> The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources.
Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.
> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.
Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.
> This is an absurd strawman.
Need to read more degrowth fiction then.
> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)
The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.
> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.
It isn't a cope. They are pointing out the fact that the state has been used against the opposition multiple times in the past by authoritarians, by both the US (this goes beyond DT's gov too) and socialist governments (although they often use the term "reactionaries" instead).
Who did Obama sick the DOJ on? Who did Biden? How? Did his lackies at the FCC bully media companies, threaten to take them off the air for what their comedians did? What noblogs.org did they go after? Did they tell everyone the un-cities were violent overrun places that needed that national guard sent in? Did Obama's personal lawyer get to run the DOJ?
The left/"socialists", generally, these days, seem to believe pretty strongly in individuals liberty. They aren't the same rank hypocrites who crow and cry foul every chance they get, only to violate those same principles as soon as it's convenient.
> The left/"socialists", generally, these days, seem to believe pretty strongly in individuals liberty.
The “left” as a whole, whether you mean left ultras or left-liberals, generally do not respect individual freedoms in my experience. They redefine liberty to exclude rights they don’t believe in (the right does as well).
Polls have shown that the public as a whole, including the left, is becoming more hostile towards many individual liberties, especially freedom of speech. Even more concerning, support for political violence is gradually climbing.
Socialists are a mixed bag. In my experience, the more educated they are, the more they publicly espouse support for individual liberties, at least during academic discussions. But there’s a disturbing trend of “joking” about rights violations in casual conversation, mirroring the same trend on the right. Still, the DSA (for instance) seems to be gradually improving its official stances, although there is still work to do.
Everyone knows that the right is terrible on civil liberties, but that’s no reason to excuse the left.
"In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal.[1][2] The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature."
Other comments have pointed out this: how are you going to stop the "warrior narcissist" if you disarmed/de-weaponized the peace-makers? Even if de-weaponize after you erase all the current "warrior narcissists", how will you prevent new ones from rising up and re-weaponizing? Surely, you know that war is not the default state, so this isn't a theoretical.
Also, I think your description of "warrior narcissists" as a shallow description of the spirit of these people. You mentioned something about "identity" in later comments, and I cannot help but wonder what do you mean by that. I don't think Putin's main motive is his self-image, nor do I think Israel's leadership is murdering Palestine's populace to appear heroic.
It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
I'll always appreciate the spirit of pacifism and collaboration, but your comments seem quixotic, and not in a good way.
The police state exists entirely to maintain its own identity - and thus control - over that of its subjects. It is a warrior - controlling the lives of others or killing them - and it is doing it narcissistically, to maintain its own image of itself.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
The subject is de-weaponization of technology.
First, you separate the technology from the person using it correctly - i.e. not to create a police state.
Then, the person using it incorrectly in a police state.
In this case, the person you don't want to have using technology to murder/do harm/violate the actual human rights of others, is the warrior narcissist.
So, as a technologist, I do not let my technology be used by someone who is only going to use it on others, for actual war-fighting/warrior purposes, for the purposes of protecting or promoting their identity over the life of others.
Because that is what good technology is - something which gives all users, equal rights. An equal, new identity, with each new form of technology.
So, de-weaponization means, disconnecting the user from using technology in destructive ways.
Constructive ways are easier, such as I demonstrated with extreme prejudice, such as the notion of the pink F35, dropping cluster medical supplies, water desalination pods instead of child-maiming fertilizer bombs, or indeed - fertilizer in the right place, with emergency seed-bombs for a 3 month re-supply of the landscape, food-wise, etc.
All current war theaters are the result of a police state and these police states only function because of technology.
These are parables I'm dramatizing, with intent. I do know there is no chance in hell of turning off all the weapons - I for sure know that there is a way to use technology to make sure a police state doesn't happen in the first place. (Because I've been doing exactly that with technology for decades.)
Putin is an identity of someone you don't actually know, but yet, you think you know the warrior narcissism in Putin - but it is actually the identity, not the individual, that I am talking about. I rate Putin among all the other war criminals of the world - they are there, because they have the technological might of their people - or indeed the ignorance of their people in spite of this might, or indeed even collective agreement on scale, to perpetuate that identity.
And lest it not be clear, I find that in order to be a good pacifist, you have to allow for new identity, always. It is the use of technological power to gain mass identity and exploit it for war, which I am specifically calling the playground of the warrior narcissist. Those who would murder to maintain their own identity.
