America's Dangerous Obsession With Invincibility - Page 12 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15257570
ckaihatsu wrote:
And we need statism -- *why* -- ?



late wrote:
You could always move into a cave.



That's *fun*, of course, but this isn't about *me* -- this is about stick-a-fork-in-it-cause-its-done regarding 'late capitalism' and its conformist nation-states.

You're increasingly sounding like BlutoSays *used* to sound, with emotional bluster filling in for actual politics.

Are you *also* a geographic nationalist, late?
#15257577
late wrote:
Statism sounds libertarian.



Statism sounds like 'late'-ism. (grin)

The world doesn't *need* statism, obviously, because all current commercial-type processes of social production, under capitalism, have been thoroughly *established* into institutional commercial / corporate / governmental practices, so there's no 'Benjamin Franklin'-like cutting-edge *invention* to hold-out for, as from the bourgeoisie, as the domestic political mythology goes.

TLDR: Corporations perfected socially-productive social organization over *vast* scales, so *that* function has been *over* for decades or centuries already. The *workers* should be the ones to carry-on those established practices, or make new ones in their own collective interests over the same.


Social Production Worldview

Spoiler: show
Image



labor and capital, side-by-side

Spoiler: show
Image
#15257583
We seem to have moved away from America's Obsession with Invincibility in the later pages of the thread.

Can someone explain the relevance of "late-stage capitalism" and the collapse of the Soviet economy in the 90s... to the OP?

Is it because late thinks that many of the aspects of Western capitalism (as currently practiced) are invincible?
#15257594
ckaihatsu wrote:
Statism sounds like 'late'-ism. (grin)

The world doesn't *need* statism, obviously, because all current commercial-type processes of social production, under capitalism, have been thoroughly *established* into institutional commercial / corporate / governmental practices, so there's no 'Benjamin Franklin'-like cutting-edge *invention* to hold-out for, as from the bourgeoisie, as the domestic political mythology goes.

TLDR: Corporations perfected socially-productive social organization over *vast* scales, so *that* function has been *over* for decades or centuries already. The *workers* should be the ones to carry-on those established practices, or make new ones in their own collective interests over the same.


Social Production Worldview

Spoiler: show
Image



labor and capital, side-by-side

Spoiler: show
Image




That didn't make sense, at least not to me.

Sounds like left wing libertarian, if such a thing is even possible.
#15257596
QatzelOk wrote:
We seem to have moved away from America's Obsession with Invincibility in the later pages of the thread.

Can someone explain the relevance of "late-stage capitalism" and the collapse of the Soviet economy in the 90s... to the OP?

Is it because late thinks that many of the aspects of Western capitalism (as currently practiced) are invincible?



Yes.

We aren't invincible, we are an aging empire. I was trying to get the discussion closer to reality.

No, you have a chip on your shoulder, and unlike Bluto you have good reasons to have it. But it distorts your perception of us. We are suddenly in a wildly unstable era, and negotiating through it without another world war looks really tough.
Last edited by late on 02 Dec 2022 17:40, edited 1 time in total.
#15257597
late wrote:
That didn't make sense, at least not to me.

Sounds like left wing libertarian, if such a thing is even possible.



Well thanks for at least taking a glance at it.

It's *not* libertarian because there's no *private property* in the model -- and thus, no *state* / standing administration, either. It's a communist gift-economy, with the labor credits usage being optional.
#15257601
(Again.)


late wrote:
That didn't make sense, at least not to me.



No prob.

Here's a moment from history that may be more illustrative:



Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria contained large numbers of workers with revolutionary sentiments opposed to the middle class nationalism of their governments.

Revolutionaries led unemployed workers in an attempt to storm the Austrian parliament in April 1919. For a moment it was not absurd to conceive of the revolution in Hungary linking with Russia to the east and, through Austria, with soviet Bavaria to the west, overturning the entire setup in the former German and Austro-Hungarian empires.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 435
#15257604
ckaihatsu wrote:

No prob.

Here's a moment from history that may be more illustrative:




They would likely have set up the same sort of bureaucracy the Russian Soviets had.

We've had this discussion before, and I still have no idea how you could get it to work. I think it would fall back into a currently existing pattern. You know, dictator, authoritarian bureaucracy, etc.
#15257605
late wrote:
They would likely have set up the same sort of bureaucracy the Russian Soviets had.

