playinghardtolistento asked: i dont have much interest in rationalism-as-thought-techniques because from what i've observed it doesn't seem to have uniquely benefited people who subscribe to it in ways that a general purpose self-help book and associated social support structure wouldn't have, with the added detriment of being tangled up in rationalism-as-techno-libertarianism. if there actually are "one weird tricks" employed by rationalists that would be helpful to leftists i'd love to hear about them tho
I’ll have to think about this because it’s important, but my facial impression is indeed that there aren’t really any superpowers or whatever - I just like discussing weird ideas and some versions of The Community are good places to do that
well, I DO think everyone reading “how to do things with words” (I think that’s the title?“) would nip a lot of the dumber arguments we keep having in the bud, like for instance the definition of socialism or whatever, but the basic insights aren’t unique? There’s probably a number of small things like that that ppl are likely to point out in the comments
Then there’s CFAR which seems to be “self-help, except we try to apply ~optimization~ to it, which is 100% more optimization than other self-help things”
Rationality checklists and deliberate de-biasing (I’ve been working on trying to recognize when my brain does something unsavory and bring it to my own conscious attention instead of letting it fester unnoticed, and like “why doesn’t anyone else anywhere even recognize that this is a thing”)
Then there’s that thing which makes people really likely to turn out trans and I suspect is at least partially modulated by the same transhumanist-y “optimize everything” morphological freedom attitude which makes people also use nootropics and sign up for cryonics even though all of them may be perceived as weird by the general population, and partially by the emphasis on changing one’s mind and not getting tangled up in silly things such as whether or not one’s non-doll-playingwithness in childhood makes using estrogen in 20-somethings verboten or not
Then there’s the parts of “technolibertarianism” that are positive instead of normative and thus would be very good for leftists to understand and use, such as public choice theory, behavioral economics, the corrupted hardware problem, group and individual irrationality, the impossibility of efficiently regulating things one doesn’t understand (and the diaspora is very much linked to things that are regulated by people who don’t understand them, such as nootropics, transhumanism, cryonics, transgenderism, urban planning, etc. and it might help illuminate the reasons why regulating things excessively and not respecting autonomy is extremely harmful), the need to deal with the coming post-labor future in which traditional ideas don’t work even to the very small degree they currently work and thus things like “who owns the robots” are even more important than presently, and so on
In addition the diaspora’s technolibertarianism is overwhelmingly social-technolibertarianism and the non-libertarian right is basically a rounding error, suggesting that either rationalism turns people non-rightist or repulses the mainstream right to begin with, and that in turn suggests that leftists should be interested in why these “technolibertarians” nonetheless aren’t what people usually think of when they hear the word “technolibertarian” even though they sure look like it, and that people like Thiel are more outliers than median examples of the wider rationalist-adjacent population
Then there’s Effective Altruism which is basically applied communism, in a way that is not vulnerable to the failure modes of working for a revolution (such as “Lenin” or “the fiftieth anniversary of the discuss the imminent revolution and never actually get shit done club”); eg. GiveDirectly is redistributing capital to people who don’t have capital and these “technolibertarians” routinely claim this redistribution of capital is one of the best and most important humanitarian interventions in the world, usually only outclassed by things like “not having people die and suffer from diseases that are really cheap to prevent, simply because they are too poor to afford even the really cheap prevention”
Then there’s the fact that the community has managed to derive a lot of significant leftist-associated insights from first principles and in the process repackage them as something the STEM class can understand and hopefully even apply in action occasionally
this blog is first and foremost a shitpost curation station, BUT if I had to pretend it had some sort of greater mission I think increasing intellectual exchange between rationalists and leftists would be up there
if you are a rationalist, has this blog corrupted you at all with leftism? if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?
if you are a leftist, has this blog corrupted you at all with rationalism?
if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?
(where leftism/t arbitrarily and somewhat sloppily means “discourse community descended from marx’s writings” and rationalism/t means “discourse community descended from yudkowsky’s writings” and corruption means “getting more positively disposed to the idea that the associated people (at least here, On Tumblr) and ideas are worth engaging with,” but if you have a more interesting answer for different values of these go ahead - these definitions are sloppy and I really just mean “no, not bernie sanders” and “no, not descartes and spinoza” and “no, not selling all your possessions and joining the other cult”)
((credit for inspiring this come from @sinesalvatorem, who reminds me that i haven’t done that “reducing inferential distance from rationalism to communism” thing I said I would do, and also inadvertently that it would be a good idea to get a lay of what the inferential distances (in either direction) actually are))
Okay, so as someone who not only knows but cares about the Marx/Bakunin distinction (and thus felt really compelled to pick the nits of “descended from Marx’s writings” because as far as taking sides on the topic of two pre-all-the-empiricism-of-the-last-150-years dudes makes sense I’m on side Bakunin; for example when marxists.org tries to argue that Marx was right their arguments simply make Bakunin appear as the more sympathetic one even though they have been able to pick and choose them with the obvious itent of being favorable to Marx) I’m pretty much leftiness georg already by those standards, but then there’s the other distinction that is more political than cultural and which I am confused by.
