"okay so if I hack my (non-expropriated) toothbrush into a rocket, go to space, bring back an asteroid and use my toothbrush to turn it into a 3d-printer which prints more 3d-printers, at which point do things get socialized and how?"
me, trying to understand the practicalities of communism
…I think I found the leftist economics equivalent of the trolley problem
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
thetransintransgenic said:
That’s why we need to abolish capitalism, tho – you CAN’T hack your toothbrush into a rocket now – because DMCA prevents breaking DRM so you can’t touch anything. The only way we can get rid of the DMCA is by abolishing capitalism.
This is why I think the reply system is bullshit because I can’t like or reblog replies directly, because this is like-and-reblog-worthy. Limiting reply interaction is theft. Or something.
But my brain is still confused by communism though, because it automatically assumes that it would be Equality Fnargl who uses markets to maximize currency (because when externalities are internalized and people are actually free, maximizing currency doesn’t have the terrible side effects it currently has) and takes some of that currency in taxes and uses it to buy 3d-printers for everyone, but actual communists say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of communism.
Property is theft, and responding to it with another form of theft, taxation, makes perfect sense (because the existence of property needs some enforcement mechanism or otherwise even the biggest capitalist is simply an Emperor Norton staking fictitious claims to everything; and if there is to be enforcement it’s fair and just to set some conditions for the enforcement to make sure that the social construct of property actually works for the common good instead of against it, because we want entrepreneurs not robber barons); but when someone is like “okay no you seriously won’t be allowed to own anything” my brain outputs an extremely contrived scenario that is still far simpler than the actual tax evasion schemes some people use and breaks the proposed idea for not having any property at all.
Because my laptop has so many hours of labor put into it, nobody should expropriate it or I will cry (Arch linux, disproving absolute abolition of property since 2002); and if we allow me to keep my laptop I can’t see any feasible way to absolutely prevent someone from hypothetically owning a factory. If we just say that “okay you are allowed to own $thing, but you need to pay the rest of us compensation for not touching your $thing because property is theft”, it is sensible and doesn’t break but is allegedly not communism, even if we assume that enough things are shared so that nobody needs to choose between wage labor and starving on the streets, and if enough things are shared I don’t see how the existence of some private property somewhere would inevitably degenerate the system to serfdom and wage slavery if a culture of liberty exists and everyone has agreed to kick the ass of anyone who tries to fence in the commons or force people off their land into the dark satanic mills or otherwise oppress others.
(Or, in practice, if the existence of some private property somewhere were to totally outweigh all the shared 3d-printers, I’d take it as pretty strong evidence that sharing things doesn’t work; but empirically it doesn’t seem to be the case and historically people have been violently stopped from sharing things or the systems have otherwise been artificially rigged in favor of the non-sharers and this suggests that in the absence of such intervention people would indeed be able to share things successfully. The tragedy of the commons was a fiction constructed to justify state action to deprive people of their rightful property because people with guns didn’t like people who shared things, and this is why the state is bad and should as a prior probably not do the things it wants to do even if many people who are not the users of the commons think the state totally should seize the commons.)
And in practice I’d expect that with Equality Fnargl providing 3d-printers to people and crony capitalists (some say that the “crony” is redundant and I won’t exactly object if I’m allowed to make a distinction between markets and capitalism) not being artificially propped up by a state which loots value creators to enrichen rentseekers with bullshit like copyrights or patents, the outcomes would be far more equal than in any currently existing society (at least in the sense of not having people suffer from material deprivation and the indignity of servitude to others because they don’t have alternatives) and the question would be whether in the left-libertarian actually free market paradise everyone would have one 3d-printer or two 3d-printers, and whether people would have much reason to care that someone is using their 3d-printer to print more 3d-printers while someone else is 3d-printing complicated fractal artwork.
This is why I don’t do theory and just stick to intensely gesturing towards things, and building things because intensely gesturing doesn’t actually have much of an effect. Theory is confusing and democracy is bullshit, but building 3d-printers and sharing them and trying to prevent the state from taking them away is an actionable strategy.
2 months ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 11 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
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ilzolende liked this- thetransintransgenic said: That’s why we need to abolish capitalism, tho – you CAN’T hack your toothbrush into a rocket now – because DMCA prevents breaking DRM so you can’t touch anything. The only way we can get rid of the DMCA is by abolishing capitalism.
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