myrmepropagandist
It’s not a public square until it is controlled by the public democratically. Anything less is a substitute, a stand in for The Big Conversation we probably should be having.
The fears people have about “collective action for the common good” aren’t trivial. The potential for corruption, cheating and diversion of the public will to private whims is real.
Too many people are more comfortable letting some powerful man tell them “I’ll take care of people like you” and screw the Big Conversation.
myrmepropagandist
The fragmented fake public square, is an obstacle to really getting anything big enough done.
Maybe the maximal size of a human society that can act together is just not able to be that big. (I don’t really buy this)
The social media problem and the inability to seriously face climate change problems are linked by common cause. Are we going to hope someone powerful will just fix it for us? That’s the current ‘plan.’
Are we really this terrified of what a real public square might produce?
The McKennas 🏳️⚧️ ♾️ 💖
@futurebird
Absolutely. In other words:
It's only a public square if it is owned by the public, otherwise it's a park-like enclosure.
— Maggie & Rowena
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Sorry, I didn’t see your toot in my notifications because I blocked sarfeo (for refusing to answer). I’ll respond now:
Yes, in fact there were various economic systems that predated capitalism, and none of them were communism, but they featured all the same flaws that are currently ascribed to capitalism.
That’s why I’m always saying that if you’re blaming capitalism for, say, greed or bigotry or environmental harm, you’re blaming the wrong thing.
The blame belongs with the root economic causes, which are universal issues, not an aspect of any single system. It’s the fault of resource scarcity combined with human nature.
So, for example, the colonialism that we’re still fighting the vestiges of happened under feudalism and mercantilism, not modern capitalism.
However, we’re not going back to any of these historical systems, and there are no viable modern alternatives to capitalism.
The USSR and China, for example, ran under a command economy and that was a huge failure.
What actually works, and what you actually find in the real world, are mixed economies, which is to say regulated capitalism.
Capitalism is terrible, but it’s better than everything else, so maybe it’s not so terrible. It’s the very best thing we’ve got for creating wealth. Of course, it needs some help with the distribution side, which is where taxation and regulation comes in.
But we’re way past the point where we can take the idea of communism seriously. It’s been tried and it’s always failed, with no sign that it will ever do anything but fail again. It never even came close to working, not even a little, not even for a little while.
If you’re curious, I wrote this blog post about the topic: https://truth-sandwich.com/2023/07/05/real-red-magic/
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Uh-huh, so you’re against one thing, which means you’re for an alternative. But you don’t want to say what it is.
Thing is, we know. The alternative to capitalism is communism. If that’s not the alternative you intend, then it’s on you to provide an alternate alternative.
myrmepropagandist
“The alternative to capitalism is communism.”
Is this how you define communism? Was the whole world was communist before capitalism started?
sarfeo
@TruthSandwich @futurebird "bluff": why do you assume others have bad intentions? this is not twitter…
anti-capitalism means "against capitalism". see my other response for details.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Ok, I’ll call your bluff: what does anti-capitalism mean if not socialism? And what is socialism if not the path towards communism?
sarfeo
@TruthSandwich @futurebird says who
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Because that’s what “anti-capitalism” means.
sarfeo
@TruthSandwich @futurebird why even mention it?
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Let’s rule out one possibility immediately: communism.
sarfeo
@futurebird Religion managed to bind together (more or less) about a billion people each, with some fantasy stories. I'm thinking there must be a bigger story, that encompasses more people. But grounded in reality, and lifting us out of the dark future we're currently facing.
Alon
@TruthSandwich @vidar @futurebird Yeah, during early industrialization, in explicit reaction against it while still trying to have capitalist manufactures.
(P.S. the "Sanders is a Russophile" line in the post is complete bunk; Sanders has supported weapons deliveries and other aid to Ukraine. Nor did he equate Democrats and Republicans - he caucused with Democrats throughout his tenure, and strongly endorsed Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.)
