[Beren]

It's why the only way would be for those former workers to own some of those robots.

Nobody will own those robots because they'll be socialised. Not nationalised nor confiscated, but socialised, that's why there'll be socialism.

[Potemkin]

Nobody will own those robots because they'll be socialised. Not nationalised nor confiscated, but socialised, that's why there'll be socialism.

Precisely. In an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity, the concept of "ownership" would become obsolete. Why would you need to personally "own" something?

[Beren]

In an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity, the concept of "ownership" would become obsolete. Why would you need to personally "own" something?

The whole means of production especially won't be owned by anyone, it'll belong to society as a collective, of which everyone's an equal member. It will be the same with the state as well, of course, or maybe there won't be a state at all.

It's such a perverted idea to him that wat0n's mind just can't deal with it and has to cling to any tiny bit of capitalist feature in order to get on with it somehow.

[wat0n]

...Perhaps because such abundance does not exist, and scarcity won't just disappear. I mean, realistically it won't.

[Rancid]

THe road to communism is capitalism, not communism.

Capitalism wins again!

[ckaihatsu]

The newest jobs will be already automated ones, in the not too distant future there'll be no new types of jobs for humans. It's the ancient jobs such as motherhood, nursing, teaching, being an artist, etc. that are the hardest to automate and will be done by humans even when they won't have to work anymore. In socialism they'll be the most valued professions (still done by people), which isn't the case in capitalism and wasn't the case in Soviet socialism either.

I'd argue that even *these*, most-human, most-humane occupations may just be *social constructions*, ultimately, and society is *already* using a shifted social-organization topology due to *the Internet* (consider personal shoppers, for example).

Those are all 'pink-collar' jobs, meaning service-sector, and perhaps what's *most* important aren't the mothers, nurses, teachers, and artists, but rather the child-rearing, nursing, education, and art. Certainly people can continue these things if they *want* to, but that's the key -- do they *want* to, or is it currently out of *material necessity* -- ? AI / robots, like the preceding development of industrial machinery, would take the load off of human labor, hopefully for-good finally since everything basic to life and living would finally be fully-automated and in full abundance, even mitigating the 'distribution problem', arguably.

But in the transition there will still be. In the end, in the long run everyone will be capitalist (own capital).

It's not just those - counseling, plenty of services, etc will still be done by humans. Likely, repairing and maintaining machines will also have a human component, so will R&D.

I'd argue that 'capital', too, is a social construction, and there empirically / realistically can't be both the continuation of capital (which implies *private control*), and also 'full automation' -- which implies a societal-rational approach to distribution, a goal that cuts *against* the current landscape of balkanized and hegemonic private corporate interests.

Most of that, the whole process of production basically, will be done and controlled by AI. In terms of production (of goods and services) humans just won't be able to compete with machines and AI, and they won't even be able to take part in any production process anymore, except a few perhaps.

A society based on robotic production would therefore have to be post-capitalist.

Yup.

[Crantag]

Why would that be a problem? The whole point of working is to generate goods and services to sustain the human population. If we can achieve that end through other means - for example, by automation - then human labour would no longer be required to sustain human life. This is just another way of saying that the problems of capitalism are problems of distribution. There’s no point having a fantastically efficient mode of economic production if 99% of the human race starves to death because they are unable to find jobs, jobs which are now completely pointless and unnecessary anyway. For this reason alone, capitalism is doomed in the long term.

It is not necessarily doomed in those circumstances.

As you know, one of the chief contemporary contradictions of modern 'advanced capitalist societies' as that they have the most sophisticated counter-revolutionary apparati; whereas what you are referring to has revolution as a prerequisite.

However, I think revolution would be eventually inevitable; but it is not carved in stone that it would go that way. Fascist state terrorism owning the day is also a possibility, among other possibilities.

[Igor Antunov]

China with 3.8 million slaves? What's your take on that @Igor Antunov?

There are plenty of jobs that are far from being automated anytime soon. The transition may not be great but it's not impossible and we most definitely don't need luddites.

Slaves are most prevalent in housekeeping settings where the range of tasks is mundane but very varied and numerous. 3.8 million slaves in China is statistically irrelevant. We can do better. 38 million would have a greater impact on the economy.

So that's what you're fantasising about? Which porn starlets would you like to home-grow in your basement?

