slatestarscratchpad:
Okay. I guess other people have stronger feelings against Internet communists than I do.
My own feelings are kind of - puzzlement mixed with lack of understanding. Part of it is that I *still* don’t really know what communists believe beyond “overthrow capitalists, seize means of production”. In particular I don’t have a good feel for what people think true communism looks like, and when I ask I get answers anywhere from “Cuba” to “a bunch of loosely connected utopian farming communes”. I’m not sure what the difference is politically between a communist state versus an ordinary democracy or an ordinary dictatorship, except in the form of vague generalities like “the Party works for the good of the people” (just put that in the constitution and I’m sure it will come true).
Ownership of the means of production doesn’t seem that important to me. It seems to correspond to the stock market (owners of stock control companies capital and receive companies’ profit), but last time I tried to calculate it out if all stock were distributed evenly among the population, it would mean $6000 “profits”/year/person in the United States. Add in all CEO salaries and it gets up to $6400. That’s a lot of money, but it’s only about half the poverty line, and it would barely increase the average worker’s salary by 10%. Is the difference between inhumane oppression versus the glorious golden future really just earning $50,000 vs. $56,400? And that’s assuming that the transition to communism doesn’t decrease wages or profits in any other way, like by hurting the economy or making companies less ruthlessly profit-seeking and so decreasing stock dividends. But without the whole means-of-production/worker-owned-company thing, communism just seems like a more dictatorship-prone version of Sweden.
Finally, my meta-political stance is caution and empiricism - I have some political stances, but more important than enacting them is getting a framework where they can be tested, made sure they’re not dangerous, and enacted if and only if they work. Communists don’t seem very good at testing their ideas in contexts less irreversible than a giant revolution that destroys everything that has come before. The exceptions I can think of are a few communes - most of which have failed - and a few worker-owned companies with a mixed track record. In other words, I’m not sure what incremental communism would look like, or what it would mean to move in the direction of communism other than “stockpile armaments and wait for a chance to shoot people”. And the few examples of giant-revolution-communism I have to go on are either horrible bloodbaths like Maoist China or places like Cuba with some detractors and some proponents that nevertheless if you’re trying to help the poor and ensure equality of opportunity seem inferior to the best social democracies.
And my other complaint about communists is that I rarely see them talking about any of these things, either explaining/debating their solutions or being properly worried at not having any. Whenever I see them they’re either going on for the zillionth time about the whole thing where the proletariat need to seize the means of production, encouraging general agitation and discontent, getting angry at people for trying to solve things incrementally, or talking in incredibly dense post-modern jargon about issues that seem a thousand levels removed from the real world.
This is what I mean when I say communists aren’t my out-group: I have so much trouble placing them ideologically and seeing them as a coherent movement that it’s hard to have strong opinions about them.
At the very least I consider communism an useful error message. It arises from discontent in society and while its proposed solutions to the problems it identifies are debatable, I find many of the problems themselves at least worthy of noticing. As a psychiatrist you are probably familiar with the patient who says they are in excruciating pain caused by an alien implant in their neck, and just because there is no implant to remove doesn’t mean the pain is just as imaginary; and even the most uncharitable interpretation of communism would be basically the political equivalent of that thing.
One of the reasons you don’t have a clear idea of what people want is that “communism” is an extremely diverse label containing a huge number of different and sometimes diametrically opposed ideologies. Stalinists, libertarian communists, and anarcho-primitivists won’t get along at all, and their utopias will be dramatically different. Also, one of the main ideas of communism (or so I’ve understood; my familiarity with the theoretical material is admittedly very limited) is the abolition of states as well so “what a communist state looks like” is kind of similar to asking a gay couple “which one of you is the man?”. In practical terms, the Zapatistas and Rojava are probably the closest to what communists actually want (or at least the communists worth considering; stalinists, maoists etc. seem to throw tantrums about the latter but ideologies whose supporters haven’t updated after tens of millions of deaths can be safely ignored as far as I’m concerned).