The “communism as a vague description of the goal of post-scarcity and the end of poverty and material lack and rentseeker bullshit forcing people to toil for the benefit of powerful non-value-creator parasites; 3d-printers for everyone; beeline for future society: eudaimonic” thing makes sense; C4SS and David Friedman alike make sense (and I think the idea of “substantial basic income + actually laissez-faire” is effectively more socialist in the meaning of “alleviates the plight of the working class” than the entire state of Sweden), and “get maximum cash, invest in 3d-printers, share them, prevent the state from taking them away” is an actionable strategy, but what is the actionable strategy of “communism as politics, switch to economy: planned”, and what are its contents actually?
All I’ve managed to pick up from elsewhere is roughly “we have a lot of valid complaints about how a lot of things are really sucky for non-rich people but no proposed solution other than some kind of nebulous ~global revolution~ that is unlikely to ever actually happen and any attempts to do anything else than carry on the decades-old tradition of discussing the imminent revolution is liberal reformist bullshit, and we will control the economy democratically and it will ~automagically~ make it work better than markets despite not containing any actual replacement for the very important mechanisms markets have, and we will not expropriate your toothbrush even though we totally could expropriate your toothbrush and you’re supposed to trust us because this time subjecting everything to democracy would not work as disastrously as your previous experiences with democracy and de facto mob rule have led you to expect because this time democracy will ~automagically~ not vote on your body even though it totally could vote on your body and you would be a class enemy if you object” (this may sound a bit uncharitable but my interactions with statist marxists haven’t exactly been that fruitful because the inferential distance is too large)
So basically I’d like to know what steel marxism is _actually_ about, and especially wtf is up with the labor theory of value and democratic economy/economic democracy.
May 1st reserved for outdoor fucking, for historical reasons and because we have a song about it
May 4th, the actual anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre, is worker’s day
Victims of Communism Day can be the second or the third as they prefer
Okay so 30.4. || 4/30 is Walpurgisnacht, then it’s fucking day, then it’s victims of utopian experiment day and then it’s erased-from-history day (because nobody remembers the anarchists! Haymarket was about anarchists, not about tankie pieces of shit!). Sounds like things gone full Meguca. Not that I’m complaining.
Besides, victims’ day needs to be 7.11. || 11/7 because statist communists were the ones who caused them. There was never any anarchist regime killing people en masse because there was never any anarchist regime because authoritarians always fuck with other people’s experiments.
Carson + Paul is obviously the best choice. Heal the world + never worry about being sick or getting STDs + end the drug war. Only downside is spending three hours a day praying, which is honestly the easiest downside to deal with.
Also I think Paul’s running mate bonus is supposed to say “decriminalization” in the last paragraph.
Kasich is better than Carson I think. If you have a legion of 11 million loyal followers willing to heed your beck and call you could do pretty much anything and it would be a lot more fun than standing around all day touching people and feeling guilty every second that you’re doing anything else
I’m trying to figure out why Ted’s running mate bonus is supposed to be a good thing lol
I mean you could probably earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a day curing AIDS and cancer if you really just wanted to use it on yourself. Which is arguably just as good if not better than having 11 million loyal followers.
Or you could tax the ohioans just a few dollars a day each to earn a hundred times more.
Assuming “Ohio” means the legal state of Ohio, and not “the territory which currently forms the state of Ohio”, Kasich/Paul is totally OP and broken.
First, I legalize individuals and communities choosing which state to belong to democratically. The other states may whine, but governance only with the consent of the governed doesn’t violate basic rights, so with Paul I can totally do it.
Then I end the drug war. In Ohio, because I’ve legalized states setting their own drug laws.
I decriminalize states setting their own immigration rules, and open the borders in Ohio, defining ohioans as “anyone present in Ohio, or who announces their decision to join Ohio, or who has previously fulfilled either condition and has not renounced their ohioanness” (thus, making me immune to assassinations as anyone who would try to do it would have to travel to Ohio, become ohioan, and stop wanting to assassinate me and start wanting to protect me instead).
