I agree with many things, in particular his sentiment about styles and "rules", but his demeanor is uninspiring.
He doesnt provide much clarity around good writing and just comes off as rationalizing his own taste.
You cant scorn popularity and accesibility, you gotta understand it and work with it to the extent that its important for what you want to achieve.
Art, history and social contexts fold in on themselves, if you're using a baroque style of writing then understand where it belongs and do something cool with it. Be conscious of it.
Monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism took reigns of markets more than a century ago. The state serves these huge interests.
Everybody knows AI firms pirated to train, nothing will come of it. A plain example of classist application of law.
The reason for the willy nilly application of their own laws will always be 'national security', of course, since they own infrastructure their interests are a national security.
So tech may shake things up whenever it makes great leaps, but finance capitalism quickly adapts and absorbs the waves.
No state, anywhere, has the right to rule or even exist.
All states are terroristic parasite gangs, all states [no exceptions].
Your state exists because there is no one else capable of challenging it [no outsider or internal armed militia].
Your state is merely the gang which reigns supreme in your territory - constitutions, democracy, and other grievance pressure relief systems be damned.
You don't get to vote or serve as juror because the system is somehow moral or holy, you get to vote because in historical systems lacking those pressure relief measures the aristocracy tended to be [literally] decapitated on a regular basis.
Democratic measures exist to bribe and persuade your acquiescence so you don't get together with your aggrieved neighbours and go lop heads off ["it's just the rules of the game, you can try again in 2/4/6 more years :^)"].
Seeing politics from this lens should demystify so many seemingly confusing actions and outcomes, it's why no matter how much you vote you never actually "win" and even if you do... it's in such impotent and monkey's paw ways.
>No state, anywhere, has the right to rule or even exist.
No person has an inherent right to exist either. Rights, just like states, or property, or gender, are social constructs. They exist because enough people believe they exist and behave accordingly.
- Evolution of technology and social systems with them
Do all humans have value? Yes, but not all humans can realize their own value. Your society is the gymnasium that helps you realize your value.
Think of how technology interfaces with humans and their employment. The more efficient technology gets the less people you need to produce the same amount of goods. And with each technological breakthrough production needs less people to operate. Sure, they may redistribute later, but immediately it manifests as layoffs.
Unemployment means less people can self-realize since work IS part of the realization of individuals. If work were not part of your realization, then how else do you buy a house, experience the world, raise kids, etc, if not through your benefits of your work?
Here we see how human value is tied directly to the ability to provide to society and to provide for themselves and we also see how that is tied to the ability of society to employ.
Now I ask you, will the AI crisis (and how it relates to human value) be solved with a CEO at a board meeting showing that humans have intrinsic value?
Or will it be solved with the one sided truth that us workers possess and only we can espouse? This truth being that our value as humans can only come from our self-realization within and as-part of society.
Can that CEO be sincere about how society works or must he adopt a convenient POV?
Capitalist ideology cannot conceive of society as an interconnected whole. A capitalist frame of thinking cannot be sincere, since its actions are in opposition to the interests of the majority. And I am not saying that the production of goods is in opposition, I am referring to HOW the goods are produced is in opposition.
People will only use AI for the things they must already be insincere for, such as work-related communication, because truth is already relinquished in those environments. Work is just money making (usually for someone else) with some niceties sprinkled around and individualism to seal it all up. Faking sincerity is hard and being sincere gets you fired.
Is the problem our recognition of human value or for-profit production as a whole?
Is the problem AI or how hard we have to bullshit each other to get by?
Do you really understand class war? Your suggestion is having the state legislate this away as if the state isn't fully compromised by the capitalist class?
This is the main lesson of the 20th century that liberals refuse to accept; that the state is controlled by capitalist class interests. Capitalist democracy is a curated racket.
And even if we were to force legislation exactly as described above it can't and hasn't lasted long due to the incentives ($billions) to undo it. They will go as far as to kill people for this, and they have.
Legislation does NOT fundamentally change existing power relations. They have this shit in their pockets and you're just saying that we should have them take it out of their pockets.
The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.