We've had this discussion before, and I still have no idea how you could get it to work. I think it would fall back into a currently existing pattern. You know, dictator, authoritarian bureaucracy, etc.



You're a *statist* so you see everything political in terms of the *nation-state* -- whether that's present-day, or historical, or another *country*, even.

You're thinking conventional-dictator only because that's how things happened to *play out* in the 20th century -- Stalinism itself was almost 100% *emergent* / not-popularly-based, yet here we are today ready to consciously make it happen with all the assistance of ubiquitous digital telecommunications.

I'll remind of *scale*, if you don't mind:


History, Macro-Micro -- simplified

Spoiler: show
Image
#15257623
late wrote:Yes.

We aren't invincible, we are an aging empire. I was trying to get the discussion closer to reality.

No, you have a chip on your shoulder, and unlike Bluto you have good reasons to have it. But it distorts your perception of us. We are suddenly in a wildly unstable era, and negotiating through it without another world war looks really tough.

Is that what the West has been doing - negotiating?

Like negotiating NOT to expand NATO in the 90s.
And then negotiating to bomb a dozen oil-strategic countries in the last 20 years.
Is this any kind of "negotiating?"

Does the war-strong West leave any other options on the table except war?

"Our banks keep ripping off the world, or it's war (and lots of propaganda)!" is not negotiating.
#15257637
QatzelOk wrote:

Like negotiating NOT to expand NATO in the 90s.




We have the same conversation over and over.

We simply did not make a deal to not expand NATO. We also talked about bringing Russia into NATO. A lot of things seemed possible at the time.

Problem is... Russia was still Russia. When it became clear they hadn't changed the former Soviet states started begging us to be let into NATO.

You ignore a ton of crap Russia does, I don't have that luxury.
#15257639
late wrote:
Where do you live? It would not, pray tell, be in a.... state?

Hmmm?



Absolutely valid query.

I'll note that the 'localities' in the model economy roughly translate as 'empirical physical geographic localism', particularly for *consumption*. Membership of any given collective local grouping -- primarily for *consumption* -- is entirely self-selecting / collectively self-determining, and would be up to the people of that society as to whatever particulars for themselves, and how to make it work, given the premise.

Also a locality could, as an entity, issue *debt-based*, or non-debt-based labor credits, which would all have unique serial numbers and the locality's ID on them. They would circulate but would be non-exchangeable for any goods / resources / materials, since that would be commodification. Labor credits would be strictly internal to the persons who are actively involved around active liberated-labor projects (necessarily for the public good, by definition). In other words the usage of labor credits, either *with*, or *for*, involves one in ongoing socio-material planning, and/or actual voluntary liberated-labor around 'policy packages', either finished or less-than-complete.



It *is* a gift economy, but only inasmuch as the locality's population *demands* the gifts *and* supplies the funding, actual labor (and collectivized assets and resources) for producing those gifts. Ideally these three factors would be present in the same locality, yielding a condition of self-sufficiency which would also allow the locality to grow politically and reach out to network with *other* localities for more complex arrangements of planning and coordination.

If a locality lacked, say, the funding of labor credits, then it would have to create them out of debt and that would be transparent to the world. The locality could pay up its debt by sending as many people from its environs as necessary to do the work hours *elsewhere*, for other localities (at certain multiplier rates), to bring back the needed number of labor credits to erase the debt.

Any localities that repeatedly tried to just issue additional debt without attempting to work off existing outstanding debt would wind up being looked upon unfavorably by its neighbors (and beyond) since it had, as an entire local population, decided to *use* others' labor time for its own local projects without having the means to pay for it.

All of this is *independent* of collectivized assets and resources, like factories and oil deposits. If a locality became *very* debt-ridden it certainly wouldn't be in a position to *utilize* any of its "own" (nearby) assets or resources, and so other localities would be able to prioritize *their* use of the assets and resources for actual, *funded*, *labor-ready* project plans for *their* localities.

This would mean nothing more than what it sounds like at face value -- since there would be no private property anyway there would be no *drastic* consequences to any of these scenarios. No one in the debt-ridden locality would be allowed to *starve* or go homeless or without electricity -- it's just that they would be politically at a standstill until they resolved their locality's problem in a *collective* way, the same way that got them into the mess.

