We need to construct a myth which is appropriate to current sociopolitical conditions. I think that complexity and cybernetics could be such a myth. But in my view this requires abandoning to some extent the romantic rebellion against the machine and the dream of submitting it to our will. The only path forward is - to merge with and become the machine. But you know, kind of keep our humanity a little bit too. If you find your ideas continue to fail, maybe you have to consider the cynics are possibly right. Then you can create new idea.

Well, I can't / don't subscribe to your postmodernism, especially when all matters of social production *could* potentially be directly addressed by a collectivist post-capitalist political economy. You're making cultural mythology the *independent variable*, unfortunately, which makes for a bad political / material trajectory.

Where do you stand on the topic of fully-automated industrial mass production -- ? (I've come across the term 'fully-automated luxury communism', which I find to be apt.)

[Prosthetic Conscience]

That silly internal political culture is the culture they would import into governance if they somehow attained power/influence. This isn't something that would just disappear or not manifest itself in the larger political landscape.

Just as the silly internal political culture of MAGA types (talk of revolution, talk of renewing America, talk of violence and cleansing, etc. etc.) eventually did get imported (to some degree) into our government during Trumps time.

Just because they aren't violent doesn't mean they aren't dangerously stupid.

No, it does mean they're not dangerously stupid, literally, because being not violent removes the danger.

The equivalent on the right of the silliness of pronoun obsession or waving your hands instead of clapping isn't "talk of revolution" or "talk of violence and cleansing" - it's silly obsession with signs to show how "patriotic", or religious, you are - reciting a pledge of allegiance every day in schools, having prayers to open council meetings, wearing lapel pins with your national flag, insisting on playing your national anthem at non-international sporting contests, putting multiple flags in the background of every TV shot you can, saying "God Bless <insert name of country>" or "Allahu Akbar" ...

This does dumb down general society, but it's been that way for decades, if not centuries. We survive it. We'll survive a fad for jazz hands and taking offence at gendered pronouns, too.

[Noumenon]

Sure, political economy has historically *tended* to be 'emergent' / out-of-direct-control, and that's the *problem*, as we're seeing with the global warming challenge to all of humanity, now.

Revolution *implies* collective conscious direct control, and that's what's needed now, to tackle global warming, etc., because the current capitalist *market* system is too hands-off / emergent.

I agree that the system needs more democratic control. But I don't think that implies it is conscious. 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.

Okay, I'm finding this to be quite *fatalistic*, saying that since democratic control over production hasn't really been sustained in history, that it's automatically 'impossible' forever-more.

Theoretically all social production *could* be collectively determined, especially since it's *people* / laborers who are physically doing the tasks that produce commodities. That's what my 'labor credits' framework model addresses, for a post-capitalist political economy.

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.

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. 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.

Well, I can't / don't subscribe to your postmodernism, especially when all matters of social production *could* potentially be directly addressed by a collectivist post-capitalist political economy. You're making cultural mythology the *independent variable*, unfortunately, which makes for a bad political / material trajectory.

Where do you stand on the topic of fully-automated industrial mass production -- ? (I've come across the term 'fully-automated luxury communism', which I find to be apt.)

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 (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.

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.

[Rancid]

being not violent removes the danger.

being not violent removes the danger.

I stopped reading right here. Violence isn't the only kind of danger that exists on the planet. I was not suggesting these people would get violent (though human's are interesting when they gain power/influence, so that's certainly not out of the question).

[Potemkin]

I stopped reading right here. Violence isn't the only kind of danger that exists on the planet. I was not suggesting these people would get violent (though human's are interesting when they gain power/influence, so that's certainly not out of the question).

Exactly. People can be non-violent, yet dangerously incompetent.

[Prosthetic Conscience]

I stopped reading right here. Violence isn't the only kind of danger that exists on the planet. I was not suggesting these people would get violent (though human's are interesting when they gain power/influence, so that's certainly not out of the question).

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.