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[Dostoevsky]

Over the last few years I've just come back to one simple reality time and again: money.

It's the lever for everything. From all the shills, the mis and disinformation, people saying patently untrue things in order to sway people's opinions, destroying the future for a small advantage in the present.....it all comes back to money. People will betray themselves and others simply for the chance to be rich and famous. Fuck everyone else as long as I get mine.

It's not enough to just have some. It's not enough to have enough. Once you've crossed this variable threshold of "enough", all your left with is to accrue more. It's the essence of capitalism, the unchecked growth of a tumor that has embedded itself and now draws from everything around it to propagate and spread and swell and grow.

I've seen money override even people's supposedly deeply held beliefs and prejudices. What's your price tag? How much would it take for you to abandon your morality, shit on the social contract and actively work to make the world a worse place for everyone else? I sort of fantasize about the idea of someone offering me more money than I'll ever earn in my life, to get me to do something I know is wrong and violates my core principles.....just so I could set it on fire and watch their disbelief that anyone can put something above being rich.

Back in law school we read one of the modern philosophers, who pointed to a thought exercise given to people. The gist of it is: if you were randomly deposited into a certain class of a new society, would you prefer a) lots of equality between classes or b) lots of inequality between classes. According to the book, at least, people in most countries asked would answer (a), while Americans would answer (b) for that lottery chance of sweet sweet wealth.

The shape of how things are now is completely alien to the way things were when the mountains were and inch taller, and by the time the mountains are an inch shorter than they are now, the state of things will be completely alien to the way things are now. Our world wasn't inevitable, and it's certainly not eternal. Why not have hope when everything around us is evolving too fast to keep track of? In fact, if that evolution is going to happen anyways, don't we have a duty to help it evolve in the direction we want it to?
There has not always been humans, and they have not always acted the same way they do now. The way things are right now is not the "normal", it is only the way things are right now.

Sure, but I don't really read the impermanence of humanity as a reason to particularly like it. I'm not saying the universe stinks, or even people writ large stink, just that any current society +/- a few thousand years is probably not going to be a utopia. Don't worry, I'm not planning on building a doomsday device or anything.

Edit: Also saying I'm not going to twiddle my thumbs while the world burns. I'm even lucky enough to have a job advocating for making things better, but that also means I've seen plenty of evidence to suggest that any hope for major change in my lifetime is pretty darn slim.

[Imic]

At the risk of skirting too close to an oversharing post, there are always more definitive and final ways to get out of the wonders of the modern era. But they have pills for that, so I can continue to be productive.

I think a lot of this thread is overly idealistic, not from a whole 'socialism / X alternative doesn't work' angle but more of a 'there will always be a sufficient number of powerful jerks to ruin anything' angle. My centrism comes from largely from cynicism and fatigue, not righteousness. There's no real hope to make things significantly better, but maybe one can help make things a little bit less terrible.

But hey, I wouldn't mind being wrong.

The shape of how things are now is completely alien to the way things were when the mountains were and inch taller, and by the time the mountains are an inch shorter than they are now, the state of things will be completely alien to the way things are now. Our world wasn't inevitable, and it's certainly not eternal. Why not have hope when everything around us is evolving too fast to keep track of? In fact, if that evolution is going to happen anyways, don't we have a duty to help it evolve in the direction we want it to?
There has not always been humans, and they have not always acted the same way they do now. The way things are right now is not the "normal", it is only the way things are right now.

+1

-snip-

There’s probably a correlation between eschewing greed and not getting into positions where greed would come up. So much of the upper organization of this world relies on cold hard cash that it’s less that Humanity is inherently greedy, and more that it’s mostly the greedy that seek those positions. Or it might be a cultural thing. It probably is. That said, this might all be coming straight out of my arse.