Every state that has implemented marxist ideals has had their economy made up almost entirely of the state, that level of state oversight over the economy is just an extreme version of our current model of highly bureaucratic, bloated states where the owners/controllers over the means of production are syncronized with the state and its interests.
It was an ideology that at its height ruled a third of the world including some of the most populous and resource rich territories on earth yet still fell within decades.
The increased income inequality within much of the developed world has happened at the same time as ever increasing state influence over the economy.
My understanding of Marx was that he mostly just wrote books describing how capitalism works. Then guys like Lenin came afterwards and killed lots of people. What are Marxist ideals?
History shows that the "fundamental change to power relations" is just a shift from moneyed interests to political/bureaucratic interests. Which is worse because while moneyed interests have power money can buy, political/bureaucratic interests have the power of state coercion.
"They will go as far as to kill people for this" is rich coming from someone preaching Marxism, for which millions have been murdered.
How is the government worse than the corporation or billionaire for coercion?
Libertarians always try to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the governmental one, but they both taste like leather to me and I at least have a say, however small, on the government.
This is a ridiculous oversimplification of complex historical processes. The biggest change to power relations by far were the bourgeois revolutions, which ostensibly shifted "political/bureaucratic" interests to "moneyed interests," which is quite literally the opposite of what you're saying. At any rate, the dichotomy is completely misleading since "moneyed" interests and "political/bureaucratic" interests are not at all mutually exclusive; in reality, they are virtually synonymous within the capitalist system. Also the notion that "moneyed" interests do not possess the power of state coercion must be some kind of perverse joke. Do you not even have a cursory knowledge of history? There are so many instances of money equating to state coercion that it's mind boggling anyone would say this with a straight face. Do you not know what a pinkerton is? Are you not paying attention to what the current president is doing both domestically and overseas? The idea that any advocate of capitalism would get on their high horse and moralize about Marxism is pathetic.
> The western allergy towards Marxism is one of the most detrimental cultural positions the working class has EVER faced.
And it's no surprise they took these positions, considering the FBI originally deemed the likes of "It's a Wonderful Life" as communist propaganda and claimed it "made bankers look bad."
> "What's interesting in the FBI critique is that the Baileys were also bankers," said Noakes. " and what is really going on is a struggle between the big-city banker (Potter) and the small banker (the Baileys). Capra was clearly on the side of small capitalism and the FBI was on the side of big capitalism. The FBI misinterpreted this classic struggle as communist propaganda. I would argue that 'It's a Wonderfil Life' is a poignant movie about the transition in the U.S. between small and big capitalism, with Jimmy Stewart personifying the last hope for a small town. It's a lot like the battle between Home Depot and the mom and pop hardware store."
In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism. This is it, we will forever live in a social-democracy state. I wonder who promotes this idea.
> In the west, the prevalent idea is that socialism/communism lost and that there is nothing beyond capitalism.
It didn't just "lose", it killed millions of its own people in the process. Having been born in a communist state, I'd rather clean toilets in American than do anything else in the USSR.
Edit: It's basically impossible to communicate the day-to-day misery and deprivation of late stage Communism without sounding like a crazy person. My parents were both university-educated professionals but we lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment with occasional hot running water and only newspaper for wiping after the bathroom. This was considered a rather affluent existence.
To find something similar in today's America you'd have to go to the worst, most impoverished parts of town and even then...
In the most impoverished part of my town (just kidding, in every part of my town) people live in the culverts that fill up with water when it rains. I am not sure what they do when it rains.
Fair criticism of the USSR, but some the United State's success comes from taking a large chunk of land from the native populations and then using it's resources and geography to build an economy and military capable of enforcing it's policies in the Americas and eventually around the world. Some of which was sanctioning communist countries and fighting an expensive cold war against the USSR.
I think it helps to draw some distinctions here. Nordic countries have strong social welfare systems, but private property and free enterprise are still a thing. This is not at all the same as communism where everything is ultimately state owned and operated.
China is an interesting example too because it's basically capitalist with strong government oversight. So you can go hog wild on exploiting labor and amassing wealth as long as you don't oppose the overall goals of the government. We'll see how long they can keep it running - the problem with most authoritarian systems is that they're only as good as their current leadership, and when that changes things tend to fall apart.