Ownership of the means of production is not just about money. (But for a lot of poor people $500 a month is a really big deal.) The basic idea that people work for themselves instead of someone else is very attractive for many (if not most), and there is also evidence suggesting that it might make people more productive as well. Companies with employee stock ownership plans, more worker participation in management etc. might be more productive (haven’t scrutinized the data but studies usually argue something like 5-10%), and even people like Paul Graham agree with the basic ideas behind socialism in the workplace (bosses, hierarchies and investors tend to suck and it’s more awesome to own one’s own work) in essays like this or this. In addition, if workers are also the owners and they hire their own bosses it would (in theory) solve some issues in misaligned incentives as they could balance the monetary value created by management with the immaterial value destroyed by the actions management takes to extract more productivity from workers at the expense of their well-being. In other words, it’s not a question of $50,000 vs. $56,400 but a question of $50,000 and bosses and hierarchies and no freedom vs. $56,400 and having genuine participation in one’s work; a difference which seems like the difference between a really good employer and a median employer, and the impact of a really good employer on a person’s happiness seems to be pretty big. Basically, the communist ideals are less “government bureaucracy for everyone!” and more “startups for everyone!”; whether or not it would be realistic in practice is another question I won’t start addressing in depth here. But having seen it firsthand, Silicon Valley is awesome, and it makes a lot of sense that people would want to give everyone the things that make Silicon Valley awesome.
I agree that their lack of empiricism is most communists’ biggest weakness in both theory and practice. I’d argue that if people want to do practical communism, the best way would be to accumulate capital to workers in legal ways so the state doesn’t take it away with its guns. In other words, by having worker-owned businesses, especially worker-owned businesses that seek aggressive growth, especially in sectors which are the most critical for a self-sufficient society (food production, minifacturing, tech) and thus would allow the communists to discouple their basic needs from the wider capitalist system while also getting material feedback on how communism works in the real world, without depending on bad ideas like “let’s replace our entire production system with something that hasn’t been tested because we predict it will only work if it is never tested in a smaller scale, and without backups so we can’t roll back if the new system sucks”.
ETA: Stuff I forgot to mention:
Under this kind of communism, BART workers would gladly automate their jobs away to get more free time because they would be the ones reaping the benefits.
Also, there are other forms of capital than just dividends; for example real estate is one really important source of income for rentseekers instead of value creators.
I am not responsible for the outcomes of assuming actual communists agree with this; while I’ve tried to stay within the rules of fair steelmanning, I’m certain some of my beliefs are leaking through (wrt things like revolutions) and making the result fall somewhere between “right in the goals and wrong in the implementation” and “burn the heretic”. But this is the strongest simple description of what communism might actually be about I can produce, and it’s noticeably more specific and sensible than, and at least as substantiated as, the stereotypes most people operate on.
(via wirehead-wannabe)
3 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #win-win is my superpower #i am worst capitalist · 163 notes · source: slatestarscratchpad · .permalink
I am literally a corporation
…soon!
Got denied every single form of personal welfare because the social bureaucratic illfare state is unable to comprehend my situation (come on, I’m simply learning skills while ignoring credentialist bullshit, it shouldn’t be that hard to understand even for socdems), and the advice at the social security agency was literally “beg from friends, then take your tax money somewhere more deserving when you start making it”.
The obvious solution is to register myself as a corporation, because corporate welfare is far more generous than personal welfare around here (it wouldn’t be too much of a simplification to say that every single cent collected in corporate taxes goes back to politically favoured businesses in subsidies and deductions; this is defended as “keeping the important sectors afloat” aka they are literally and blatantly taking money from the successful entrepreneurs and businesses and distributing to cronies and unsuccessful ones who serve the bureaus instead of the markets).
If I start a holding company that sells my “unpaid” labour to other businesses and creates profit to its owners, I can not only apply for startup subsidies (basically a modestly-but-sufficiently-sized basic income for 6-18 months!) but also avoid a lot of taxes later on when I actually start earning money and routing it as dividends instead of wages (no payroll taxes for pensions, unemployment insurance etc. for redwashed rentiers; this worker won’t let the holders of political capital steal their surplus value). The risk is simply that entrepreneurs are totally and utterly ineligible for any personal benefits at all (save for rent subsidies which simply mean I’m paying effectively 95€ a month for housing instead of the nominal 320€), which is already exactly my situation so I have literally nothing to lose here (except some money for the paperwork).
In addition, it’s so unbelievably the æsthetic.
4 months ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist · 6 notes · .permalink
Anon-ish hate-ish mail yay!
I got some fan mail from a superhero who got lost on their way back to Bizarro World. Anon has a name, actually, but using it here would be too mean unless I seriously toned down the snark and I’d rather not tone down the snark because it amuses me more this way.
> (this is in reference to your long post about That One finnish feminist website.) I don’t understand how you could realize you were being mean and brainwashing people and silencing people and still be proud of it, and this really bothers me.
