Vilageidiotx

Borgies pls go

<Snipped quote by catchamber>

Although I must say that wouldn't be relevant to the alleged prophecy of Karl Marx. While matter and energy cannot be destroyed in the universe, they could be enforced to act accordingly the laws of communism, redistributing themselves evenly across all space within the universe. The destruction of all celestial objects and life through pulverization or conversion to energy would be a consequence of the act of redistribution.

All they've got to do is find the script where the physical laws of the universe are written and add communism.

@Arkaquiavel

Wait, did you just describe the second law of thermodynamics?

Physics is a communism confirmed.

...

Borgies pls go

wtf happened here

this thread became very weird very quick

Borgies pls go

Politics is not inherently violent, and you don't need a violent revolution to repair the violence of the status quo. There is a high probability that a violent revolution can undermine its own noble goals, and establish a more violent system than what you started with.

@catchamber

It's a possibility. But there is a high probability that a non-violent revolution wasn't a revolution at all, but simply a matter of the powers that be allowing a few changes to protect from the possibility of real large scale change.

Just because total automation can replace conventional farming doesn't mean the latter will cease to exist. Some people will prefer traditional methods, simply because it appeals to their personal aesthetics.

Yes, but those people will be in a comfortable position where they can make their preferences happen, even if it requires them to take a loss. I'm talking about the changes that happen at the bottom of the food chain to the people who don't have much of a choice in the matter.

I don't see automation rapidly outcompeting every traditional model in every market. Even if it did, people will suddenly be able to get many high quality goods at very low prices, allowing them to pursue economic activity unrelated to survival. Algorithms may be able to make art, but some people will simply choose to compensate human artists. On top of this, a vast amount of educational resources will be accessible to the majority of humanity, allowing them to focus their efforts on continuous improvement of existing technologies.

I agree with the first sentence, but that's the problem. If automation killed employment in a decade, we would be forced to figure it out. Instead, automation has came about like the boiling water to the frog. We don't notice it because it happens gradually, and when we see the causes we start looking for other problems. I'm afraid people will spend their lives being impoverished before the slow-burn of automation finally reaches the point where post scarcity makes some sort of socialistic society inevitable.

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

They still retain the right to refuse them service, and can exclude them from their economic choices that provide mutual prosperity to those with compatible worldviews.

But they don't have the property to make that happen.

One little pertinent fact about Marxist economics is that Marx thought early American was not a capitalist society for exactly this reason. Because most people were small-time farmers and therefore owned their own means of production, they approached the market as individuals capable of bargaining. Capitalism happened when the farmers gave way to industrial workers who did not have the ability to negotiate because, lacking the means of production, they didn't have a way to live without the approval of the business men. To go back to the tractor guy making his neighbors unemployed, what do those neighbors do? Sure, they could refuse to purchase from tractor guy, but tractor guy doesn't care because he sells his goods on a national market. Your unemployed neighbors boycotting you? Fuck'em, sell your goods in the city. Neighbors won't talk to you in church? Fuck'em, go make new friends in the town next door. Those unemployed neighbors have no recourse because they have no power to bargain. And at the end of the day they have to buy food from somebody (if they can afford it), and chances are that person will be another dude with a tractor.

First, organizations that seek to end hunger can pool together resources to provide the systems and its byproducts to those in need. Second, if you create a greenhouse or vertical farm with reflective and hydrophobic surfaces, accelerate crop growth with carbon dioxide collected through ionic smog vacuums, internally recycle water and purify inputted seawater through solar thermal, gather solar thermal steam and molten salt power, acquire condensation based hydroelectricity that connects to subsurface drip irrigation, and stack FarmBots on shelves, you can maximize the amount of food for a given volume. If you live in an apartment, you've voluntarily sacrificed living space for proximity to an urbanized community, which makes it your problem.

That's nice, but it is utopian. We already have the resources necessary to end world hunger, that we don't is evidence that it won't happen in this current system.

I haven't done research regarding such movements, so I'm assuming none of them exist. Maybe we could work together to draft legislation for this?

Income caps get talked about. In the United States this is presented as a 100% tax on the top-most tax bracket. When people hear that, they think we are taking all the money from the rich people, because people don't understand our tax system. Currently the top most bracket is people who make $419,000 a year. A 100% tax on the top most bracket would mean that a person who makes $819,000 a year would pay taxes on the first $419,000 as they typically do, but the entirety of the next $400,000 would automatically go to the government since all money above that $419,000 is taxed at 100%. At present, the tax on this income is theoretically 40%, though there are a shit load of tax breaks available to people at that level of income. This, incidentally, is why Trump won't release his tax forms. I have no doubt he has kept that shit legal, but if people actually saw how many breaks he gets, there would be even more anger in the streets.

The internet has expanded the amount of information available to consumers, as well as their economic options. If you look hard enough, I'm sure you can find out who is and isn't worth compensating.

I know some of this. The thing is that wages are at least partially based on the cost of living, and I'm an average working dude, so my ability to afford ethical shopping is limited. Like I said though, I do what I can. I buy what I can from the farmers market, try to avoid big box stores, etc. But there are limitations here. Between the cost of living and the fact that finding many items that are not produced in sweat shop conditions is a fucking nightmare.

Such is the case for some political progress, but that doesn't mean those wanting a better world should stoop to the level of mutually assured conflict. It's very counterproductive, and should only be reserved as a completely last resort.

At what point does this mean that an afflicted party cannot fight back?