Then I implement a basic income in Ohio (for those who have been ohioans for a sufficient amount of time, as I have previously suggested). And all the other cool stuff, in Ohio.
Everyone would give anything for the cause, so I ask the people to be excellent to each other, and otherwise be free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t deprive others of the same right (but if they wish to give to charity they really should prioritize EA instead of Make-a-Wish). Crime in Ohio plummets to zero, and so does poverty, deprivation, and coercion. The economy gets an immense boom from the immigrants, and the abolition of zero-sum and negative-sum bullshit games, and all people working together for their prosperity, like a weird libertarian (or, in fact, full-blown anarchist in all but name) version of North Korea’s propaganda films come true.
The obvious consequence is that a lot of people would want to be a part of Ohio. Just as planned. It won’t take long until Ohio has a population of approximately 200 million and covers a vast fractal shape encompassing most of the major cities.
Then I become the president of the US in the most overwhelming election since Washington, seize control of all brances of the government, and turn my Paul powers to international law instead. Rinse repeat with a bit more restraint to not provoke a nuclear war, and I’ll soon have acquired most of the Americas, the major liberal cities of Europe, and vast swathes of territory in Africa as well (I’m deliberately not touching Russia or China because that way lies armageddon), in this only-nominally-stateful community of freedom and dignity.
It’s immune to invasions because open borders mind control magic, it’s immune to terrorism because surely you wouldn’t want to hurt your fellow ohioans, it’s immune to pretty much everything except ICBMs. For ICBMs my policy will be a clear and ruthless MAD if attacked, but otherwise non-interference in the affairs of the other superpower and the little regional Shitholistan with a superiority complex propped up by its ridiculous nuclear arsenal. In fact, I can afford a comparably submissive foreign policy, letting Russia pick the arctic oil and China get whatever gas fields it wants because our anarchist regime is too rich to care about such slim pickings.
We’re going to outer space instead. All the labor and ingenuity currently wasted in pointless things will be redirected in a program of technology and space colonization (and AI research but I’m assuming no FAI because it kind of cuts everything short and turns things boring). We’re going to cure all the diseases, conquer the Moon, Mars, and everywhere. We’re going to win.
A wise man once asked: “Why does everything always end in world domination with you guys?”
The rationalist answered: “Have you ever tried giving us a scenario that did not have world domination built in?”
To the US I came seeking fortune But they’re making me work til I’m dead The congressmen have it so easy The bankers put gold on their bread The people of the world are so hungry But think what a feast there could be If we could create an anarchist state That cared for the people like me:
I am the man who arranges the blocks That descend upon me from up above. They come down and I spin them around Til they fit in the ground like hand in glove. Sometimes it seems that to move blocks is fine And the lines will be formed as they fall - Then I see that I have misjudged it! I should not have nudged it after all.
Can I have a long one please? Why must these infernal blocks tease?
I am the man who arranges the blocks That continue to fall from up above. Come Ohioan! To the every last one! An individualist regime of peace and love. I work so hard in arranging the blocks But the landlord and taxman bleed me dry But Ohio will rise! We will not compromise For we know that the old regime must die.
Long live freedom, burn the flags! We salute the orange and black!
I am the man who arranges the blocks That continue to fall from up above. The food on your plate no concern of the state An individualist regime of peace and love. I have my choice in arranging the blocks Under promethean rule, what you say goes. The rule of the game is our rights are the same And my blocks can make my own-shaped rows.
Long live Ohio! It loves you! Sing these words, you know what it’ll do…
I am the man who arranges the blocks That are made by the men from Shitholistan. They came two weeks ago and back there they won’t go Now they’re working to our world conquest plan. I am the man who arranges the nukes That will make all the Putin keep away The hopes have come back, and ‘Murica is Black! Let us point all our dollars at EA.
We shall live forever more! We can start an altruism war!
I am the man who arranges the blocks That are building a highly secret base. Hip hip hurray for the AS of A! We are sending our men to outer space.
This is #amazing, you are #amazing, 10/10.
Note to self: Sing this when I have microphone access.
Orange and black is just the general symbol I use for free market anarchism to distinguish the anarchism of Utopian Ohio from anarcho-capitalism (yellow and black) and anarcho-communism (red and black). A utopian “would you kindly be excellent to each other” anarchism would have basically the best features of both.
Mutualism is one form of these free-market anarchisms but I don’t personally necessarily subscribe to it because the labor theory of value and “same work for same work” break horribly (even some red-black people I’ve talked to about the theory agree that it has bad incentive structures), and occupancy-and-use also has some pretty significant issues.