[Dostoevsky]

There’s probably a correlation between eschewing greed and not getting into positions where greed would come up. So much of the upper organization of this world relies on cold hard cash that it’s less that Humanity is inherently greedy, and more that it’s mostly the greedy that seek those positions. Or it might be a cultural thing. It probably is. That said, this might all be coming straight out of my arse.

There was a small wave in the social science circles several years back on the 'WEIRD' concept tainting research. WEIRD being an acronym for Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. There was evidence suggesting that when you exclusively use 'WEIRD' populations (e.g. white university undergrads participating in on-campus studies) for research, you can't really turn around and claim the results represent the human condition. There have been some cases of famous/foundational studies being repeated in non-WEIRD populations and reaching entirely different results.

That said, the idea seemed to fizzle away after a few years. I wonder what happened. (Honestly, I do wonder.)

[Naturegirl1999]

The WEIRD idea makes sense to me, of course a subset of a species cannot be extrapolated to the entirety of a species.

[nenjin]

which makes us feel like trying to have integrity is pointless if we're the only ones.

But that's the core of integrity, isn't it? It doesn't matter how many people also have integrity, it matters if you have integrity.

The issue is that it's a cold comfort to die knowing you had integrity in life while the rest of the world didn't, and continued to get worse. Selfishly you can say "well at least I had it" (without even being religious or expecting some payment or reward for having integrity.) But when you want something better for the rest of the world, regardless of whether or not you'll benefit from it, it is pretty soul crushing to be on the right side of things and feel alone out there, or at least disconnected from the people who share your world view. So much easier to just say "fuck it, yolo, get mine." Even though, when the end comes, all the material wealth and power will be worth nothing in the eyes of the Grim Reaper. Virtue won't mean anything to them either, but at least on your deathbed you can die knowing you stayed true to not making the world a shittier place just to enrich yourself. I wonder how the arch capitalists deal. Do they look at their legacy, the way they've guaranteed their wealth will trickle down through the generations to their brats so they can continue the Great Work of fucking everything up? Does that bring them comfort in the last moments?

[Imic]

The WEIRD idea makes sense to me, of course a subset of a species cannot be extrapolated to the entirety of a species.

Whilst it’s true that any subsection of the species will be very different from any other, it was more referring to the idea that this specific subsection of the species was extremely skewed in certain directions in terms of ideology, culture, tendencies, etc. compared to the rest of the species.

[Max™]

So is the problem then that the research should be thrown out, or that the newly limited realm of applicability for the research is less exciting when you discover your hard earned insights about rich white college kids are hard earned insights about rich white college kids?
________________________________________________

Regarding burgerpunk... I'm basically a relic because I would rather sit in a weird spot in the room by the door because I can use a wall mount for one monitor and put my computer close enough to the wifi and the wifi close enough to the modem that I can hit both directly with a wired troubleshooting session spread across either screen and actually enjoy that my nicer monitor (love that IPS shit) doesn't have a VESA option because I've got it on a lazy susan so I can turn it to show the missus stuff easily while storing convenient bolts/nuts/bits/washers/screws/smaller tools under the screen in easy reach.

I was annoyed to learn that not only was the cable modem we'd had for a long time buggy AND slow, comcast had apparently been charging us for it every fucking month and ordered a modem of our own which I had to call a guy in india to fucking hook up properly while making sure they knew I'd be discussing shit with the BBB if those charges for their piece of shit kept going. Have to check regularly to make sure nobody in the house ever looks at the xfinity wifi hotspot because it meters your use and charges for a slower version of the fabulously better wifi our new router spits at us... well, me, everyone else splits the bandwidth, but I'm the only one who can jack into the full 220~ Mbps digital meth goodness. Fuck heroin, gimme an ethernet port on my arm, 10 Gbps or better thanks!

We recently had two dudes that previously rode in the space shuttle get to the jumble of air-filled cans falling across the sky while riding a rocket that had it's first stage politely return to the planet and wait for reuse by the private company that made the damn thing.

