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[smjjames]

There's also the fact that Helgoland wants to use Socialism as a Synonym for Communism,

Except he isn't? Germany's socialist left Die Linke party did evolve from the communists, but that doesn't mean that they're communist now.

[Reelya]

That is clearly what Helgoland was implying when he said they were socialist in the "proper sense of the word". Basically he's saying there's only one sense that's allowed, and it's fairly clear that he means "like communists/marxists" in some aspect. Otherwise none of his argument makes any sense at all.

btw if you google Die Linke you can clearly see the flaw in that argument. It's an umbrella group that contains everything from center-left democratic socialists to hardline communists. So saying they are the proper singular socialists in the "proper sense of the word" doesn't make any sense, since they don't have a unified ideology, they are a coalition of different but aligned groups.

[smjjames]

Also, if we're going to go back to the originator of the term, we'd have to go back to this French guy. He also coined something called industrialism, which sounds like... maybe the precursor to the welfare state?

[Reelya]

Nah if you read his theories they're very different to socialism.

He said the primary threat to the needs of the industrial class was another class he referred to as the idling class, that included able people who preferred to be parasitic and benefit from the work of others while seeking to avoid doing work.

Fuck those lazy unemployed people bringing the system down.

Saint-Simon stressed the need for recognition of the merit of the individual and the need for hierarchy of merit in society and in the economy, such as society having hierarchical merit-based organizations of managers and scientists to be the decision-makers in government.

This is actually pretty traditional right-wing / conservative.

He strongly criticized any expansion of government intervention into the economy beyond ensuring no hindrances to productive work and reducing idleness in society, regarding intervention beyond these as too intrusive.

Now he sounds like a libertarian.

In opposition to the feudal and military system—the former aspect of which had been strengthened by the restoration—he advocated a form of technocratic socialism, an arrangement whereby industrial chiefs should control society. In place of the medieval church, spiritual direction of society should fall to the men of science. Men who are fitted to organize society for productive labour are entitled to rule it. The conflict between labour and capital emphasized by later socialism is not present in Saint-Simon's work, but it is assumed that the industrial chiefs, to whom the control of production is to fall, shall rule in the interest of society.

He's ... kind of bordering on technocratic fascism now.

Sure, his ideas upset the apple cart and got others thinking up their own ideal future societies, but his actual ideas don't resemble socialism at all.

[Helgoland]

The question I think we should ask is why do you want to define socialism in such a way that it excludes all democratic and/or non-revolutionary socialist ideologies?

Huh? I thought I mentioned it before: The distinction that I see is in the sort of society and specifically economy that is being aimed for. If you dislike the free market as the default solution, if you're in favor of collective ownership (with nationalization as a special case) and would like economic variables like wages, prices, etc etc to be determined by a political* rather than a self-regulating process, that's Socialism. Whether it's Democratic Socialism or more of a People's Republic doesn't really matter - both fall under Socialism, just like Conservatives may be pro- or anti-democratic.

Communism then is a subset of Socialism, as per the historic usage of the two words.

That is clearly what Helgoland was implying when he said they were socialist in the "proper sense of the word". Basically he's saying there's only one sense that's allowed, and it's fairly clear that he means "like communists/marxists" in some aspect. Otherwise none of his argument makes any sense at all

Fairly clear? Still a bit cloudy, I think... 'Proper' meant the sense not tainted by its abuse in US domestic politics. Die Linke is definitely not a Communist party, though they provide a platform for those guys as well. They do explicitly consider themselves Socialist though, that's the common denominator of the various factions.


*This can be anything from Soviet-style Five Year Plans to communal decision making on a local level.


Ninja: Reelya, could it be that he is referring to rentiers and wealthy land-owners there? I haven't delved into the article, but that fits better with the historic context. Back then idling poor folks were mostly known for starving to death...