I don’t do theory on that level because that level is pretty much only good for eulering people, but “I’m opting out of the capitalism debate so +free market, -crony capitalism, +anarchism” is roughly the direction I’m intensely gesturing in for the purposes of moving towards a society of A Bit Less Bullshit. (Somalia is a surprisingly less-bullshitty place considering that it’s a third-world Shitholistan with an islamist infestation and a civil war, so not having the state make things even worse by propping up robber barons seems to have at least some empirical support (I suspect it’s doing relatively well because they don’t have sea slugs in the desert). And Turkey needs to let Rojava try their thing without fucking with other people’s experiments. Because you know who fucked with other people’s experiments? Stalin. Be smart, don’t be like Stalin.) And every red-black I know calls me orange-black so I’m not protesting because at least that way they don’t outgroup me into yellow-black.
"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?"
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.
Empirically, I think you just pass a law saying that you can’t own factories but laptops are okay, and leave judges to make Good Enough judgement calls to make the thing go- it’s less ambiguous than, e.g. anti-harassment laws. Communist countries have existed and have done this sort of thing.
Eventually a rich set of case law emerges defining what has/has not been considered to be a factory in the past, which provides guidance for judges making decisions and a level of dependability in judgements.
It’s only a problem if you insist on whatever the legal system does being rigorously defined- but I don’t think any real world legal system *is*, and I’m dubious one even could be, let alone must be. It’d probably also have to lack functional harassment restrictions, and I think you’d need to at least tolerate totally arbitrary cut offs to be even able to enforce assault and anti-noise disturbance law,
If you mean you think it has enforceability problems because a laptop will be too helpful for building a 3D printer, then that’s reasonable but akin to the enforceability problems of taxes; it is true, but the bigger you get the harder it is to not notice, so in practice the breaches are not a huge problem. Presuming the plan isn’t for the 3D printers to foom and destroy the state.
(I’m not familiar with a lot of the details of communist thought, someone who actually is a communist could provide a more detailed idea of where they’d like the limits of private property to be.)
The problem is that people are smart and will find ways around it. Enforceability problems with taxes are right now big enough to make pretty much every single welfare state be in deep trouble they wouldn’t be in if they could enforce the taxes they’ve set.
Like, legos are toys, right? We aren’t going to expropriate children’s toys because we aren’t terrible strawmen.
Consider a nerd: (laptop + legos) = 3d-printer.
Is it a “factory”? Reason (not the magazine) says it isn’t. Reason says using it to print another 3d-printer doesn’t turn it into a “factory”. Reason says 100 3d-printers is a “factory”. Induction breaks down somewhere.
We could argue that one may only own what they are possessing, so that the factory owner must personally operate all the machinery instead of having wage laborers, because any machinery they can’t operate personally 24/7 will be expropriated for everyone else’s use when they aren’t using it. This is the basis of many theories that try not to expropriate toothbrushes while still expropriating factories.
Consider a nerd: automation.
Even if people are only allowed to have “possessions”, not “property”, a nerd can “possess” an entire factory by running it off their laptop. And if land is the issue, the nerd will just make the factory mobile.
So even with the rule that property isn’t allowed, only possession, we still can have factory owners.
Or we could have a rule that whatever people build will revert to the public after 10 years or something. How unfortunate that my 3d-printer only lasts 9 years before breaking down. Or maybe I rebuild it in year 8 and argue that it’s new now and get to keep it for another 10 years.
The only way I can think is to have ultimately arbitrary expropriation based on the democratic decision-making process, and I don’t trust democracy not to find some way to expropriate even my laptop. So far democracy has managed to build two kinds of things: horrible bullshit that originated from evil intentions, and horrible bullshit that originated from good intentions. At best, we get a horrible bloated regulatory hell determining how many 3d-printers turn expropriable and what kind of automation is considered “possession” and what is “absentee ownership”.
(And this is with a few minutes of deliberately trying to break it; the people who run Mossack Fonseca have been thinking about such things a lot longer and more thoroughly.)
The alternative is really elegant: you can call it your own, but you must pay a tax for others to respect your property. Property can be bought and sold because that way there are markets that can be used to determine the value of any piece of property, and then people pay x% (always the same value of x, never changing for any reason because otherwise we get bullshit) of their “voluntary selling price” every year to be allowed to keep the property, otherwise it reverts to the public. If someone offers to buy it for the VSP they must sell, or raise the tax value of the property and pay more. No arbitrariness, no democracy, no loopholes, and my ingenuity in hacking things into 3d-printers printing more 3d-printers gets harnessed for the common good and I know that I can keep my laptop and thanks to the taxes everyone gets 3d-printers and a UBI to buy food and shelter etc.
