It absolutely staggers me that there are people out here trying to find out a way to make capitalism work. There is no “one neat trick”. If you can accumulate wealth, then you accumulate power, and democracy under capitalism just puts the power of the state up for auction to the highest bidder.
Capitalism does not work. It can never work. It makes fascism inevitable. Capitalism needs to be completely left in the ashes of the past.
There is one way how capitalism can work, and it did work for a while:
Worker action, from voting to unionisation, strikes up to revolution are all things that happen under the umbrella of capitalism, and as much as capitalists want to ban that, it’s all just part of the same coin.
If capitalists play nice and fair, pay good wages and make sure the workers have a decent live, then the system is stable and as a reward they get stability to make business.
If they get too greedy and squeeze the workers too hard, workers push back. They form unions, vote left, start striking, and in the worst case they destroy equipment and start a revolution. This is the kind of power that the people have.
In theory.
Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it’s wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.
And OP is right. Back in the day you had to get the military to shoot their own people. With automated weapon systems and AI/robots performing more and more of the productivity, this balance shifts rapidly, and it will likely lead to a total system breakdown with unforeseeable results.
Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it’s wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.
Trump was successful in lying to industrial sector unionized that he’d bring back manufacturing to the US. His direct harm to that, and agricultural, sector shouldn’t take that long to break the disillusionment. ie midterms. Q4 GDP, despite massive AI/datacenter investment cycle, grew at under 1%, with real economy contracting. The 45 year GOP plan of trickle down oligarchist/corporatist supremacism should be attacked more strongly for the lie that it is.
Totally this. The capitalists feared that yet another country could spiral into revolution and then communism, so they had to keep the workers happy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union combined with neoliberalism and globalism shifted the balance. Now they could always threaten their workers “If you are unhappy, we’ll move production to Singapore or Vietnam. So behave if you want to have a job.”
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can’t do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all).
We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.
People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.
With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.
It doesn’t need to stay that way. International labor movements have been attempted more than 100 years ago already and more than once. At a time where there was no instant cheap worldwide communication and cheap machine translation.
robots and AI
You can already run a decently sized LLM on a computer in your own home. 3D printers are affordable. Mass produced electronics and other parts are cheap. More automation makes things even cheaper. Normal people could soon (10 years) own an intelligent robot of their own. First buy one for the price of a car, later being able to build one yourself from easily available parts and free software.
Look at how the Ukraine war used DIY techniques to develop and build drones as effective weapons of war. Something similar will repeat itself.
Capitalism might no longer need humans for labor. It will still need humans as customers and a market.
“we” don’t need it. Despite every large civilisation inventing it, small civilisation (150 person village) just doesn’t. And can thrive quite happily without it.
It’s when civilisation gets larger that we “need” money. You can’t build the LHC or Artemis 2 without some form of intermediary currency. The problem is, to do that you end up with the issues of power imbalances.
We will only get 150 people villages if civilizations collapses, billions die, and humanity turns to subsistence farming. Even among 150 people, there will be trade in goods and favors. People have different talents and skills.
As soon as trade develops between villages, currency becomes extremely useful. There are seasonal goods, especially in agriculture. Sheep are shorn in spring to produce wool, much earlier than harvest for Apples and grain. So if you want to exchange wool for Apples, you need to make a contract or IOU note to deliver Apples in a few months. Now you basically have vouchers for commodities. You can then trade the Apple voucher for new metal shears because you don’t actually want Apples. Suddenly you trade vouchers for vouchers and it becomes a little cumbersome. There’s also always the risk of a voucher not being honored. So the village council decides to issue standardized vouchers that can be redeemed for grain in the community granary. Currency is reinvented because It’s extremely useful.
Anarcho-Primitivism is certainly a romantic ideology.
If anyone is going to put money toward politics, it needs to either be not enough to affect outcomes significantly or it needs to be a large enough part of their wealth to hurt.
If you’ve ever wondered what billionaires spend money on, politicians.
Honestly, just installing mechanism to easily remove them would be sufficient. Like, elections without a lottery option aren’t consent to be governed. If we added a lottery option to ranked voting, the elites wouldn’t be able to convince enough people they’re decent to actually get elected.
Ancient Greeks believed that government and positions of power must be randomly selected by a machine from a pool of candidates, and that elections are NOT democratic. That elections are always going to be corrupted by the oligarchy.