Drop books not bombs, is legitimately the simplest pacifist view I can express. I see far, far more peace to be had in the world with the concept of dropping a complete archive.org gardening section from the pink F35, you know .. "turning the pistol into a pump" ...
>It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.
Apropos quixotic.
You might notice that I am manifesting the very thing I am resisting.
That is by design. For every excuse for murdering 'those people over there', I have and can spot a greedy instance of technological mis-use. There is no longer any good, legitimate reason for war - technologically. It happens, because technologists don't confront the warriors.
So I'm targeting warrior narcissism intentionally, and yes in a way guaranteed to create a cloud of smoke on the horizon, because .. after all .. dang himself, could prove the value of my point by switching me off right now.
> You write as if there is only one smoothly homogeneous "Capitalism" and that it's actually practiced.
You'd be mistaken, as that better describes OP. All I mentioned is that the push for open competition began in capitalism (or, more appropriately, liberal capitalism) undermining the prior more nepotism-based system of dominance.
Of course, there are more intricacies but, given that OP's comment was shallow, I didn't feel the need of going deep into the many forms of what people may call "capitalism". We can get into it if you'd like.
It's not just an American belief. USA has no MSS equivalent for starters. They don't have a Great Firewall. One can make their own independent party in the US (winning is a different story, tho). And so on.
And that's just in recent times, the PRC had it worse then.
But you are cheery picking a few things while ignoring others.
In the US, you are free to buy a gun and walk around with it. In the EU you can't But if you ask a person from the EU, they will think that this "freedom to bear arms" does more harm than good in their eyes.
So who has more freedom here? The person who walks around with the gun or the person who can walk the streets with the freedom of knowing that guns are not allowed here.
Freedom is a sliding scale not a binary thing. Should you be free to marry your first cousin or children? Some freedom absolutist will tel you that governments shouldn't be able to tell you who you can marry but we can all agree that some freedoms need to be curtailed for the good of society.
Now you can argue that China is less free when it comes to political matters and that would be fine except the problem in this case is that the author simply expressed a very broad opinion which makes it impossible to falsify.
The person who is prohibited from having guns in any space has less freedom. The freedom of knowing guns aren't allowed isn't a freedom of its own, but a constraint on actions. Constraints provide security to do certain actions, improving their viability (hence why EU people may think it does more harm than good), but they don't increase the pool of legal actions, only reduce it.
Also, EU people would be wrong to assume that their countries are gun free. Focusing only on countries with a general ban, the are still a notable category of people who are allowed to bear arms: some government officials. So the security of "no guns" is already compromised. There also some downstream structural effects on building societies on such constraint. But I'd say this is besides the point.
I'm also not commenting on whether some freedom should be curtailed or not, as that's also besides the point.
In the end, given the laws of USA, its citizens do have more freedom than PRC's, even outside of politics. I've heard, for instance, that PRC's citizens have the "freedom to easy housing", but they don't. They, at best, have an promise of easy housing supply from the CCP. Given that housing supply depends on material conditions, it's not a formal guarantee. On the other hand, expressing the wrong opinion online in mainland China may net you arrest.
I don't think it's a tool for sowing division. There is a significant group of self-proclaimed socialists who proudly stan the Soviet Union and Mao's China, so I think it's more of a case of ideologies being more messy than they seem.
Personally, I don't care as much about the label themselves as I do about the relationships they describe behind.
Not sure why this comment is downvoted. In the context of Marxian Socialism and Command Economies, it's very much true that socialism is incompatible with free markets.
Going even further, without a free market for labour, there's no true worker emancipation. Even with "worker-ownership" (read corporate-ownership under a democratic governance), each worker's power is still diluted by the governing body (which, funnily enough, means socialism strengthens capitalism as "control by those who own capital" while weakening capitalism as "free markets").
I didn't downvote it (obviously), but, for starters, it confuses socialism with communism (and also makes a typical categorical error in assuming that FEATTATEATTN is an implementation rather than desired value).
Second, it confuses capitalism (existing systems) with free market (some kind of ideal). It also pretends "free market" is a value neutral proposition. That completely ignores real-world role played by property, information, money and other multiparty relationships that socialism (and other regulations) try to address.
Third, it ignores the fact that socialism has been, not extensively, but successfully, implemented in the real world. (Mondragon and other worker coops, postwar tripartity models of worker participation in company control, etc.)