I think basically capitalist oversimplifies a bit, both because private business holds no monopoly on exploitation of labor in any society, and because many of their large businesses are wholly owned by the state with the CEO appointed by the party. Here is an interesting interview on the subject with a relevant timestamp. https://youtu.be/e297mEZ479E?si=ASV_u9ZoN36wI4M5
The nuance that capitalist businesses do not hold an exclusive interest now or historical pioneering of labor exploitation is valuable to keep in mind because no matter how far the project of labor power spreads, all we workers must keep in mind that we have a primary and vested in empowering the most diminished of our society.
But why is it successful? Where did their money come from? How sustainable is it? The core issues from capitalism still exist there, but they have more money with a smaller population.
Ok, but you're not exactly a research sociologist, are you? It's not like you've made a study of poverty in America—let alone poverty on the imperial periphery, like El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras where we've been undermining democracy and labor rights in order to keep outsourced wages low. Now there are the places you can see real poverty that makes your Soviet austerity seem downright cosy.
So it's just not fair, your comparisons. You're not looking at the whole picture.
Was it communism that killed people in the Soviet times, or was it authoritarianism? You can have authoritarians no matter your economic structure. They have killed people around the world in the name of communism, capitalism, fascism, race, culture, religion, colonialism, and just general jingoistic control for millennia.
Ask it the other way around. Can you have (Marxist/Leninist) communism without authoritarianism? The answer certainly seems to be no. And since the Marxist/Leninist flavor is what almost everyone thinks of when they say "communism", then one could say that, absent any qualifiers like "voluntary" or "non-Marxist", communism is authoritarian, and did in fact kill all those people.
Was it Leninism that was so deadly in the USSR or Stalinism? Stalin was a much different leader with much different politics and philosophies than Lenin and Trotsky. Don’t confuse the Communist party with communism, just like many Libertarians in the US are not actually libertarian these days.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention to the skyrocketing prices of fuel, food, and healthcare... Or did you just think all those people just above the poverty line disappear when the livable income floor gets hydraulically jacked up?
They are not all in one place, and their death certificate doesn't say "politics" on it. They are in cemeteries all over the country and died of many different immediate causes.
I think they mean, the USA (or capitalism in general) is currently killing millions of our own people.
We know how many people communism killed, but has anyone done the same math on capitalism? Maybe they're both very bad, and we have to find a third way.
And it seems like the winners capitalism brought about don't actually care all that much about both "social" and "democratic" aspects of "social democracy", if they stand in the way of ever increasing wealth and power.
Tangentially, this is also the reason why many forms of corruption can be done away with right now with modern technology.
Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).
On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.
Almost as if capitalism makes everything into a market, and the profits make it self sustaining.
How many will see the connections between this and our capitalist mode of production? Probably few since modern lit/news is allergic to systemic analysis.
The blatant flaws of capitalism can't be ignored for much longer.
All people in my extended family were Soviet scientists and engineers from multiple fields, and outside of experimental physics it was the same or worse. Same publish or perish pressure, same amount of fraud and lack of reproducibility. A ton of papers were made up. My father's lab lead was an absolute fraud (biochemistry), everybody knew that, and my father was unable to speak up until the late 90's.
When I was a kid I thought it was the issue with USSR rotting to the core (it was), but when it crashed and later when the web appeared, it became obvious that it's a common problem with academia and its incentives.
The only way to curb something like that is more democratization. Fraud is a common problem in any system anywhere. A reputation score on top would help, only if it can be kept democratically controlled.
There is no single solution, but public fund usurping is basically a law of capitalism, which is why I critique it in this context. Public money laundering is a developed industry in capitalism.
What I get from this is that the professional academic community -- as a whole -- has hit critical mass, which has produced a cottage industry of paper mills and fraudulent services to support said surplus.
Socialism wouldn't be the answer to this because socialism is famous for struggling with surpluses and shortages. All socialism would do is clamp down (hard) on academic's, which case you wind up with the famous shortage where not enough PHD's are available to produce research for an industry.
