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Remember me comrades!
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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I'm in no way here to argue pro-capitalist rhetoric. I'm not super committed to capitalism as opposed to other systems of economic management, I am however willing to posit that the system of trading work for money does not inherently oppress- absolutely late stage capitalism is an unabashed fuck-show responsible for more misery than acceptable by almost any ethical standard. I hate the idea that, ultimately, you're only worth what you can produce. I think that workers rights should be paramount, and there's no amount of money that would be an acceptable profit margin to sell human suffering, full stop.
On the geopolitical scale, I think many decisions during the cold war were driven by fear of nuclear warfare. There's for sure profit in controlling puppet states, but with Cuba on their doorstep and Russia very clearly taking the role of an international superpower, I think that there was some rationale about their ability to become more politically important and influence the world beyond the west's ability to push back, and with nuclear armaments proliferating at a genuinely insane rate, there was a very real threat of apocalypse on the horizon. Do I think that justifies warmongering, interference in legal elections, and killing dissidents? Of fucking course not. But I don't think it was motivated by money alone. Money is just a gateway to power, like anything else.
I think personally, the idea that you can use work to produce capital that you can then spend on other things is not necessarily authoritarian. It's also definitely not a single catch-all solution to "how do we make a society that is just"- obviously unregulated markets go brr. I think the counterbalance needs to be systems that allow for people who can't work to live a high quality of life, regardless of how much they can provide.
That is where history disagrees. In the bargain of trade the people who need money to live can never make deals on an even playing field with those that don't. If trade determines your survival and we know it can't be done fairly than we have created conditions that can only snowball into misery.
I see no reason to belive the people running an apartide government that used weapons of mass destructions on civilians should be given any benefit of the doubt. There is no evidence they were kind or altruistic in any other endeavor. Why would it be different here?
If the cycle was work -> value. Than I would agree that is what socialism calls for. However the accumulation of capital makes it impossible for a worker to get fair and just value for their labor.
I definitely think that if any theoretical government would be capable of making that core work-to-value cycle work, it certainly would look pretty radically different than the US, I mostly live here because I was born here, I have a support system here, and my ancestors were literally bled to death here lol
Yeah, you could make something work. I could make my car fly, it would just be easier to use a plane though.
Most of history worked just fine on other systems. Most of the time this system has worked terribly. The system we had was just the first one to encorporate the scientific method and rationality. It is a historical accident. We can do better.
I think that there's quite a bit to be said for the ability to abstract something like labor and turn it into a common resource that can be utilized by anyone- if I need to buy a Japanese computer part from a very small manufacturing organization, that's about the only way to make sure that all parties are seeing value in a transaction, seeing that there's no guarantee that I have anything they would want or need, and I may never interact with them again.
I agree, we can for sure improve on the concepts involved, but that doesn't mean that they're accidental, and there's a reason that the system was even marginally successful.
I think like, evolution is a great example of a similar process - the biological functions formed by evolutionary processes aren't intentional, because intention implies cognitive processes that a natural law isn't capable of; but they do serve purpose. They aren't accidents, because the system is by its nature iterative and of course something would work eventually. Is there a theoretically more efficient structure than the one that we currently have for the human heart? Sure! That's just not the structure that evolved through selective pressure.
Again, not to say we shouldn't try to improve on systems of economy and government, but more to say that there's still lessons to be taken from what we currently have; it worked in some small way, which means we probably wouldn't benefit from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.
Well no. In the example of buying a small computer part they probably see little value in the transaction. Between parts, overhead, shipping, materials. Ths majority of the economic signal there is lost to inefficient rent seeking, bloat, corrupt middlemen, and management costs. Who in this situation are we concerned about? The people who designed it? The people that assembled it? The people that mined the materials? The people that handled shipping? The market abstracts all this so people.habe a very hard time feeling the relationships between each other. Then rent seeking behavior overshadows all that and makes market forces effectively noise.
I do agree with the idea of evolutionary solutions. Consider the horse. Useful. When we abandoned the solution that evolved and created purpose built solutions we got way cooler and way more effective answers. Like, would you say the rocket ship was just an overcorrection to the inefficiency present in water buffalo based transport? No. It was the application of science, logic and reason to create good answers to hard problems. Every time we try to make something cool we do so. It's rad. We should to do the economy what we have done every other technology
I think that for sure one of the drawbacks of the labor to currency system is the blind consumerism and the unethical conditions necessary to, say, make a bacon cheeseburger. I think the unethical parts of that interaction have more to do with corporate price-gouging and abuse of labor than the consumer themselves, who (in our current system) is kept intentionally blind to the real cost of their meal.
I think that for sure rent-seeking is one of those things that, in this theoretical government, would need to be addressed. Landlords and speculators are clearly opportunists with no connection to the stuff they milk value from, and that's problematic.
On reflection, ultimately I have no problem with the premise that people don't necessarily need to understand how to grow wheat, or even know someone who owns wheat, in order to consume the labor of a farmer- so long as that farmer is capable of truly leveraging their labor favorably and also benefits from that interaction. In that scenario, the farmer also uses the abstraction, which allows them to really utilize all of their labor through a larger base of people to sell to. They can also put this theoretical currency towards things that contribute to their fulfillment and that of their family members without knowing the person who produces those things personally, and so on.
I think one place I'm struggling with this is I'm having a hard time conceptualizing how people with more ephemeral skills would be able to leverage that skill into the resources necessary to obtain other types of fulfillment without a way to hold and transfer the value they generate. I'm sure there are philosophers who've written books on books about it, and I just need to find their work lol.
I think that we stopped using horses and adapted systems to do similar work, for sure, but that was after we had already iterated into the saddle, the cart, the wagon, carriage, etc. Horse to car is a big step if we look at the two of them without the greater context, but it was thousands of years of technology and iteration before we got there. They're fundamentally interrelated- I mean heck, we even measure the power of an engine by horses.
I agree that the natural next step economically is coming, and that's a fact- the questions in my eyes are: what's the horse, what's the carriage, and what are we replacing the horse with?
Cybernetics. The needs of people are essentially known and predictable. We can just make them and give them to people. That is also kinda how most of human history worked and it was fine then. It could be fine now, even better with computer data analysis and rational processing.
Sure there will be exceptions like little Japanese computer parts. However some democratic process could be used. Plenty of writers and scifi stories have possible systems. We can figure that out when we get there.
I'm actually not not into the idea of being able to instantly and accurately judge the needs of a whole nation of people. I mean shit, we already collect so much data through smart watches that once we are able to accurately measure metabolic rate, that's like 90% of it right there I think lol
There is a book, the people's republic of Walmart.
Basically every company with sufficient money does exactly this and they are very effective at it. Just what if instead of using the tech to make Walmart slightly more money we used it to make some public goods cheap and effective
Ah Yes, another fine addition to my reading list.
seriously though, we live in a late-stage capitalist hellscape and it's always funny to be when people use government monitoring fears to justify removing core social safety nets while simultaneously Walmart, Google, etc. Know when your balls ache because they have collected data on you from when you were prepubescent.
Those companies use the money they squeeze out of you to buy politicians to make your life worse. So life under capitlaism has trained everyone to mistrust that kinda thing. People have simply never lived in a world where anything like that was likely to improve their lives. So pessimism is a reasonable response to the conditions we find ourselves in. However a better world is possible.
hard agree. I think the only way we can improve our lives and the lives of those in our communities is to unflinchingly believe in the fact that we deserve better, and we can get better