All the candidates are on the ballot you add a positive or negative number next to the candidates you care about, maybe we add a party modifier that adds +1 or -1 to all candidates of a party. The computer scans your ballot and puts the candidates in order with those numbers. Unranked candidates (i.e. rank zero) are equal to the “lottery” option. We can use this ranking to define the relation between all candidates and sum these relations across the whole population. Going through these sum relations we start with whatever relation gets the most votes and set that as true (blue > red) and it’s opposite as false (red > blue). Then the next and next until we have know how the population ranks all the candidates. Any candidate less than or equal to the “lottery” option gets dropped. Above the lottery option, you start with the top ranked candidate and work your way down until you run out of positions. If you hit the lottery option before running out of seat those seats are filled with randomly selected citizens. The citizens can decline and we re-roll, but there’s no opt-in process – no power seeking.
The book “Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule” by Hélène Landemore advocates for something similar but without the ranked voting part. She advocates just for pure lottery.
She advocates for deliberative democracy, so like congress but a randomly selected citizens council/jury that holds power and deliberate and talk about how to solve problems. While I’m not sure if her book said, I get the impression she wouldn’t approve of the amount of power presidents wield. She’d probably advocate that position be more subordinate to a people’s congress, like congress appointing a head of a department rather than the president being some grand leader. At least that’s my impression.
Maybe if you don’t choose it’s a vote for a lottery to pick. If half the population doesn’t vote then the winner is a random person. So if the authorities manage to prevent people from voting then they can’t seize the system with their own pick
Random? I’d hope they were at least qualified. Believe me, I wouldn’t want most of the people I know in charge of anything. I wouldn’t even trust myself with a town budget.
Right, but this is a democracy we are talking about. If half of the people participating are convinced the entire selection is no better than a random pick then that is very damning.
This is actually why I advocate for the ranked voting combination. We can have qualified career politicians if more than half the population agrees they’re qualified and decent people, but if they can’t manage that… yeah, the lottery is more an anti corruption mechanism than a way to get rid of politicians.
Do you trust the pedophilic warmongers more than a council of 100 random people? Sure, you’ll get a block of idiots and few PhDs, but mostly you’ll get normal people with different perspective on life. If you’re really worried, ban felons (and PhDs) from the random selection to make sure you get mostly normal people.
Also, who decides who’s qualified? You’ve probably heard this argument about being qualified to vote, but being qualified to rule is just as problematic. Any test you make to decide who can rule will be captured by the rulers and used to entrench their power. Right now the decision is made via campaign financing. On the other hand, if you have random citizens then suddenly there’s a very big incentive for every part of our society to make sure everyone is educated and well-treated, least enough of these uneducated or mistreated citizens get randomly selected and collectively agree to remove the problem.
“Citizens Juries” is a phrase often associated with it.
As for PhDs, Experts have tendency to think they know best and move to capture systems. There’s an argument to be made that if you want your opinion respected, you should commit to helping without the benefits and corrupting effect of power.
We really do have to purge the wealthy to make a better world.
Cap on how much they can own and control. Say, $100 million? Tough cookies if you think you deserve more.
How about they can own their own head on their shoulders if they are lucky
It absolutely staggers me that there are people out here trying to find out a way to make capitalism work. There is no “one neat trick”. If you can accumulate wealth, then you accumulate power, and democracy under capitalism just puts the power of the state up for auction to the highest bidder.
Capitalism does not work. It can never work. It makes fascism inevitable. Capitalism needs to be completely left in the ashes of the past.
There is one way how capitalism can work, and it did work for a while:
Worker action, from voting to unionisation, strikes up to revolution are all things that happen under the umbrella of capitalism, and as much as capitalists want to ban that, it’s all just part of the same coin.
If capitalists play nice and fair, pay good wages and make sure the workers have a decent live, then the system is stable and as a reward they get stability to make business.
If they get too greedy and squeeze the workers too hard, workers push back. They form unions, vote left, start striking, and in the worst case they destroy equipment and start a revolution. This is the kind of power that the people have.
In theory.
Due to clever manipulaton, the capitalists managed to divide the working class and pit them against each other. This worked fine for a few decades, but it’s wearing thin. It will take maybe 5-15 years until it all comes to a head and explodes.
And OP is right. Back in the day you had to get the military to shoot their own people. With automated weapon systems and AI/robots performing more and more of the productivity, this balance shifts rapidly, and it will likely lead to a total system breakdown with unforeseeable results.