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
I’m sorry, no, that’s just not true.
Sanders honeymooned in Russia and has allowed himself to be used for Russian propaganda at least as far back as the 1980’s. (See linked article.) His recent criticism is focused on the fact that Russia is no longer communist and is instead run by oligarchs. In other words, he loves Russia and wants to bring back the good old days.
Sanders has recently carried water for Putin, arguing that he has “legitimate concerns about NATO expansion) while his allies (the JD’s) have voted against Ukrainian aid.
As for endorsing Clinton “strongly”, that’s a lie. He claimed his loss was due to rigging and he had his surrogates pimp for spoiler Stein. (Receipts below.)
Like I said, I’m not the first to recognize him as our Thalmann.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/world/europe/bernie-sanders-soviet-russia.html
Alon
@TruthSandwich @vidar @futurebird Wait - none of what I'm talking about is communism. I don't think it really makes sense to speak of communism or socialism before the industrial era. The point of socialism was to replicate egalitarian communal structures at scale; that's not really a thing in a preindustrial society.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
That essay lists examples of attempts at communism dating back to 1800.
Alon
@vidar @TruthSandwich @futurebird Yeah, and he was wrong. Historiography marches on, and at this point historians don't even like talking about feudalism as a thing that existed. There were a lot of coexisting different systems in medieval Europe and while manorialism was the most common, it was deeply parasitic on revenue generated by urban market economies.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Exactly this.
Communism predates Marx and it was a failure long before he ever put his stamp on it. It remains a failure.
Marx was wrong: capitalism is not ever going to transition to socialism and then communism.
We know he’s wrong because people tried to turn his theories in to fact. And they failed, failed, and failed.
Alon
@vidar @TruthSandwich @futurebird What do you mean, better than everything else that had been tried? There were systems of free labor in medieval Europe contemporary with serfdom. There were so many peasants fleeing to cities with free labor that there were rules for how long lords had to fetch the peasants back (a year and a day). There were peripheral regions that never quite adopted manorialism and it was fine; Russia only went manorial as the Early Modern tsardom was reestablishing serfdom.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@Alon @TruthSandwich @futurebird
If you want an argument for why capitalism is better than anything before it that I fully agree with, read chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto. Marx was a massive fanboy of capitalism..
He just expected it to eventually give way to something else, like every preceding system.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@TruthSandwich @futurebird
Feudalism was terrible, but at the time it was better than everything else that had been tried. That does not mean it'd have been valid to conclude "maybe it's not so terrible".
I don't actually think it's very interesting whether or not people think socialism or communism can work.
I think it's more interesting why people think capitalism can survive, and why they think capitalism is somehow unique in not having failure mode that will eventually end it.
Passenger
@vidar @TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird
I'm not sold on automation being the important part here. During my lifetime, the main driver of capitalist "productive" improvements (productive being in scare quotes because it increases shareholder value but not meaningful production) has been reorganisation, not automation.
I've worked for some very big companies and the rise of office software hasn't led to the decrease in head office staff or management, just the rise in what Graeber called bullshit jobs. Airbnb, Uber, WeWork and the other tech unicorns haven't created leisure, just precarity.
Meanwhile, my clothes are made by child slaves in whatever country won the race to the bottom, and my food is picked by undocumented people whom farmers employ because they can threaten them with migration authorities if they unionise.
Maybe it's because I'm under 40, but I think Marx's belief that capitalism would drive automation is one of the things that's aged worst about his beliefs.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird
Of course not. Automation is an inherent driver of capitalist productive improvements. It's one of the things Marx cheered on like a massive fanboy in the Communist Manifesto. However sufficient automation either requires infinite growth to provide additional jobs, or will eventually reduce the demand for labor.
Whether that means the end of capitalism depends on whether Marx was too cynical about society's ability redistribute or not.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Automation is not incompatible with capitalism.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird
That's great. For capitalism to survive this needs to continue *forever* without labour costs ever getting high enough to make automation of a sufficient set of jobs possible.