Lastly, it treats "free market" as an all-or-nothing proposition, which is never the case. There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Which brings us to your second paragraph, why rejecting free market can emancipate the workers. Treating labor as a commodity means that the person who performs the labor loses their decision power to the market, and so they lose freedom. Thus socialism demands that you do not separate human from the labor, and so they should always have a say over conditions in which they perform the labor. (This is different from other commodities, which, being inanimate objects, do not have a say about how they are used.) Accepting that free market for labor shouldn't exist is not really that different from accepting that free market for slaves shouldn't exist; in both cases there is human freedom attached which shouldn't be simply subjugated to the decisions of the "free market".
I would also say that worker coops show that your 2nd paragraph is empirically untrue. (Which is also bad for that model, because they often struggle to find capital, most of it being owned by
capitalists who demand control over it.)
In regards to socialist/communist confusion, OP primarily refers using the term "socialism", except at the end where they use "socialist communist countries", likely referring to the self-proclaimed socialist countries that strive/strived towards communism. (I'm not sure FEATTATEATTN means here)
> There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.
Reasons that don't contradict OP's: "Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent." Nuclear bombs only current purpose is indiscriminate eradication of human life and child trafficking is well... child trafficking. They all break consent. The same can be said about slavery, but not labour.
Which brings to the core of this discussion: the free market of labour. The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party. Removing it, however, rewards those who benefit the most from the current arrangement, which is most likely to be the employers.
While commodities, and other conventional properties, indeed do not have a will of their own; once appropriated, they become an extension of the will of their owner. With this in mind, labour, capital and commodities aren't different: neither the human actions applied to make bread, nor the machines needed to make bread nor the bread itself care about their prices or how they are used, but their owners do. In both cases, the same human freedoms are being affected in the same way. Slavery is special because the traded resource in question is another human being, someone capable of self-ownership, and the slaver isn't simply dictating on, for sake of simplicity, non-essential part of their body as with labour and commodities, but the slave's whole body and life, thus violating the consent part.
Which segways to your final paragraph. When I mentioned "worker-ownership", I was specifically alluding to worker coops. They not only do not prove what I said untrue, they, both theoretically and empirically (but mostly theoretically, yet), prove it true. One empirical part is the fact that Mondragon's increasing reliance on contractors, for instance. But, more interestingly, is the fact that, presuming that all ~70,000 Mondragon employees are members (they aren't), each would have around 0,0014% share. Given that Mondragon works under indirect democracy, this share doesn't even translate to direct influence. Is this painting the image of worker emancipation? Notice how the corporate power over the individual is still strong - sure smells like capitalism, as defined as "control by those who own capital", except "those" here is a corporation, which is not that different from today.
Given that you brought the slavery, likely for the analogy with wage-slavery - trying to fix workers by making their employers democratic is like solving slavery by making their slavers republics. The proper solution is to give direct private ownership over the means of production to all, but that's likely economically infeasible (but who knows, society where everyone is a capitalist like this would be neat). However, we can fix the issue with coops previously by keeping them small, but to handle the large contingency of workers and their diversity, a lot more coops would need to exist. Furthermore, these coops would need to be able triage workers that fit into their culture, and worker would need to be able to chose coops that satifify them. That implies a free market of labour. It points to the issue being more located in the concentration of power on people, not individuals, which means socialism can't do anything to fix this, specially if it implies getting rid of the free market of labour. Perhaps pushing for coops can help prevent corporate power concentration, but a healthy free market of labour is critical.
> The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party.
I disagree with this, and it's less true in theory than in practice. The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production. In terms of labor, it means your remuneration will be reduced to subsistence wage, and not more. An apple doesn't care about its price, but price of your labor determines your living standard and your freedom.
And where this doesn't happen in the real world, it is actually a consequence of labor market failure, for example, labor negotiations through unions.
(There are also other labor market failures that prop the wages upwards, for example for CEOs.)
So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.
The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company. Moreover, all the value produced gets redistributed to the workers, not just a portion. (And I agree here that outsourcing Mondragon is bad.)
> That implies a free market of labor.
No it doesn't. Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production (for example, it implies no labor laws, so you might die in the summer heat as a consequence). And it is by design.
(I was appalled to find that Hayek defended mining towns. Freedom to change the job my ass!)
> The free market is deliberately engineered to push down price to cost of production
The free market is not deliberately engineered for any particular goal, except the free trade between parties. Fundamentally, it's a trading and information system.