I guess demand will be fulfilled without a problem by traditional human trafficking trade as long as human population grows that fast, especially in the third or whatever world, so this technology won't be so easy to commercialise actually, not to mention that we've already had societies based on slavery and they got outdated.


In a capitalist society the agony of capitalism is a problem and they call it crisis.

No, I don't need sex slaves. My point is we've simply hidden slavery under the rug. Extrapolating further, medieval feudalism is no different to current day tenant/landlord agreements and low income wagie cagie servitude jobs. Serfs and landowners. Nothing's changed, just the perception of these elements. They've been dressed up in different clothes.

[ckaihatsu]

It is not necessarily doomed in those circumstances.

As you know, one of the chief contemporary contradictions of modern 'advanced capitalist societies' as that they have the most sophisticated counter-revolutionary apparati; whereas what you are referring to has revolution as a prerequisite.

However, I think revolution would be eventually inevitable; but it is not carved in stone that it would go that way. Fascist state terrorism owning the day is also a possibility, among other possibilities.

What about base-superstructure, though, which is what this thread's been covering.

[Crantag]

Precisely, which is why they are utopianists rather than serious commentators. Any such "leisure society" would have huge implications for the mode of economic production. If robots do all the work, then who will be able to earn any money to buy any of this abundance of goods and services? There is a glaring distribution problem. This thought never seems to occur to them. It's weird. Are they really that dim? :eh:

I guess the simple answer is, they are that dim.

Their problem is having never studied Marxism, and I don't even mean that flippantly.

Marx's analysis really is the closest approximation of scientific analysis of political economy, which can seem somewhat ironic, based on the insistence of some mainstream economists that economics is a science, based on the heavy reliance on mathematical modelling.

Compare it to computer science, in the latter you have an artificial environment, where abstract things are permeable. Economics deals with the real world, in which anomalies abound and nothing is predictable.

Economic models are useful, only when artfully applied, and are of limited use even then.

[ckaihatsu]

Slaves are most prevalent in housekeeping settings where the range of tasks is mundane but very varied and numerous. 3.8 million slaves in China is statistically irrelevant. We can do better. 38 million would have a greater impact on the economy.



No, I don't need sex slaves. My point is we've simply hidden slavery under the rug. Extrapolating further, medieval feudalism is no different to current day tenant/landlord agreements and low income wagie cagie servitude jobs. Serfs and landowners. Nothing's changed, just the perception of these elements. They've been dressed up in different clothes.

To be fair, though, there *is* a difference between [1] rentier capital (landlords and their non-commodity-producing assets / resources), and [2] equity capital that by-definition exploits the working class to produce *commodities* (goods and/or services) for people's modern norms of well-being and consumption.

(Rentier capital expropriates from *both* the proletariat *and* the bourgeoisie / equity-capital, by exacting rents and interest payments as reward for simple *wealth ownership* -- non-commodity-productive assets and/or resources, like land or cash. This is capitalism's economic overhead and happens to be feudal-like and historically regressive / reactionary.)

[Crantag]

What about base-superstructure, though, which is what this thread's been covering.

What is base-superstructure?

[ckaihatsu]

based on the heavy reliance on mathematical modelling

I'd like to point out that any and all such models are abstract and *suggestive* / active, rather than how scholarship *usually* works, which is to dispassionately / passively study the outside world as *it exists*.

Being 'active' over something that's out-there / objective / empirical / emergent, is the height of presumptuousness, and this kind of mindset / 'character' is seen *everywhere* among the bourgeois.


philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show

Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show

[ckaihatsu]

What is base-superstructure?

In other words, the productive means ('base') that a society uses, and the societal / cultural / institutional 'superstructure' that forms over that base.

[Crantag]

I'd like to point out that any and all such models are abstract and *suggestive* / active, rather than how scholarship *usually* works, which is to dispassionately / passively study the outside world as *it exists*.

Being 'active' over something that's out-there / objective / empirical / emergent, is the height of presumptuousness, and this kind of mindset / 'character' is seen *everywhere* among the bourgeois.


philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show

Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show

Hey, I'm not trying to make it all personal here and shit, in other words, I don't give a fuck, I'm just calling it how I see it.

Thing is, I left academics.

Was it a good thing? Fuck if I know.

But it is not very relevant to my life now, I just give cold analysis, when I'm in the mood to do so.

I left academics because my funding expired, and my dissertation wasn't complete, and I didn't think I could get by in Tokyo with a regular job, and do the PhD at the same time. It was all a big cluster fuck though. Including plenty of whiskey bottles. And even smashed windows, and police stations.