You can get completely normal looking glasses with little HUD effects that talk to the internet through the fondleslab in your pocket and let you get notified about the likes you got from the ridiculously high quality pictures your fondleslab pulled in from it's sensors and interpreted smartly enough to tweak the lighting and colors of your mocha foam heart and steam while applying a pleasing bokeh bloom to the background wall and illumination sources.

Despite the onslaught of a global pandemic the stock market has kept going up due to the various tech and infrastructure companies in the right places to massively benefit from the average income of the average person in the US going up courtesy of the government giving brief bursts of helicopter moneymachine going brrrrtttt!

The government is nominally led by a rapacious simpleton weakboy who is only really good at fucking up and only ended up elected due to some piece of shit making literal cancer into a form of "entertainment" called reality tv and getting the hilarious idea of trying to make a total shitsack garbage fire like Trump look like a savvy corporate tycoon without realizing people might believe it wasn't staged scripted bullshit and take the ridiculous joke seriously enough to accidentally the whole presidency.

I'm on no form of social media, I email my mom occasionally, I only check twitter when an actual relevant link in a discussion or article is given, or KSBD seems late, and the rest of the time can't even imagine spending any amount of time sifting through all the bullshit. I'm at a point where facebook is something that happens to other people because every time they try to change something to slip trackers through my armada of blocking mechanisms I update and forcefuck their bullshit to death before it ever gets to the point of my browser trying to request a connection.

I am odd, clinging to my mechanical keyboard and no mouse, two screens and no wifi, existing largely as a me-shaped hole in the pervasive mesh of tracking information woven around the world, using tools with no power source except my own muscles to turn materials or random objects into new and more useful forms, drinking tap water in a big refillable bottle because of a traumatic discovery of sugar ants up under the cap of the horrific poison I used to drink called sprite.

I am uninterested in taking part in much of the world because I would rather deny it the opportunity to influence me, I am an asshole and an anarchist so I either ignore shit or end up plotting how to set it on fire before making it explode. I am poor, but I am free to do what I want in ways that I've found satisfy me. Nonetheless when I look up from the sawdust at the screen or glance outside, I am well aware that I cannot get truly free of capitalist bullshit, similarly I cannot deny that I am in the future.

It is not the future we expected, it is not the future we wanted, it is strange, and banal in so many ways, but it is definitely not lacking the dressings of near-future fiction we used to expect from cyberpunk.

Though Stross says it hasn't aged well, I think he's too critical of his own work and Accelerando remains a fascinating read which certainly didn't age as badly as shit like TNG having big clunky tablets, a barely competent smarthome assistant, and the now laughably pitiful specs and capabilities of the gee-whiz android Data.

I do not envy him trying to write his "present day+lovecraft" series of Laundry novels when shit he thought would be outlandish but semi-plausible keeps getting outdone by reality.

[feelotraveller]

time of samurai
a floating pavillion
infinite blossoms

[Reelya]

Alright you animals, here it is. You've gone and got me to make a thread. I'll flesh out this post more later.

Since you wanted definitions, here are some:

Socialism is not when the government does things. Socialism is when workers control the means of production. That's it. It's one sentence. Anarchists are socialists. Marxists, Leninists, and Maoists are socialists. Parliamentary socialists are socialists, but don't tell anybody I told you that because they'll call me a liberal.

The workers controlling the means production practically makes all enterprises are public enterprises.  As the government is merely a group of said enterprises that automatically makes the worker-controlled enterprises either governments in their own right or part of the government.   

Workers controlling the means of production, in itself just does one thing. It removes the us/them dichotomy between management (who represent the owners) and the workers. It collapses that dichotomy. However in large part this is actually completely orthogonal to government.

So is it going to work that a particular factory is going to be owned and operated by the workers in that specific factory, or is there going to be a democratic government with voting that runs all the factories together? Either definition fits the workers controlling the means of production thing, but those systems could be wildly different in terms of execution.