Technically speaking, market prices only seek an equilibrium point between supplier and consumers. While, due to human ambitions, there's an empirical pressure for commodities' prices to go down, human labour is different. In case of commodities, you can scale all aspects of productions as long as there are enough. Whereas commodities are constrained by environment, human labour is constrained by the environment and ethics, as you can't just produce people, a hard requirement for human labour. As such, I find that the only cases in which people will be paid subsitance wages are when there's a oversupply of workers and an undersupply of businesses.
> So I am not sure how you imagine free market for labor to help workers unless you assume a market failure of some sort.
Because restricting worker/employer relations only makes it harder for switching firms, which empirically favors the more scarce side, which normally is the employers. Making these firms coops doesn't prevent lack of control, as elaborated bellow.
> The individual share of worker within a coop might be low, but it's still better than 0 under a private (capitalist owned) company.
The thing is, shares on their own are not ownership proper (the same applies to publicly traded companies, BTW) as it's exclusive. A share is percentage of influence over a corporate process that determines the final allocation of the corporately-owned resources. While the share division might be quasi-continuous, the final decisions are discrete and made by the corporation, for the corporation. In the context of a direct democratic governance, everyone will get a vote, but this vote will only translate into control if it falls in the required majority of a decision. In practical terms, having 1% share doesn't mean you have 1% control over the resources of the company: if a worker consistently fall under minority over all elections, they have effectively 0 control. Alternatively, they might find themself having their way in all elections. Despite having the same shares, two worker may have different levels of influence over the corporation. And that's just direct democracy. Indirect democracy, seem in large worker coops, make this distribution of control even messier. Ultimately, this is all to say that worker coops are still private corporations in the sense that they both alienate individual workers. The details of this alienation may be different from traditional individually owned private corps, but this is not the path for worker freedom. For disenfranchised workers, their only option is to find another corporation that better aligns with their values and goals.
Also, value getting redistributed to workers isn't exclusive of worker coops. Stock options, ESOPs, etc. aren't exactly rare in other private corp formats.
> Free market of labor is more than just a free choice of job, it also means that people who are not involved in the job itself might dictate the conditions of production
How so? In a free market, the only ones actually dictating the conditions is the supplier (the worker) and the consumer (the employer). The employer is the one providing the job, so they are involved by definition. The market often informs the employer in their decisions, but this influence is always consented, not forced. (Also, one cannot consent to their own death, no need for labor laws to state that.)
Finally, not sure why you just freely mentioned Hayek without elaborating. I also would like a citation, for the only reference I got was:
> There are, undeniably, occasions when the condition of employment creates an opportunity for true coercion. In periods of acute unemployment, the threat of dismissal may be used to enforce actions other than those originally contracted for. And in conditions such as those in a mining town the manager may well exercise an entirely arbitrary and capricious tyranny over a man to whom he has taken a dislike. But such conditions, though not impossible, would, at the worst, be rare exceptions in a prosperous competitive society. (Hayek 2013: 204)
It should be noted that Hayek would consider such dismissal coercive if the action was to result in the unemployed's ruin. As such, wouldn't call this a defense of mining towns.
You have it backwards, most cryptocurrencies transactions are, at best, pseudononymous, where, by contrast, cash transactions are anonymous by default.
> What has society gained in return?
A currency technology that doesn't rely on central authority, slavery nor imperialism to exist.
USD includes cash. In fact, cash is the preferred payment method for criminal things, contending with Monero, so complaining about its inclusion is certainly something.
Going even further, cryptcurrencies, being distrusted ledgers, still fulfill the ability to test for someone "social trust" within a transaction, anonymous or not. Also, it's not like we, as the whole society, have access to your transaction history at all times with USD (which we do with Bitcoin, funnily enough).
Anyone who lives in a country with high inflation and unstable monetary policy can now use crypto to store wealth. Calling crypto inherently bad is pure first world privilege.
Good thing that's just degrowth propaganda.
> This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs.
Except in comparison to all others. Crop failures and famines were common in feudalisms. Planned socialism is known for food insecurity. The system today might not be best possible, but it's, by no means, terrible.
> This is an absurd strawman.
Need to read more degrowth fiction then.
> What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form)
The problem here is the "human needs" part, which are famously infinite.
> ...than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
Also degrowth propaganda. No one "grows" for the sake of "growing", lest they have a need for it. All choosing actors act towards fulfilling their needs, regardless of whether anyone find them "fundamental" or not.
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