Trump was successful in lying to industrial sector unionized that he’d bring back manufacturing to the US. His direct harm to that, and agricultural, sector shouldn’t take that long to break the disillusionment. ie midterms. Q4 GDP, despite massive AI/datacenter investment cycle, grew at under 1%, with real economy contracting. The 45 year GOP plan of trickle down oligarchist/corporatist supremacism should be attacked more strongly for the lie that it is.
The Soviet Union as a counterweight was good for worker benefits as well. Keep the workers happy, keep the machine running.
Western Euro-Communism was seen as a real threat during the 1960s and 70s.
Totally this. The capitalists feared that yet another country could spiral into revolution and then communism, so they had to keep the workers happy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union combined with neoliberalism and globalism shifted the balance. Now they could always threaten their workers “If you are unhappy, we’ll move production to Singapore or Vietnam. So behave if you want to have a job.”
With AI and robots this shifts further. Let’s see where this goes.
It’s not just moving industry to countries with cheap labor, there’s also importing cheap labor.
These two things have positive effects for workers elsewhere because they get skilled and comparatively well paid jobs.
A fully globalized economy should eventually balance itself out regarding wages for similarly skilled jobs.
It will be fascinating to see a post scarcity economy. Will all people work as artists, personal trainers, motivational speakers, artisanal bakers, and such?
In theory. In practice, the planet is too big for unified union action or unified political action. You can unionize on a country level and call general strikes on a country level. You can’t do that on planet scale. Globalized economy sidesteps the power of unions and the power of the people in general.
Technically, we have been living in a post-scarcity economy for the last 50-70 years already. We have a massive global food overproduction. We have more than enough resources to give everyone a pretty nice standard of living. But on the one hand we have a massively inefficient economical system, where huge parts of the population do redundant work and bullshit jobs, while another huge part of the population do tasks that just exist to prop up the system (e.g. the whole financial and marketing sectors only exists because of the capitalist system, they aren’t doing anything worthwhile at all).
We live in an artificial scarcity society, because capitalism needs artificial scarcity to work.
People sell their labour for money, which they then use to buy stuff from the capitalists, and the capitalists use (part of) the money to buy labour from people.
With AI and robots, this will soon not be necessary any more. The labour of the people will be even less relevant than it is today. So the question then becomes whether (a) the system will collapse and what will happen afterwards or (b) if we will just pump even more bullshit into our bullshit jobs to prop up the old system.
It doesn’t need to stay that way. International labor movements have been attempted more than 100 years ago already and more than once. At a time where there was no instant cheap worldwide communication and cheap machine translation.
You can already run a decently sized LLM on a computer in your own home. 3D printers are affordable. Mass produced electronics and other parts are cheap. More automation makes things even cheaper. Normal people could soon (10 years) own an intelligent robot of their own. First buy one for the price of a car, later being able to build one yourself from easily available parts and free software.
Look at how the Ukraine war used DIY techniques to develop and build drones as effective weapons of war. Something similar will repeat itself.
Capitalism might no longer need humans for labor. It will still need humans as customers and a market.
No, they will all starve, because they can’t make their own food, and are no longer valuable.
Yeah, even the concept of money needs to be abandoned. We don’t need it.
If we don’t need it, why does practically every civilization invent it?
What’s your alternative? Barter?
“we” don’t need it. Despite every large civilisation inventing it, small civilisation (150 person village) just doesn’t. And can thrive quite happily without it.
It’s when civilisation gets larger that we “need” money. You can’t build the LHC or Artemis 2 without some form of intermediary currency. The problem is, to do that you end up with the issues of power imbalances.
So… “we” do “need” it.
(“We” in this case being everyone who lives in something larger than a 150-person village, which is the overwhelming majority of us)
(“Need” meaning very accommodating for trade, which seems to be important to the vast majority of all societies ever)
We will only get 150 people villages if civilizations collapses, billions die, and humanity turns to subsistence farming. Even among 150 people, there will be trade in goods and favors. People have different talents and skills.
As soon as trade develops between villages, currency becomes extremely useful. There are seasonal goods, especially in agriculture. Sheep are shorn in spring to produce wool, much earlier than harvest for Apples and grain. So if you want to exchange wool for Apples, you need to make a contract or IOU note to deliver Apples in a few months. Now you basically have vouchers for commodities. You can then trade the Apple voucher for new metal shears because you don’t actually want Apples. Suddenly you trade vouchers for vouchers and it becomes a little cumbersome. There’s also always the risk of a voucher not being honored. So the village council decides to issue standardized vouchers that can be redeemed for grain in the community granary. Currency is reinvented because It’s extremely useful.