Having a well-defined and principled legal system for things that involve the means of production is important in a way having a well-defined boundary for assault and noise isn’t, because people aren’t incentivized to bootstrap noise into a lot more noise and create auditory growth and musical prosperity.
And seriously, 3d-printers fooming and destroying the state is exactly what you can expect in this community. In rationalist tumblr, anything, absolutely anything, even legos and a laptop, ends in a foom and world domination.
"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
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.
"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
socialism never took root in america because the united states government has been systematically assassinating domestic communists for 150+ years.
but that’s true of basically everywhere - certainly of everywhere socialism took root
Ayyy
those domestic communists had it so hard
if the government is really murdering lots of leftists then why won’t leftists allow me to teach them crypto
what sort of crypto are you teaching? just like, using Tor? or is there more?
tor, otr, pgp, tails, disk encryption. boring stuff.
I am very interested in being taught crypto. And according to @oligopsony‘s categorization I’m very left-skeptical, according to my U-R tribe model I’m very U which correlates with left, and according to the gerenal categorization of libertarians as “screw the poor, not same gender people” right-libertarians vs. “screw same gender people, not the poor” left-libertarians I’m also very left.
The “20th Century” update to Outside did give people a lot of cool new gear, but the changes to the ideology system are totally fucked up. I know the USSR drama was really popular and even got some attention in the non-gamer media but the new simplified ideology mechanism (to make it more n00b-friendly, no doubt) sux0rz. Also, the abrupt plot derail from the promised impending boss fight against the State-Sanctioned Robber Barons into the “everyone splits to two sides, now PvP” filler was complete bullshit and a blatant money grab because the creative team was sitting on their asses unable to figure out meaningful content (”Post-Scarcity” has been vaporware for how long now?). Also, the promised exciting update to organizations was a real let-down because they just took down all the player-created content and replaced it with NPC shit the players can’t meaningfully influence or interact with.
Devs, fire those slackers and roll back to the ideology system of “19th Century” for this update so I can again PvE with libertarians, communists and feminists without needing to be really careful not to accidentally PvP my guildmates because the game engine arbitarily assigns us to different sides.
Another element I’m liking in Nihilist Communism is the statement that being working class is not an identity, it’s not a cultural thing, and that there isn’t anything necessarily virtuous in being working class.
That’s something that has marked a lot of leftist and social justice analysis, something I’ve brought up before but the association of ‘oppression’ as a concept with ‘virtuousness’ as a concept both obfuscates a lot of aspects of oppression (for instance in creating the moral desire to be oppressed, hence people either donning working class clothes or trying to analytically ‘edge into’ oppressed spaces by arguing that they, themselves, are oppressed), or by engaging in guilt rhetoric or by finding some contrarian point (by casting the oppressed as, themselves, being inherently oppressive; leaving the ‘normal’ ‘middle class’ analyst as the most clearly Good person, see the way northern liberals talk about the Southern working class, or the way white liberals construct PoC as inherently homophobic).
Certainly there’s a colonizers mentality that comes with occupying an oppressive position, but we shouldn’t get into abolishing oppression because the oppressed are better / more deserving people, we should be trying to abolish oppression because it destroys people’s lives, whether those people are virtuous or saintly. The association of Oppressed / Revolutionary (that is, being of the revolutionary class) with ‘goodness’ helps no one.
Does a communism that is less “the working people are virtuous” also end up leaning less on “work is good and economic systems ought to be about empowering workers to work”? One of the things that I find most offputting in a lot of leftist economic proposals is the assumption that the role of an economic system ought to be creating work (and distributing the fruits of that work) rather than eliminating work or finding ways to get more goods from less work. What I want is an economy that produces enough for everyone with as little work as possible. Is there anyone doing leftist economic analysis that assumes the necessity of work is a problem we haven’t solved yet, not a virtue and not a goal (and not an identifier of the people qualified to wield coercive power?)
For as Marx puts it, “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” Whatever activities and projects we undertook, we would participate in them because we found them inherently fulfilling, not because we needed a wage or owed our monthly hours to the cooperative.
(Don’t know how much these qualify as “analysis” as opposed to “agitation” but the ideas certainly are out there, it’s just that the mainstream democratic left is stuck in 20th century ideas because its voters are stuck in the 20th century and democracy is beholden to the biases of the electorate.)