It would be far too easy to just point out that “I’ve mellowed a lot since then” part and note that I’m simply refusing to sugarcoat my past actions or pretend that “evil”, or especially “dubious, unfair and simultaenously brutally effective”, never pays. It does, that’s why it’s able to exist in the first place.
In the x-rationalist community there’s a standard thought experiment regarding sunk costs: “imagine you’ve been magically teleported into this situation, now what do you do?” When the having-iternalized-the-advantages-of-civility and feeling-sufficiently-high-status-to-not-get-easily-defensive-threatened you is teleported into the position of someone with a history of aggressive actions having led into a really powerful position, do you hold onto that position while using your powers for good, or do you just throw everything down the drain and let entropy revert things into the standard white neurotypical cisfeminism that usually dominates everywhere? If you choose the latter, well congratulations you’ve effectively protected the world from being taken over by you. That’s what makes things outside the window the way they are. Nice job preventing unbreaking-of-it, hero.
Also, I’m always amused at how everyone treats TOFC as the entire world and acts like exclusion from one community is equal to perfect ostracism everywhere ever. No it isn’t. Even many of my best friends and people I admire the most would be perfectly ineligible for its membership.
> Hopefully you won’t take this as an insult, given your tags, but my first impression (DISCLAIMER: I haven’t binged your blog, so uneven reliability) of you from that post is that your actions are those of a real-life supervillain in terms of morals and not just aesthetic.
I’m also the person who talks communists into privatizing the atmosphere. Just saying that you really should judge things by their content, instead of their superficial resemblances, because superficial resemblances just lead everyone to shitty conclusions. If we look at the extent of my supervillainy, I’ve advocated unscrupulously saving millions of lives, and taken control of the SJ overton window in one country to effectively no-platform the bad kind of SJ. I’m just going to assume you haven’t realized the actual content of my actions because it’s a more charitable interpretation than the alternative that you’d consider such actions evil.
> You seem to be objectively pretty smart though
I’m glad we’re on the same page here, at least.
> and you’d definitely be a Hitler/ISIS and not a Mao/Stalin dictator in the event that your life plans succeed.
You do realize that one category of those managed to piss off pretty much the entire world and tried to eradicate some of the most productive parts of their population for basically shits and giggles and got their asses utterly whooped as a result and discredited their ideologies; while the other two ruled with relative success till the ends of their lives, oversaw dramatic development and victories at a terrible human cost, and have inspired hordes of apologetics among the downtrodden that to this day probably number in the millions, despite being arguably responsible for far greater humanitarian tragedies, right? Right? pleasesayrightohmygod…
Some people have seriously claimed that Mao, even without any sugarcoating, might have been the single most effective altruist in the world. That’s what smart and successful supervillainy looks like. Not the obviously evil antics that are basically little more than the geopolitical equivalent of gluing a “kick me” sign onto one’s buttocks.
I’m pretty certain anon might actually be some kind of a bizarro world superhero who’s kind of amateurishly trying to manipulate me to being less effective in my supervillainy from the perspective of us both.
> On behalf of all us humans made of flesh and not steel, I hope that doesn’t happen, though. (not in the ask box because it’s not really a question, hope that’s okay?)
No need to worry, politics is ugly, violent and ineffective. My supervillainy will happen on the free market. Bwa ha ha, I’m going to invent something that creates value to people and then capture some of that value if I can! Behold my evil plan of fulfilling people’s desires in voluntary interactions! I’d be way less of a supervillain than John Galt because I believe in open source and empowering the miserable to become formidable and to uplift them from the ugliness their environment forces them into, instead of just contemptuously looking down upon them from my glass towers where I hatch dramatic speeches that utterly fail to recognize the complexities of the world.
Or if I somehow end up the dictator of whateveria I shall abolish corporate welfare and lots of coercive and hurtful laws, and institute an UBI and cost-effective services even to the disprivileged parts of the population. Mwa ha ha ha, my evil plans are so horrible mere mortal minds can’t even comprehend their true nature! But yeah, a libertarian dictatorship would be an interesting sight. (The consensus seems to be that I’m some kind of a libertarian, but the exact left-right-top-bottom subtype classification is as reliable as a dyslexic 4-year-old’s directions in navigating a confusing central european old town’s street network for the first time using only a pre-ww2 map with all street names removed. All *I* know is that the website which measures how much people side with Bernie Sanders considers me a “left-wing laissez-faire small government deregulation capitalist” who should generally vote socialist, but favors libertarian on the economy and republican on the environment. And obviously matches Sanders in 90+% with a generous two-digit margin to any others. Your guess into how the fuck that happened is as good as mine; they didn’t even offer UBI as an option anywhere!)