Anarcho-Primitivism is certainly a romantic ideology.
Yes.
Lame
$50 million.
If anyone is going to put money toward politics, it needs to either be not enough to affect outcomes significantly or it needs to be a large enough part of their wealth to hurt.
If you’ve ever wondered what billionaires spend money on, politicians.
They spend it on buying politicians.
Honestly, just installing mechanism to easily remove them would be sufficient. Like, elections without a lottery option aren’t consent to be governed. If we added a lottery option to ranked voting, the elites wouldn’t be able to convince enough people they’re decent to actually get elected.
The word and system you’re looking for is the ancient Greek democracy, especially from Athens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Ancient Greeks believed that government and positions of power must be randomly selected by a machine from a pool of candidates, and that elections are NOT democratic. That elections are always going to be corrupted by the oligarchy.
Yep, the United States is an electoral oligarchy, not a democratic republic.
What do you mean by lottery option?
All the candidates are on the ballot you add a positive or negative number next to the candidates you care about, maybe we add a party modifier that adds +1 or -1 to all candidates of a party. The computer scans your ballot and puts the candidates in order with those numbers. Unranked candidates (i.e. rank zero) are equal to the “lottery” option. We can use this ranking to define the relation between all candidates and sum these relations across the whole population. Going through these sum relations we start with whatever relation gets the most votes and set that as true (blue > red) and it’s opposite as false (red > blue). Then the next and next until we have know how the population ranks all the candidates. Any candidate less than or equal to the “lottery” option gets dropped. Above the lottery option, you start with the top ranked candidate and work your way down until you run out of positions. If you hit the lottery option before running out of seat those seats are filled with randomly selected citizens. The citizens can decline and we re-roll, but there’s no opt-in process – no power seeking.
The book “Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule” by Hélène Landemore advocates for something similar but without the ranked voting part. She advocates just for pure lottery.
Does that mean that she thinks anyone who qualifies to be a candidate is automatically qualified to win?
She advocates for deliberative democracy, so like congress but a randomly selected citizens council/jury that holds power and deliberate and talk about how to solve problems. While I’m not sure if her book said, I get the impression she wouldn’t approve of the amount of power presidents wield. She’d probably advocate that position be more subordinate to a people’s congress, like congress appointing a head of a department rather than the president being some grand leader. At least that’s my impression.
I mean it’s probably leagues better than the current system where the only people who get anywhere near the presidency are the powergrubbers.
– Frost
Randomly selecting from a pool of available candidates?
Maybe if you don’t choose it’s a vote for a lottery to pick. If half the population doesn’t vote then the winner is a random person. So if the authorities manage to prevent people from voting then they can’t seize the system with their own pick
Random? I’d hope they were at least qualified. Believe me, I wouldn’t want most of the people I know in charge of anything. I wouldn’t even trust myself with a town budget.
Right, but this is a democracy we are talking about. If half of the people participating are convinced the entire selection is no better than a random pick then that is very damning.
This is actually why I advocate for the ranked voting combination. We can have qualified career politicians if more than half the population agrees they’re qualified and decent people, but if they can’t manage that… yeah, the lottery is more an anti corruption mechanism than a way to get rid of politicians.
Do you trust the pedophilic warmongers more than a council of 100 random people? Sure, you’ll get a block of idiots and few PhDs, but mostly you’ll get normal people with different perspective on life. If you’re really worried, ban felons (and PhDs) from the random selection to make sure you get mostly normal people.
Also, who decides who’s qualified? You’ve probably heard this argument about being qualified to vote, but being qualified to rule is just as problematic. Any test you make to decide who can rule will be captured by the rulers and used to entrench their power. Right now the decision is made via campaign financing. On the other hand, if you have random citizens then suddenly there’s a very big incentive for every part of our society to make sure everyone is educated and well-treated, least enough of these uneducated or mistreated citizens get randomly selected and collectively agree to remove the problem.
Kinda sounds similar to Jury Duty. I don’t know why you’d ban PhDs though.
“Citizens Juries” is a phrase often associated with it.
As for PhDs, Experts have tendency to think they know best and move to capture systems. There’s an argument to be made that if you want your opinion respected, you should commit to helping without the benefits and corrupting effect of power.