To me, that's magical thinking.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Again, none of this happened. In America right now, companies are struggling to attract labor. Real wages have increased, faster than inflation.
What actually happens is that industries can reach a steady state, neither growing nor shrinking.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird
Towards zero, not to zero. The point is not that it will succeed in getting rid of all labour, but that the more survival for companies depends on taking market share rather than developing new markets, the stronger the pressure is to drive down cost, and eventually the labour element will be the easiest to cut.
The only way this doesn't happen is if capitalism fails to do what its supporter claims it excels at. It's possible.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
It’s nonsense on every level. The fact that a system can drive down costs doesn’t mean it can drive them down to zero. And that’s not what we’re seeing anywhere. It also says nothing about the cost of resources for labor to convert to goods.
Moreover, all societies engage in distribution (I reject the notion of “re”-distribution because that falsely implies that any initial distribution was somehow natural). although no society has ever gotten UBI to work on any scale.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird
You can of course reject all of that, or whatever subset. 1 and 2 is basically Marx taking capitalists at face value, and agreeing with them that capitalism great at driving down costs. While a and b reflects his belief that the ruling classes are motivated to protect their profits in the short run, and in doing so will prevent reforms that could make capitalism survive or at least delay change. Plenty of socialists, including some Marxists reject a/b too.
Vidar Hokstad / Galaxy Bound
@TruthSandwich @jhavok @futurebird His argument isn't that capitalism requires endless growth, but that capitalism running out of new markets has to compete on cost of production rather than expansion, and that this 1) will drive us towards post-scarcity, 2) will drive the demand for labour towards zero. His contention is then a) that society won't address 2 (e.g. by redistribution, UBI, or whatever), because the state represents the ruling classes, and b) this will eventually cause upheaval.
Jimmy Havok
@TruthSandwich @vidar @futurebird Marx was spot on with his critique of capitalism, but completely off the board with his theory of history. He thought you could predict social evolution when it is a chaotic system that can be blown one way or the other by random events. For example, feudalism was doomed by the Black Plague and the increased value of labor that came from depopulation, but aMarx posited that it was an inevitable step in social evolution.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
I said better, not great. :-)
Marx’s various criticisms of capitalism had factual errors, such as his much-repeated claim that capitalism requires endless growth.
This isn’t a minor mistake, it’s used to justify his theory of history. If capitalism literally requires the impossible, then it’s obviously doomed.
Since at least the days of Marx, communists have been insisting that communism is inevitable and we shouldn’t even try to avoid it. This triumphalism reeks of the Borg’s “You Will Be Assimilated, Resistance Is Futile” intimidation technique.
And yet, each time it’s tried, it fails. It fails hard. Maybe we should take a lesson from this.
One of the stranger strawman arguments applied to me elsewhere in this thread is that I’m denying that capitalism can be replaced.
As I said, we can imagine post-capitalist economies driven by technological innovations we currently lack, such as a post-scarcity world where labor and wealth are disconnected. If anything, ChatGPT has forced us to think about this.
But curiosity about such possibilities is not the same thing as a belief in their inevitability, or even their goodness. I can think of at least two SF stories describing post-scarcity dystopias, for example.
Truth Sandwich 🥪🇺🇸😷
Yes, and that’s why the USSR was such a success… oh, wait.
As I point out in the essay, Marx was a better diagnostician than clinician. And, frankly, he’s not even that great at the former.
Jimmy Havok
@vidar @TruthSandwich @futurebird Seems like capitalism is showing the exact symptoms Marx predicted. Go figure.
DeepSpace🔺9
@vidar @futurebird @jhavok @passenger @TruthSandwich
I see tens of thousands of tech workers being laid off because AI has come for their jobs. Those were good jobs. With the rise in AI we should all be fighting for UBI.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.