4 months ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #win-in is my superpower #boxes don't work #i am worst capitalist #future precariat billionaire · 3 notes · .permalink
multiheaded1793:
ladylike-manhood:
sinesalvatorem:
jaiwithani:
reagan-was-a-horrible-president:
jean-luc-gohard:
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
- A forty hour work week is considered full time.
- It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
- A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
- Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
- Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
- Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
- Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
… Wouldn’t the metaphor be “company finds a cheaper lumber supplier”? And if a lumber company thinks they aren’t being paid enough for their lumber, they raise the price. What you probably don’t want to do it pass a law declaring a minimum lumber price.
My true objection is that minimum wage does not appear to do the thing that it is supposed to do, namely improve the well being of poor people - studies usually show extremely marginal positive effects at best, and often show no effect or slightly negative effect. We’ll have better data on this when Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has been going for a few years, but I’m willing to bet at generous odds that it shows no significant effect on poverty, and slightly less confident that it will have damaging effects on economic opportunities for the working poor. Would be awesome to be wrong.
To OP: “facts”. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Like, number 3 isn’t even an “is”. It’s an ought - an unsubstantiated one at that. I mean, you can turn an ought into an instrumental value of mine by linking it to a terminal value I have, but just bluntly asserting it? Uh, noooo.
And 4 doesn’t actually follow logically from 1-3, even if we assume 1-3 are sound. It’s skipping steps. You need some premise somewhere if you want to define theft as “purchasing a service at a rate I disapprove of”. Like, what even is this?
5) This business would be failing to pay its labour if the price of its labour increased, the same way Starbucks might fail if the price of coffee beans skyrocketed. However, even if you think coffee beans must ethically cost 5x as much as they currently do, that doesn’t mean you can declare Starbucks a failure based on your hypothetical costs that the market is not, in fact, imposing. The appropriate comparison isn’t a company breaking into a warehouse to steal lumber or coffee, but them finding a new, cheaper supplier. Claiming theft and trade are equivalent is disgusting.
6) You don’t give someone a gift by refraining from stealing from them. Likewise, you don’t subsidise a business by failing to increase the costs it has to deal with.
I don’t think I’d describe myself as anti-minimum wage, but I hate shitty arguments.
Here’s the missing steps:
- The government has also prohibited homeseading, or otherwise reverting to peasentry or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle(which you might prefer to working for minimum wage)
- Absent money, in the USA, you will eventually starve, steal and be imprisoned, or poach and be imprisoned.
- Those who are not supported by others, and do not wish to starve or be imprisoned must therefore work for some kind of wage.
- The government has explictly prohibited most forms of collective labor action and mutual aid. (compare restrictions on employeers in the FLSA vs restrictions on Union in Taft-Hartly)
- Therefore: unskilled unsupported individuals who do not wish to starve negotate their wages under this metaphorical ‘gun to the head’ and are unlikely to be able to secure the actual fair market value of their labor.
Since we do not hold contracts made under coercion to be valid, it is fair to say that such employment arrangements are likely invalid, or only partly valid.
It’s like they are “stealing” the difference in the employees freely negotiated wage and the minimum that they actually get because of the above.
Note: IMO the solution is a UBI, or partial repeal of Taft-Hartly particularly permitting sympathy strikes again. McDonalds would get thier shit together quite quick if enough teamsters refused to handle their cargo until they were paying a living wage, or providing stable schedules.
I had no idea about the provisions of Taft-Hartly. Wow.
Wow indeed, but in both directions. Labor relations as a whole is just an obscene mess of could we just get all this headhurty thing over with asap and into a nigh-post-scarcity society of free necessities for everyone pretty please. Take away union powers, you get employers kicking workers in the head systematically. Give unions power, you get redwashed rentiers holding the economy by the metaphorical testicles and abusing that power for all they’ve got and kicking the precariat and everyone else in the head.
In 2010 roughly a thousand stevedores, making an average of twice the median wage, caused a measurable dent in the GDP of Finland because they wanted their employers to pay one year’s wages (two years of median wage, mind you, and that would’ve been on top of the already existing 500 days of relatively generous unemployment benefits only people in middle-class jobs get) in severance benefits to laid-off workers. The damages to the economy were estimated to have been in excess of a hundred million euros a day, or in other words every striking stevedore hurt others in a day more than they themselves earned in two years. On the other hand, nurses typically earn only a bit above median in a job that’s arguably just as rough and demanding and important to get right. What do stevedores do that justifies their position, other than hold the capital of an immense extortion power, safeguarded by the regulatory capture of labor laws?