[Reelya]

Nope, Helgoland he's not talking about owners and rentiers, the guy had no problem with capitalists, only lazy people. In fact he saw capitalists as a vital part of the system, so he is in fact more like a fascist than a socialist. Basically he wanted a ruling elite of the worthy people, who he saw as the smart and industrious. There's no mention of democracy in his writings or about workers self-determination, which puts him at odds with the more familiar socialists. In fact, he doesn't ever talk about the working class or class conflict, that's not part of his theory.

However ... at the time they still had aristocrats and remains of feudalism, so back then it would have sounded a lot more progressive. A dictatorship of smart people would have sounded pretty inspiring if you were ruled by hereditary inbred blobs.

[Helgoland]

Nope, Helgoland he's not talking about owners and rentiers, the guy had no problem with capitalists, only lazy people. In fact he saw capitalists as a vital part of the system, so he is in fact more like a fascist than a socialist. Basically he wanted a ruling elite of the worthy people, who he saw as the smart and industrious.

However ... at the time they still had aristocrats and remains of feudalism, so back then it would have sounded a lot more progressive.

Yeah, that's what I meant by historic context. Back then the early capitalists were the drivers of innovation, and the primary enemy of then-progressives were the old feudal structures. 'Idlers' were those sustained by their inherited privileges, as opposed to honest hard-working factory owners who were clearly much more entitled to the labor they pressed out of their quasi-slaves.

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[Max™]

How about skip all the terms and go with stuff like:

*Do you think the "market" is a magical creature which can solve arbitrary problems arbitrarily well?
*Do you think supply and demand is actually a law or a suggestion favored by those who benefit from it?
*Do you think automation should be resisted unless you happen to own the machines?
*Do you think raising minimum wage will harm businesses?

If you answered no to any of those, bad news, you've been bitten by the zombie revenant of the reincarnated ghost of Grandpa Marx's Beard. You may be susceptible to understanding and open to ungood wrongthink about the unstrength of Mr. Capitalism, please report immediately to the nearest euthanasia chamber to be turned into food for the rest of the eventual serfs so The Cream Of The Crop can go back to adding more pointless zeroes onto their virtually unspendable accounts and definitely put down those pitchforks and torches, because remember: one day, You might be rich as well!

[wierd]

People are most comfortable with what they are familiar with.  People are very familiar with the idea that "somebody is in charge."  The issue, is that when you put somebody in charge, they become disconnected from the rest of the society, and this leads to all manner of problems, such as corruption, and elitist politics that treat ordinary people as inferiors to be exploited.

One could argue that without "Somebody in charge", there is no central power structure around which to enforce the protection of the commons, and this leads to a runaway degeneration and destruction of the actual communal wealth of a society through lack of planning, general wasteful mismanagement for the sake of convenience, and a number of other maladies.

I am just waiting for non-human artificial general intelligence to actually become a thing.  Theoretically, such an intelligence can be designed to never become corrupt, would have the necessary mental capacity to directly interact with all citizens of every level of society at all hours of the day, every day, for eternity-- and thus would not suffer from the ideological disconnection that causes the slide toward elitism-- and further, could be designed to see to all human needs properly.  It would make the ideal government possible.

People I mention this idea to act like I have suggested worshiping satan though-- the idea is so unfamiliar and so alien to them, that they instinctively fear: What if the machine hates us, or decided that we are not necessary?  For them, I point out what AI actually is, and how it actually works-- such outcomes would be antithetical to its core programming, and make about as much sense as wondering if a calculator could find that 2+2=5. The real threat would be humans, who having been kicked off the gravy train, seek to reprogram or replace the AI to better suit their wishes, and to re-create elitist classes of privilege within society so that they can feel important without actually contributing to anything other than suffering.

I really feel that if something like communism were to succeed, it would require such a non-human intelligence to be its arbiter.