And that's not a problem specific to just socialism, that's the fallacy of central-planning. The US government clamped down on welfare fraud and the result were freak government social workers sniffing people's bed sheets and rooting through drawers and forcing everyone to document partners.
This is the situation where there needs to be a market correction because the alternative could be far worse.
It's the tax-payer funded business model, the NGO trap. Subsidies, grants, tax-breaks, credit, deductions, exemptions, etc. A whole class of profiteers live in this sector. Even though academia funding isn't strictly categorized as an NGO, it still fits/foots the bill. Public funding of private gains is the oldest trick in the book. Ask any capitalist, they know. And I'm not saying I'm against public funding, but this is often codified into a mafia of sorts when enough money flows through.
The real problem here is the fundamental lack of democratic control over our agencies. That our political organization is intensely lagging behind our productive organization. That our whole political will involves TRUSTING strangers to not be corrupt instead of directly democratizing these processes as much as possible.
But besides that, you cannot remove history from historical analysis. The reason socialism countries struggled in the beginning wasn't an inherent flaw in its organization, but the fact that they were under constant war war by capitalist countries through out their existence. Also keep in mind that most socialist countries did NOT have a whole section of the world where-from to extract riches through murder (S.America, Africa, Middle east, etc), like western capitalist countries had. This is convenient for you to ignore. Maybe because you don't know, or don't care about the super-exploitative history of these places and how they tie into western capitalism. But they are inherent to western wealth and these countries' whole history is struggle against this exploitation.
Not to mention that most of the countries on earth are capitalists and are very very very poor.
To add: Socialism has nothing to do with "clamping down" on X or Y industry, as you hypothetically claim would happen. Socialism is almost exclusively about removing the need to generate capital from production. It unleashes production from its historical ball and chain that is profiteering.
In a single sentence: Instead of production being held back by capitalists generating wealth we can produce for our own needs. It is self sustaining production.
Central planning is not fallacious. Your problem is with corruption, not democratic central planning. The US Govt is a pro-capitalist entity that pro-capitalists try to distance themselves from (ironically). So using them as an example isn't saying anything at all.
Central planning is not "allow a small group of people to decide things", as happens in the US Govt. Central planning is to take into account all sources of information on production to plan said production democratically.
This will always beat the highly highly inefficient speculation of capitalism. Where trillions vanish on a whim and cause of a tweet, where crisis occur every 8-10 years, and where its whole trade market is built to hide that it is mostly insider trading. Again, your problem is with corruption not democratic central planning.
And the way to deal with corruption is to create more democratic bodies where avg people hold real power. I don't see you asking for that either. We call that socialism.
Capitalism certainly is hugely flawed and yet it is far less flawed than any other economic system we know of. Experimentation with the foundations of society is about as risky as it gets. You could end up with a utopia or you could end up with another USSR. History tells us which outcome is more likely
People say that because they are not aware of what Marxism is.
Marxism isnt "lets try something different based on ideas of justice"
Marxism is "Society evolves through general stages: primitive, slave, feudal and capitalist, this is determined by the level production. Capitalism is holding back its current evolution into a society of plenty."
Good luck backing speculation and profit gatekept production.
Everybody hates capitalism, but no one understands that they do. What you promote as a solution is simply a pebble on the path of the people who want to capitalize.
There are 3 realistic scenarios for your proposed solution:
- it will not pass
- it will be reformed later, or, if successful
- it will just make the capitalists appear at another point in the supply chain
The capitalists design the business models (profit making schemes) and legalize them. This is not an organic development of an industry.
What you hate is capitalism and capitalism will do this to any industry wherever it can attain steady profits.
Is the end user viewed as an ISPs client? a consumer of tech companies?
The idealistic language is fine but isnt based on any scientific approach to society. Its neutral at best.
The internet is for end users, but how if its not "by end users"?
If most protocols and standard implementations depend on adoption by ISPs and tech companies what does it mean to be "for the end user"?
Is prison architecture "for the prisoners"?
So how do we solve the "by end users" dilemma?
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