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Anyone who wants trump anywhere near the presidency is insane.
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Dec 10, 2015 04:18
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Or you could classify them by their Chinese calendar animal.
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Dec 11, 2015 18:50
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Effectronica posted:Well, I'm describing how the second wave of feminism operated, so I guess that "common, immediate interests" is bullshit. Or Chinese calendar animals. But anyway, continue setting your sights on the Indonesian small shop owner.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:30
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Effectronica posted:No, I don't think so, because that ignores systemic factors in favor of some grotesquerie, whether of the David Brooksian "social class is like high-school cliques" or the naive "money is what is evil" kind. No, grouping a 100k+ 24 year old tech worker with a sweatshop worker really doesn't make sense and the ideology leading you down this path is dumb. Money, however earned, is exchangeable for capital and able to be passed down as inheritance and/or privilage. Now it's worthwhile to analyze the implications of capital ownership at a systemic level, but categorizing individuals by income type is nearly useless when it's even possible, which it often isn't in 2015 because of the realities of modern finance.
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Dec 12, 2015 21:18
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People can unite around a threat - if they agree on it. In the case of some general political collapse they won't.
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Dec 21, 2015 03:48
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Willie Tomg posted:Accelerationism does not mean "actively make things worse, then Full Communism Now, naturally, of course". It assumes only that a capitalistic economic organization trends toward a crisis point where hegemonic order breaks down into its constituent parts, and that meaningful opposition in a contemporary period is futile conflict for conflict's sake that at best destroys lots for no gain. Recognizing those two facts, Accelerationism then proposes that the only way capital-C Capital will be broken down (note: not destroyed) is to allow Capital to run freely to that crisis point and allow history to proceed. Letting "capital run freely towards crisis" is actively making things worse.
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Dec 22, 2015 04:26
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Willie Tomg posted:It's not "actively" anything when you use the verb let for goodness sake. jesus christ no wonder everyone's confused, illiteracy abounds Heh, if you presuppose that that's the trajectory society is on. But it's not actually. Democratic liberal states are designed to check power and have so far been successful at it. Pretending that their default state is a free-fall is like declaring the same of a skyscraper. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Dec 22, 2015 |
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Dec 22, 2015 15:04
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If there is one thing I've learned from the history of ever increasing prosperity health and happiness in the world it's that things are clearly in free fall towards complete collapse.
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Dec 22, 2015 18:02
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The post industrial trends are pretty clear.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:43
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Paradoxish posted:Kind of completely missing the point here. Just because things might be better for our distant descendants 200 years into the future doesn't mean they won't be worse for our children in 40 years. Not really. Accelerationists most decidedly do not beleive "up" is the long term trend. For good reason. If it is then shorter term problems are best handled with internal incremental solutions, not revolutionary destruction. Venomous posted:Relevant point for this thread in this interview with the Pirate Bay's founder. He argues that the Internet has become too centralised and tied to capital across its existence, and that there's nothing we can do at this point to ensure a free and open Internet. The way to win the war, he says, is to abolish capitalism entirely by letting it run free, which reminded me of this thread. Well he's insane. The parallels between different bad ideologies are always obvious. In that quote you can see the parallel to terrorism fearing islamophobes. They've misinterpreted reality by taking say 911, or some economic equivalent, irrationally decided that it represents some hidden fundamental truth (terrorists/capitalism are out to get us) and wildly extrapolated some fantasy disaster future from it which they make the centerpiece of their crank ideology.
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Dec 23, 2015 18:56
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Bush, post 911, singlehandedly helped destabilize the middle east while blowing billions of dollars and permanently damaging the image of the US abroad. Trump could easily repeat those things while also proving that a bigoted arrogant liar is electable to the U.S. presidency.
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Dec 23, 2015 21:45
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computer parts posted:Though this depends heavily on the scope you're willing to define for capitalism and communism. Right there is clearly a continuum which is why there is no utility whatsoever in the bright lines of Marxism. Nothing actually depends on definition boundaries, only real life outcomes. computer parts posted:I think a lot of leftists would disagree that there's a continuum between the two, hence the need for revolution (or a clean break). Which is obviously a huge problem with the ideology.