Alternatively, workers from other areas who have built up their own personal accumulations of labor credits from past work done might hear about the debt-ridden locality and could offer to come together to put up their *own* stores of labor credits, in order to either pay off the debt and/or fund new projects or production runs. There would be no "in return", because there would be no power-brokering, outside of any arbitrary collection of those with accumulated labor credits, and there could be no *tangible material compensation* in return, either, because there would be no commodity production and thus no exchange value for anything. Any societal surplus around -- even factories and oil deposits -- could just be *taken* by *anyone*, but only for personal use, not for leveraging in any kind of "ownership" or private-accumulation kind of way.

Perhaps those workers who put up their own labor credits from outside might decide to move to the locality they helped out -- maybe to be closer to the implementation around their funding, as in selecting *specific* laborers, in proportion to the funding they're putting up -- or they may *not* move -- it wouldn't matter. *Anyone* could move *anywhere* for *any* reasons because such an action would *necessarily* be personal, while transportation would be readily available and new accomodations elsewhere would simply be first-come-first-served, and *not* dependent on any kind of personal wealth, not even labor credits. Political matters could always be taken care of from anywhere, anyway, over the Internet.

Finally, personal consumption would be premised on the planned political economy, but not necessarily limited to it, since any outstanding surpluses of *anything* would be openly available on a first-come-first-served basis. No matter what a person's political or work status they would *always* have a daily political prioritization list available to them, so as to make formal requests / demands from the larger society, including demands for labor, provided that labor is available and willing.



https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338
#15257642

By comparison, the labor credits method doesn't rely on any *standing* specialized administrative formulation / institution, because the labor credits all *circulate*, only 'tied-down' in that each unit shows a unique serial-number ID in the format of ABC1234567, per issued batch, and includes the locality's database formal list item ID for that debt issuance (YYYYMMDD.NNN, 20150123.456, for example), and also includes the unique abbreviated name of the locality of issuance ('NewPhys', as an example, in the 'Labor credits framework' diagram). All of a locality's formal list items are available internally to the members of that locality / localities, with each item initially automatically becoming a 'formal list item' 'initiative' as soon as two different members of the same locality / geographic source submit their own separate content items with *identical* content-descriptions (name of the item listing) -- this indicates some kind of off-database social coordination, into workflow formality. (Any raw personal daily prioritized demand-list items submitted are automatically *timestamped* and passed-along to any and all nearby productive entities that are appropriate, but are *not* displayed publicly, only *aggregated* to the same locality / localities, with cumulative daily *aggregated* / tallied items displayed publicly for each rank position (#1, #2, #3, etc.) -- only submitted items that reach 'initiative' status, as just described, are shown as formal list items, indicating viability for the ongoing socio-political process (available stages are: 'initiative', 'demand', 'proposal', 'project', 'production run', 'funding', 'debt issuance', 'liberated labor internal', 'policy package', '(necessarily consumption-type) order', '(necessarily consumption-type) request', and 'slot donation').
#15257647
ckaihatsu wrote:Statism sounds like 'late'-ism. (grin)

The world doesn't *need* statism, obviously, because all current commercial-type processes of social production, under capitalism, have been thoroughly *established* into institutional commercial / corporate / governmental practices, so there's no 'Benjamin Franklin'-like cutting-edge *invention* to hold-out for, as from the bourgeoisie, as the domestic political mythology goes.

TLDR: Corporations perfected socially-productive social organization over *vast* scales, so *that* function has been *over* for decades or centuries already. The *workers* should be the ones to carry-on those established practices, or make new ones in their own collective interests over the same.

The state is needed to enforce contracts. Business processes only work due to contracts. Contracts are peaceful agreements voluntarily consented to between 2 or more parties for mutual benefit. A worker doesn't have to attack their employer to get them to give them their paycheck and a business doesn't have to threaten to kill the spouse of a client if they don't pay back a debt. They go to court to enforce the contract rather than grab a weapon, which is what happens without a state. Russia and China behave like the mafia because their states are dysfunctional. Corporations run much of America because that state is also dysfunctional (corruption). A state that is actually ruled by its citizens is far less dysfunctional.

A state also enforces laws. If the world was a state Putin and Dubya Bush would be arrested for breaking the law and corporations couldn't steal resources from other countries...unless it was corrupt and dysfunctional and it was allowed by law. But I doubt the majority population of the world would allow such things. The main threat to the proper function of a state is when the power leaves the hands of the governed and tyrants come to control things, against the interests of the governed, which is what always happens in a dictatorship.

In your fantasy utopia who enforces rules? Who makes the person who steals a pretty piece of jewelry give it back to the collective? Violent gangs of workers?
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