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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Socialists don't hate markets, they hate workers not having any power or democratic choice in how they interact in the market.
Workers owning the means of production just means the workers are doing the same work but they are in ownership of the factory and the profits. They will still sell the products they produce in a marketplace.
I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
Cool, what is your preferred replacement and does everyone in this thread agree? You have managed to continue criticism but not offer a replacement yet again.
The ole can have criticism without perfect solutions response. Cool, how useless and pointless of you.
I'm confused, isn't criticism without alternatives itself useless and pointless?
No, it broadens and deepens understanding.
Alternatives come from that understanding. Criticism is the fundamental step towards alternatives.
How exactly do you come to that conclusion?
Edit: "Thing bad" doesn't broaden or deepen anything. "Thing has specific shortcomings which aren't present in specific alternative to thing" is a useful criticism. Criticism without alternatives is just called complaining.
"thing has specific shortcomings" is a useful criticism.
Not always, sometimes it's just an acknowledgement of insurmountable facts. Pointing out the inability of a particular engine to overcome the laws of thermodynamics to output more energy than is input is not useful criticism. Pointing out the mortality of individuals is not useful criticism. Those shortcomings are specific, but unless there's some alternative that doesn't have those shortcomings, those aren't useful observations, they're pointless complaints.
youre wrong.
if we're talking about the input requirements of some engine to drive its load and those don't match then "yells in thermodynamics" is an incredibly useful criticism.
if we're talking about a project that relies on one person then discussing their mortality is an incredibly useful criticism.
in this case, the thing we're talking about is markets and the comment youre accusing of being a pointless complaint is
which is an absolutely useful criticism. relying on markets to pass information is a holdover from before we had better methods to do so. the most profitable companies now use data outside the marketplace to make decisions to the point of developing enormous networks to collect, store, parse, interpret and disseminate that information. Cybersyn, the socialist version of this technology, allowed such powerful subversion of american plots against Chile that the only alternative was a fascist military coup.
so it's not a pointless complaint, but an accurate distillation of criticism most recently offered up to the american public eye as the book The Peoples Republic of Walmart.
My response was to the implicit irony of
Everything else is opinion, and I'm not really invested in opinions.
Your response was:
It was refuted in detail.
I quoted the top level comment for context to show that your response was wrong not just in general, but in this particular instance.
My comment was a flippant derision of the hypocrisy of the poster directly above it. I don't really care about defining pointlessness, as I haven't really cared about any part of this conversation with you.
I care about calling out hypocrisy. You read too much into my comment, and instead of letting it stand, as intended, as a directed comment toward the person I responded to, decided to interject with your opinion on pointlessness.
I repeat, opinion. You refuted nothing, you diverted from my examples to unrelated examples that used similar words. That's called a "strawman". The scenarios you refuted were not the ones I presented, you changed them in fundamental ways to justify your opinion.
I am not interested in this conversation. I repeat, my whole point was specifically the hypocrisy of the comment I responded to. I find arguing about the definition of pointlessness to be even more pointless than anything else.
If you don’t care then stop posting about it.
I, a socialist don't. I think however they should be tightly regulated. And kept away from basic necessitys.
Markets have proven time and again to only serve oligarchs, or create oligarchs to serve. When left to their own wont. If we can choose to participate or not in the markets. Then there is no issue with markets. When we're slaves to the markets as we currently are however. No one is free.
Markets have lots of issues; you just named a bunch. Markets are subject to all kinds of hidden information manipulation contrary to prompting non cooperation and solving for individual maximums via exploitation like you literally outlined. Your wish to magically regulate them is just going to be corrupted.
Which is why I specifically mentioned decoupling from necessities. Regardless it seems like we are both blocked from the community LOL. But it's not like I expected more from the community based around memes
So, you would never trade with someone else something you have for something they have? You want to be entirely self sufficient?
If this isn't true, why do think markets serve no purpose?
Do you really think all exchange of goods is a market?
Yes. Do you not?
So Christmas gifts are a market?
No because I don't give you a gift only if you give me one. It's not a transaction. They are gifts.
...but you turned it into a semantic point. If I farm sheep and you bake bread, it's a market when I trade you wool for bread. If trade even as basic as this can't occur then you're relying on everyone to be self-sufficient.
The alternative is you're expecting everyone to put everything they produce into a kitty which is distributed to all, and I think that is a sure fire recipe for everyone to go hungry and for society to stagnate. There's little incentive to be productive, and no incentive to be inventive.
Hunger is such a poor motivator.