It's whatever.

I'm a jack of all trades, master of none. These days I build fences, handle packages, drive, work on farms, and wack off.

Yet, my academic knowledge still persists, and I will give cold analysis here and there.

[ckaihatsu]

It is not necessarily doomed in those circumstances.

As you know, one of the chief contemporary contradictions of modern 'advanced capitalist societies' as that they have the most sophisticated counter-revolutionary apparati; whereas what you are referring to has revolution as a prerequisite.

However, I think revolution would be eventually inevitable; but it is not carved in stone that it would go that way. Fascist state terrorism owning the day is also a possibility, among other possibilities.

What about base-superstructure, though, which is what this thread's been covering.

---

Yet, my academic knowledge still persists, and I will give cold analysis here and there.

Didn't mean to put you on the spot there -- I meant to extend the timeline, to ask if the 'late capitalism' (economic, and tech) dynamic has any relevance on how the 'superstructure' plays-out, whether in-line with the political dynamics you outline, or something else.

I'll note that there's currently no mass popular support for fascism, and so there *isn't* fascism, as close as it got officially / actually, with Trump's 2021 coup attempt.

[Crantag]

---





Didn't mean to put you on the spot there -- I meant to extend the timeline, to ask if the 'late capitalism' (economic, and tech) dynamic has any relevance on how the 'superstructure' plays-out, whether in-line with the political dynamics you outline, or something else.

I'll note that there's currently no mass popular support for fascism, and so there *isn't* fascism, as close as it got officially / actually, with Trump's 2021 coup attempt.

I'll start with the end and end with the beginning.

This is just my perception, but I don't consider fascism a very concrete term; it is a political term, and as George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) pointed out through his writings, in particular "Politics and the English Language", political words, including 'fascism', become eroded of meaning.

Still more, Karl Polayni, in his magnum opus "The Great Transformation" (1944) wrote about fascism in one of the later chapters, and described how it took every sort of different characteristic. He euphemistacally described Huey Long and Father Coughlin as different brands of fascist leaders in the US.

Fascism is really a difficult concept to define though.

[ckaihatsu]

I'll start with the end and end with the beginning.

This is just my perception, but I don't consider fascism a very concrete term; it is a political term, and as George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) pointed out through his writings, in particular "Politics and the English Language", political words, including 'fascism', become eroded of meaning.

Still more, Karl Polayni, in his magnum opus "The Great Transformation" (1944) wrote about fascism in one of the later chapters, and described how it took every sort of different characteristic. He euphemistacally described Huey Long and Father Coughlin as different brands of fascist leaders in the US.

Fascism is really a difficult concept to define though.

No, it's not -- it's *ultra-nationalism*, the claim that the interests of the working class are best represented by the bourgeois nation-state, which is a *cross-class* politics, and bullshit, of course.

I find this about him to be problematic:

Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I

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

---


Good anti-imperialist politics:

He [Long] further argued that American involvement in the Spanish–American War and the First World War had been deadly mistakes conducted on behalf of Wall Street.[158][159] Consequently, Long demanded the immediate independence of the Philippines, which the United States had occupied since 1898.[134][160]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long ... ign_policy

---


Careerist.

Initially, Coughlin was a vocal supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, but he became a harsh critic of Roosevelt, accusing him of being too friendly to bankers. In 1934, he established a political organization called the National Union for Social Justice. Its platform called for monetary reforms, nationalization of major industries and railroads, and protection of labor rights. The membership ran into the millions, but it was not well organized locally.[1]

After hinting at attacks on Jewish bankers, Coughlin began to use his radio program to broadcast antisemitic commentary. In the late 1930s, he supported some of the fascist policies of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. The broadcasts have been described as "a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture".[2] His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, using the slogan "Social Justice". After the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939, the Roosevelt administration forced the cancellation of his radio program and forbade distribution by mail of his newspaper, Social Justice. Coughlin largely vanished from the public arena, working as a parish pastor until retiring in 1966. He died in 1979.

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

[Unthinking Majority]

Is AI nanny hot? Can I have sex with AI nanny? If so, how much and where can I get one? Is it easier to find than a PS5?

[ckaihatsu]

Is AI nanny hot? Can I have sex with AI nanny? If so, how much and where can I get one? Is it easier to find than a PS5?

How hot was the sex with the PS5?


x D