So you have two possible broad models here. The first is that each "productive entity" is separate and run by the workers in just that entity. Various entities would need to negotiate on how to distribute resources, who's making what, how many loaves of bread get exchanged for a pair of shoes, whether some shoes are worth more than other shoes etc. That's the more workable model, but it has many aspects which would be similar to a free market system. If shoes are in short supply the shoe-making orgs will have more economic clout, and they can then negotiate for additional resources in exchange for their in-demand shoes. Since the shoe-worker own the shoe-org that's entirely consistent, but it's like a guild system, and it's still open to various types of abuse, exploits and self-interest.

The alternative model is that all workers are part of a large voting system and that system itself owns all the factories, and there's some sort of voting / decision-making system about how everything is made and distributed. However this system will necessarily entail much more thought-policing. If you got and make stuff by yourself then such a system must by it's nature stop you doing that since that would jeapardize the core principle that all production is managed by the collective. Yeah, I'm not sure this sounds like any sort of utopia, more like a dystopia. For example, how are things like movies, games, music going to be handled when every resource allocation comes down to a majority vote or central funding committee, whether elected or not?

The concept works as long as you limit it to basic commodities, but for the creation of new things and innovation, production being subject to a voting system sounds like it would have issues. A lot of things that we like just wouldn't be allocated the resources to create them in the first place under such a system. Being under such a system isn't going to make humans any more wise or less stupid. So think about violent video games. If 51% of the population believes they cause violence then they might just not allocate any resources to their creation whatsoever, so you don't get any AAA games anymore unless they've been pre-approved to be socially safe according to the prevailing majority opinion. Under the previous model, the decentralized / competing worker-orgs model, an org could still be set up to make whatever type of games they want. But they'd have a market advantage if people want their game.

[Yoink]

I feel like I just hit that bit of Germinal where they finally resolve to strike the mine.

Is that book any good? I tried reading it once and was put off by the sheer density of it, but that was before I was heavily into classic literature and I have since greatly enjoyed some of Zola's other work. Of course, it kinda sounds like it might be just a big heap of socialist waffle, but if not I may give it another try.   

[Max™]

Oh dear, Reelya, my sweet summer child, no, no... if you're discussing variations of socialism/communism in terms of "like today but the people in the factory own the factory" then you're falling for the previously-bounded conversational trap which pro-capitalist folks hope you would.

Marx was basically a sci-fi writer who didn't know he was supposed to be putting green skinned babes and laser swords in there.

Capitalism is a stage wherein the means to automate production are likely to be developed due to profit motivated assholes noticing "hey, what's the best way to stop paying workers since slavery was banned and people notice when we start killing them? FIRE THEM AND REPLACE THEM WITH MACHINES!" inevitably.

That tends towards an unstable state inexorably before people start pulling out pitchforks and torches and finding suitable lengths of rope for the nearest tall sturdy tree, and THEN you can start worrying about how to divide up communal use and ownership of said automated production.

[Reelya]

That's a bit rude. EDIT, BTW: I've already made that exact point about Marx and automation in previous bay12 threads more than once. It just wasn't relevant here. Search for "marx automation" on the forum and you'll see I've posted that exact idea about post-automation communism a number of times. It just wasn't relevant here. Here's quote from me from Sept 2019, WTF thread. I'd link it but links are broken:

Marx's main point in Historical Materialism was that it (EDIT for clarity: Communism) would be at the point where productivity increases (i.e. automation) meant work was "life's prime want". i.e. there's so little to do that you're now living to find meaning in work rather than working to find meaning in life. Another way to look at this would be that we've moved a level up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is what is markedly different to the USSR-style communism. In USSR-style, everyone works, and everyone gets the same. Labor is everything. However, in the Historical Materialism model, Communism is what happens when labor and wages are obsolete concepts.

Point being I'm well aware of the post-automation hundreds-of-years away meaning of Marx's words. I'm not talking about Marx though in this thread.