/opinion

[Reelya]

I am just waiting for non-human artificial general intelligence to actually become a thing.  Theoretically, such an intelligence can be designed to never become corrupt, would have the necessary mental capacity to directly interact with all citizens of every level of society at all hours of the day, every day, for eternity-- and thus would not suffer from the ideological disconnection that causes the slide toward elitism-- and further, could be designed to see to all human needs properly.  It would make the ideal government possible.

An AI is only as good as the model. The problem would be defining a goal for the AI. e.g. "logical" outcomes can only be expressed in terms of the axioms that are fed into them. What is "logical" is therefore arbitrary. The problem with saying that a master AI will solve all problems and all disputes is that it's not clear at all what parameters we can feed into it that are "objective".

An AI could make things "fair" however, because it always makes the same decision with the same inputs. We as humans still have to reconcile what the appropriate response of the AI is in every situation, the AI can't tell us that, since the AI could consistently hold any value system that we could think up.

[Lord Shonus]

More importantly, all it takes is one badly coded directive value in the AI for it to go massively wrong (assuming that it can handle all the complexity a human can, but remains bound to hard-coded values, which is something that I charitably doubt the possibility of). To put it in simple terms, it isn't hard to imagine an oversight that would make an AI think A Modest Proposal was a sound solution to having too many poor Irish people, while any human is going to recognize the absurdity immediately.

[wierd]

There is a reason why I said "artificial general intelligence" reelya. The issue you cite is exactly the reason. General intelligence creates its own model over time with experience. It can evaluate its own fitness toward deciding ideal solutions given some simple axiomatic inputs. (Things like "human life is valuable, and healthy happy humans are ideal humans")

We are no place even close to general intelligence. I still hold that it is what is needed for communism to work as intended.

[Lord Shonus]

In the exact same post you said that, you posited that the AI would be "safe" because of the overriding primary programming that it would not be able to modify. I was refuting THAT part - the critical "0th Law" and "1st Law" that you would need would inevitably get fucked up by a simple error caused by the massive complexity of the thing, so the notion of a "perfectly safe general AI" is a fundamental impossibility.

[wierd]

That's what imposed weights are. Humans have similar imposed weights in the form of supernatural punishments that exceed rational bounds; eg, "you get to enjoy 100,000 years in the Buddhist " burning hell" naraka for forcing others to suffer for your own selfish gain." It is somewhat effective at controlling bad behavior. It also creates unusual emergent behavior, which may not be anticipated, and humans can overrule such early programming consciously. With an AI, such compulsions become more like a mythical geas, or an irresistible hypnotic compulsion; a designed defect in its ability to choose, to force it to stay within a defined parameter set.

As stated, the real threat is from humans seeking to reprogram the ai for personal gain.

[Reelya]

There is a reason why I said "artificial general intelligence" reelya. The issue you cite is exactly the reason. General intelligence creates its own model over time with experience. It can evaluate its own fitness toward deciding ideal solutions given some simple axiomatic inputs. (Things like "human life is valuable, and healthy happy humans are ideal humans")

Hitler was a "general intelligence" too. There's no magic bullet there. IQ doesn't equate to sensible value or goals. This is why I'm sticking to my argument that it's not a cure-all.

There are infinite possible value-systems that the AI could try and optimize. Where I think you're indulging in wish-fulfillment is in the idea that there's one "best" or "true" set of values that we could possibly design an AI for that would keep all the people happy, all the time. The problem here is that we tend to anthropomorphize machines. e.g. since high-IQ people are reasonable, we assume a high-IQ AI must be reasonable in the same manner. But that reasonableness in fact stems from the specific design of the mammalian / human brain, which is an evolved trait. It's not universally true.

We might tell the machine to "maximize happiness and minimize suffering and conflict", so it pulls out all our brains and wires them up in a "Matrix"-like simulation. That way each and every person can have their ideal world and not have conflict with others. You don't think it should do that? Well you're creating a world with more suffering and conflict than the bare minimum for the sake of another principle. So you do in fact need to code that principle into the machine to avoid it following the "maximize happiness and minimize suffering and conflict" to the unpalatable conclusion.