“The road to hell is paved with Pareto improvements.”
(I am of two minds here. @oligopsony has recently pointed out how an explicitly codified apartheid might be destabilizing to the entire political-economic system - which, in context, is good, because stability here is the stability of the atrocious and laughably evil global distribution regime today. In practice implying that the non-citizen class, unless contained with powerful and specific repressive measures as in e.g. Singapore, would be great for activism, left-wing organization and all such projects aligned against their exclusion.
Bertram takes the opposite view in the linked piece, however; assuming effective repression and stable, profitable, long-lasting apartheid… this all looks like a dark prospect indeed.)
(idk… it’s 1am, and a very tricky issue)
Replacing global inequality with local inequality would probably force people to face the existence of that inequality instead of sweeping it under the rug and reifying it with borders and walls and “not our problem”s. There is already the global apartheid of “people allowed to live in the best places” and “people not allowed to live in the best places” and the first group is very intensely invested in not considering the existence of the second group or its own culpability in maintaining the distinction. Letting the second group in (modulo the standard “no fraud, no coercion” which department the gulf states seem to be pretty dramatically lacking in, and even the migrant forager labour utilized in Finland is being exploited by methods that should in any just society be totally illegal) wouldn’t make things any worse because things are already worse.
I don’t support the kind of accelerationism that seeks to maximize misery to create $miracle because it all too easily leads to simply increased misery without $miracle, but there’s an obvious way to implement this so that people are better off and the distribution regime can’t stay as laughably evil as it is now. Instead of creating permanent apartheid, phasing in full rights and entitlements after X years of residency along with opened borders (18 is an obvious and elegant and also a bullshit forevertaking option; I’d personally go with 5-10 for migrants with the basic income being gradually introduced along the way, so eg. someone who has been in the country for 30 months would get half of the full amount) would reduce the flow of white whine while still letting other people in without subjecting them to the bullshit requirements of asylum-seeking, restricted work-based visas etc.
Also, in a certain way the current global situation is pretty similar to the one in Britain during early industrialization when people’s movement and ability to move to the places offering better alternatives, and thus directly their negotiating power against local capital, was artificially constrained by legislation. There are global forcible inclosure acts happening in the form of third world land grabs; and the workers aren’t allowed to seek a better bargain elsewhere and thus are forced to accept whatever bullshit the local robber barons are able to shove down their throat. Opening the borders would mean that exploitable third world labor would suddenly have significantly more options, and those benefiting from the limitations upon their freedom would be forced to either offer a better deal (recommended) or try to impose extra repression to prevent the global proletariat from using its new opportunities (something which might prompt more action from the international community than the currently existing “well borders just happen to be the way it is, not our fault, literally SNAFU”).
2 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 3 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from multiheaded1793 and added:Replacing global inequality with local inequality would probably force people to face the existence of that inequality...
youzicha said: That quote just annoys me. Per definition, the road that’s paved with Pareto improvement leads away from Hell…
multiheaded1793 posted this