I'm talking in the terms MetalSlimeHunt set up for the thread "workers owning the means of production" so my analysis is within that framework and nowhere else. MetalSlimeHunt said that's his definition for the thing he's promoting so let's discuss that and work out exactly what that means, by itself. I'm in no way saying what's the best model, or what I think a likely model is, I'm just trying to outline models that fit the specific definition as given. Who are the workers, what's the means of production, and what exactly are we saying when we say control? All those things could be interpreted more than one way.

I'm just outlining two possible interpretations of that specific phrase hoping MetalSlimeHunt would elaborate or knock one of the other interpretations down as being not what he meant.

You can either have separate orgs, with democratic worker control within each org, or you can have one big org, with workers voting on how to run it.

Or is there a third option which fits the phrase "workers owning the means of production" that I haven't thought up?

BTW: I've already made that exact point about Marx and automation in previous bay12 threads more than once. It just wasn't relevant here.

[Max™]

Unless the production methods are self-aware we don't need to worry about their self-ownership, but they're definitely the thing doing the work, and thus the workers.

You could go with your previously sabotaged workers-as-people comparison if automation wasn't already making it problematic for people to figure out what people should do when they get automated out of a job, I suppose?

You could also consider "people own the means of production and as shareholders get to benefit from said production as needed, leaving the pursuits of wants and entertainment and art and exploration and study as prime motivators rather than any financial ones" if you wanted, and I think that would be more relevant now than ever as so many people simply can't and shouldn't risk trying to go work at a time like this, while in a more sane world we would be worrying about people trying to gather audiences to entertain or educate as primary vectors, instead of fast food/grocery/delivery/janitorial workers on the edge of poverty being forced to take those risks.

No rudeness intended, it was teasing because I've seen you say this before myself, and is why I was poking fun at you for apparently forgetting what you clearly already knew.

[Reelya]

Like I said, I do get that, but I'm pretty sure that in this specific thread MSH is saying that this is an alternative to things literally right now. Not hundreds of years away, so I limited my analysis to how things would be if we restructured in the modern day.

EDIT: the analysis I gave was pretty broad actually. You can have multiple orgs, or one big org, both with democratic control and either system would fit with "workers controlling the means of production" since we haven't specified those terms any more specifically than that. The means of production is ever-changing, it means whatever creates things, or services, that people want. Workers would mean whoever input any sort of effort into making something. That could be anything from a free-wheeling market economy all the way to total centralization of decision making in one body.

EDIT2: as for collapsing dichotomies, what I meant by that is that the idea of socialism removes the dichotomy between owners and workers, with the workers becoming the owners, and Marxist communism removes the remaining dichotomy of economic hierarchies vs political hierarchies. So both are about ending conflict/dichotomies by combining opposites. That's really just a way of analyzing that aspect of what Marx was saying. If you merge workers and owners then the conflict goes away. Also, "management" mostly goes away, as do "unions", since both management and unions are in large part institutions which largely exist to coordinate the inherent conflicting interests of workers and owners.

However, if you have a capitalist factory-owner and you replace him with a worker's committee, what you really now have is a worker-owned capitalist factory. You removed the owner/worker conflict (and probably demoted most managers and abolished the union too: hence why unions usually don't support worker-controlled factories) but not the underlying nature of the factory and it's relationship to other factories and entities.

[Max™]

We're not even 10 years away from a serious crisis regarding automation eliminating huge swaths of jobs, but we're never going to just suddenly end up without profit-driven bullshit in the way of better ideas today. So planning for a better way to transition through the automation crisis we're undergoing now could help those ideas come to fruition without the nightmare dystopian timelines where we all have to watch x minutes of ads per day, click on y follow-up links, and go to our designated make-work locations to push pointless buttons so we can get paid well below a living wage to purchase the necessities bestowed on us by our corporate overlords, maybe?