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Dec 23, 2015 21:56
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Famethrowa posted:
You should be sympathetic though, to the first world middle class (global 80-90th income percentile). Look at how much better Chinese peasants have been doing than them economically. You can at least understand why some would want to tear the system down. .png)
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Dec 24, 2015 19:43
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OwlFancier posted:Because even ignoring the need for humans in the production chain, you also need the proletariat as a market to sell to. The whole desire of Capital is to accumulate more Capital, which it does by producing and selling to Labour, Labour necessarily being the majority of the population and the majority consumers of what is produced. Not really and this is basically a weird myth that gets propagated by both sides of the ideological spectrum. Capitalism sells to people with money and doesn't care who has the money. If small proportion of rich people have all the money then they're the consumers and that's fine from capitalism's perspective. Consider that on a global scale right now capitalism is completely happy to sideline billions of people by leaving them with minimal participation in the global economy. It is possible for that to grow, if the circumstances are right (luckily they have not been). The real life check on increasing inequality in the face of mechanization is Democracy, clearly not capitalism.
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Dec 26, 2015 03:28
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OwlFancier posted:People don't buy for no reason, if a small proprortion of rich people have all the money then they probably still don't have very much to buy. If you're hypothesizing that money may eventually be completely irrelevant for the majority of people and exist primarily for trade between the directors of massive mechanized production lines then I guess that's possible but seems unlikely. Again you still have other humans in there and they need to either be surviving somehow or non-existent. Consider that if I'm a rich oligarch factory owner there are two scenarios. 1) I want more stuff in which case I'll produce it myself or engage another factory owner in trade or 2) I don't want more stuff in which case I'll do nothing. Under no circumstance does it benefit me to give you a dollar just so you'll have demand at my factory. If you have productive capacity of course I might, but if you don't, capitalism will happily sideline you (which is basically Ronya's point about human capital). Of course I'm talking here from a purely capitalist perspective. Real life states have entirely different incentives where a higher value is placed on equality and employment. [/quote] ronya posted:This is indeed the mainstream assessment. Here is some decent 2012 discussion (from a heterodox perspective). FWIW I think the mainstream has it, and the underconsumption-trap thesis does not look pretty three years on. Thanks for the link, do you care to expand on this in terms of what was at stake in your opinion? I had accepted that the economy was reasonably robust in the face of varying savings rates and that even if, say, the U.S. savings rate increased because of increased inequality it would still leave us well below like rapidly growing China.
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Dec 26, 2015 17:35
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OwlFancier posted:But the conditions of you being a rich oligarch factory owner are based on your capital having meaning. Capital has meaning in terms of how much it can directly produce for me or in terms of how much it can produce for me to trade with others. That's the meaning of value in a market economy. If only a handful of other rich oligarchs have things worth trading for so be it. I can't increase the size of my mansion or yacht by trading with anyone else, so I won't. Labor doesn't have any inherent value which is why it really is possible under the right scenario for its value to decline to near zero. The reason society is as equal as it is today is because most of us still have productive value. quote:You can't have a society where a tiny fraction of people have literally all the money and use it for trade between each other and everyone else does not use money or interact in any way with the people who own the means of production. Yes you can and that world is on display today. As Ronya already pointed out, we have cities where the core is filled with the rich, and the outskirts are barely subsistence slums. The people on the outskirts don't have [much] human or physical capital, so they're left out. It's simple, and it could theoretically get worse.
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Dec 26, 2015 18:05
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Well to be clear again I'm talking strictly in terms of incentives that are internal to the market and capitalism. Here I would outright reject the notion that capital is a control tool. It's not, it's simply a tool with value dictated by what it's able to produce (which is the universal definition of value, including for labor). The point is that economically, the market never benefits by employing anything or anyone which doesn't produce value (in terms of overall GDP or from the perspective of a hypothetical wealthy elite), a path unskilled labor may be on. People are currently integrated with the wealthy and society as a whole because they have productive value. In terms of real life society, I completely agree that it's unsustainable. But that's because real life society has a set of incentives that are completely parallel to the market. EDIT: Oh and also to be clear there are reasons why a more equal society will be a more productive one because spreading wealth generally increases health, and education which directly increases productivity. Though the point is that market incentives won't seek this outcome on their own. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 18:53
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