A living wage should not be the responsibility of employers. The responsibility of employers should be to pay what they’ve promised in exchange for workers doing the work they’ve promised, with reasonable occupational safety etc., and nothing more. If we want people to not starve to death we give them money instead of trying to make someone else give them money. This is the original sin of social democracy: trying to turn employment from an exchange of labor for money into comprehensive cradle-to-grave caretaking for those privileged enough to have it, subsequently creating an ever expanding underclass of lumpenproletariat which has fallen through the widening cracks of the system.
I actually have some idea what I’m talking about. If I wanted to work in Finland inside the regular system I’d easily lose 60% of my wages or more, a substantial fraction of it into various unfair schemes I never consented to. Pensions? Born after 1980, never going to see a single cent of them anyway; the singularity has to be my retirement plan because there isn’t any alternative. Unemployment insurance? Why the hell would I deserve to get more than someone else today just because I got some yesterday too, and why the hell should I pay it for anyone else? If I got sick or pregnant my employer would have to pay for it. With exactly the effects on women’s and chronically ill people’s employability and the survival of unlucky small businesses one would predict. Then I’d also be subject to various regulations “for my own good” just because someone else doing kind of similar work somewhere else some time ago thought it was a brilliant idea. Clock cards and regimented working hours for startup programmers? Yes, they actually do think it’s a brilliant idea. That’s why I’m getting the hell out of there.
Nobody should have a metaphorical gun to their head. Not even employers. With the burden of socialdemocratic welfare systems placed squarely, unpredictably and arbitarily upon them, no wonder they respond to incentives by weaseling their way out of everything they can by exploiting temporary workers, discriminating on a demographic basis, etc.; I for one definitely wouldn’t want to be an employer in such a system. There are so much better ways of achieving the desired goals and I very much support many of those goals and I could do so much better if I was just allowed to opt out of the social bureaucracy to implement it without the obscene side effects. (If one suspects capitalism of being cynically rigged to benefit privileged classes so that oppression is an intended result instead of an unfortunate side-effect I see only one reason to not extend that exact suspicion to social democracy as well and that is identifying oneself as a beneficiary of the latter’s oppressiveness; a group that I’d like to remind everyone has been constantly shrinking for at least the last 25 years!)
Socialize the robots instead of strangling their makers in red tape. Social democracy directly favors big corporations, established capital and politically connected labor tyrants while throwing underclasses, both domestic and global, and innovative and disruptive makers alike under the bus. And that’s possibly one of the greatest mistakes a present-day system can make. Makers tend to be a distinctly different breed from the people who thrive in climbing established hierarchies. Much more prosocial and vulnerable to compromising their class interests with altruistic idealism and more interested in genuinely creating value than just cynically capturing as much of it as possible; that’s the exact type of people ardent anticapitalists should try to populate the ranks of the global elite with, and they’d very much be doing it themselves if they were just given the opportunity! The ADHD (I’m diagnosed) inventors who couldn’t care less about class warfare because there’s so much cool shit to tinker with and where did all this money suddenly come from and whoops did we accidentally just destroy several established giants full of cynical climbers and zero-sum exploiters nah whatever let’s just throw this money at doing cool and altruistic shit that’s never going to make a profit because we’re already set up for several posthuman lifetimes and it’s not like we could safeguard our position against the next disruption when someone comes up with better shit anyway.
Protect the little people (this is the part where I insert the mandatory UBI mention; minimum wages and other social bureaucracies just lumpen the proletariat) and stop fucking propping up the old titans and just let the whiz kids take them out while their (our) built-in vulnerabilities and a constantly changing landscape give you openings for your revolution if you want one because that’s the only way you’ll ever get one. Or alternatively someone invents an open source replicator and disrupts scarcity and makes money mostly obsolete and nobody at the top cares because they’re too busy slingshotting asteroids into mars to impress their buddies and it’s not like they could reliably suppress it if they tried anyway. People and systems respond to incentives, seize control of the incentive landscape to manipulate them where you want. And if you don’t think the left could succeed at something novel and unexpected that has never been tried, how the hell could they instead succeed at something everyone knows to brace against and which has a proven track record of never having succeeded sustainably despite repeated attempts? If someone came up with a startup idea that could be summarized as “pets.com, except it’s going to be different this time I swear” any VC worth their salt would laugh them out of the room.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #future precariat billionaire #i am worst capitalist #boxes don't work · 82,147 notes · source: steviemcfly · .permalink