In that case, I'll bring up your reference to the Glorious Revolution allegedly being a bloodless revolution, as evidence to the contrary of your claim.

Because the definition of violence has moved around a few times during this conversation. I don't believe anybody died over it, but property was definitely confiscated. Remember we were talking about workers reclaiming property from the wealthy, not guillotines.

Would you like me to provide a detailed analysis as to how an individual can be completely self-sufficient with modern technology?

I can see how that's an amusing thought, but I'd gladly pay a one-time fee to suddenly acquire the means to be completely independent from the rest of society.

Still need the land. Also, I feel like we are really talking about how people who are already in a comfortable positions can retire from society. I'm more worried about the disenfranchised masses. If we were all middle class and capable of buying shit loads of machines that made every one of us self sufficient, I wouldn't be too concerned about the state of things.

However, the society you described would be well within their rights to forcibly redistribute the entirety of one's private property, even if it resulted in their death. One could be the most charitable person on the planet, and such a society could doom them to death simply by overriding their right to personal property with a majority vote. Not only do I find this horrifying, it's also a dangerous tool that can be used by manipulative people and groups to oppress society.

But is it less horrifying that a guy can freeze to death homeless just a block from an empty house because of the way we handle private property? I recognize that there are no utopias under the sun, but I think the democratic system is comparatively less horrifying than the aristocratic one.

Why I never check the "Bump in the Night"

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Won't do much good if they shoot you before you get close enough to swing it.

@Burning Kitty

I don't live in that big of a place.

Why I never check the "Bump in the Night"

I have a sword on the wall. I guess if someone starting bumping my night, I could use that.

Borgies pls go

If that's true, count me out. I'm deeply opposed to violent political change, for various reasons.

@catchamber

Politics is a violent business. I agree that vengeful or unnecessary violence should be avoided. But sometimes the most violent thing is to do nothing. To decide whether or not violence in a revolution is worth it, you have to compare it to the violence of the status quo. If you see the current system as theft from the working class, than you see a crazy amount of violence built into the current system, and the violence necessary to break out of that system is justified.

FarmBot Incorporated isn't providing handouts, but open sourced technology that can feed the world. You still have to create or purchase the machines.

We don't have to automate all food production, as that's a dangerous form of industrial centralization and overspecialization. Either way, what's wrong with mass producing food for everyone? If food is cheaper, people can reinvest in themselves and other industries.

FarmBot Incorporated is basically giving workers collective ownership and the fruits of their labor, because anyone that builds or buys the units doesn't have to pay royalties.

Because that's not how capitalism approaches automation. It won't stop and say thats enough. Once it becomes cost effective, food production will be completely automated. The reason for this is that farms that aren't automated won't be able to compete. If automation allows you to sell a box of food for $1 a pound, and the pre-automation mode at $3 a pound, than any food produced using pre-automation methods will cost three times as much as the automated food. If there is a difference in quality then you will be able to sell the pre-automated stuff as a luxury good, but as the quality becomes equal, the pre-automated food increasingly becomes a cottage industry. If there are no health, quality, or ethical concerns of the automation process, then pre-automated food will become such a small industry as to be irrelevant when talking about employment.

Also, reinvestment in a post-automation world becomes tricky if things get automated too quickly. Shit, the United States is insanely unready for this problem, since here we still require an arm and a leg just to get the necessary education to reinvest, making it very difficult for working folk to move from one industry to another.

From the looks of it, Joe Davis’s boy is putting the needs of themselves and their family above their own people, and is ignoring the future possibility of being replaced by a machine that can guide the tractor without human input. So, he's a mentally incompetent tribalist, and the rest of the community would be well within their rights to ostracize him and boycott the company he works for.

Now you are thinking like a Marxist. Of course, they can't ostracize him very well because he is the propertied individual in this scenario.

That's not true, because FarmBot Incorporated provides an open sourced technology that can feed the world. Plenty of technical data is publicly available online, and the resources needed to create new technologies are widely available at relatively low prices.

About FarmBot specifically, there are a few problems regarding it's effectiveness. First, most people who have problems accessing food do not have either the money or the property to manage it. Second, a single person needs at least an acre to produce enough food to feed themselves (I googled this, the numbers vary, but an acre seems to be the most common average). Four working class people living in an apartment do not have the resources to use a farmbot, even if they can spring for the $3000 upfront cost of the equipment itself.

We both agree that many managers and CEOs are overpaid. My advice would be to draft legislation that forces them and their subordinates to be paid more fairly, or to limit your economic support to companies that already do this voluntarily.

Income caps are talked about enough, especially now that there is a group of modern economists who are worried about the twin-problems of wage stagnation and the wealth gap between the aristocracy and the working people. If a political movement got going to push this issue, I would support it.

And for the record I do limit my economic support to especially heinous businesses as much as I can afford to. The problem is that we are talking about problems that are almost universal. Sometimes you cannot shop with your dollar because there isn't a good choice.

Had I lived in such times, I would've argued that slavery, let alone "partus sequitur ventrem", is a despicable legal doctrine that has no place in American society. Frederick Douglas did violate the law, but I wouldn't just sit back and accept the status quo. I'd be protesting, networking, and building economic systems that negate the need for human slavery.

That all happened, but it ended in violence anyway. When abolitionists figured out they could move to Kansas Territory and use their vote there to make it a free state rather than a slave state, they did that. When it was clear they heavily outnumbered the Pro-Slavery people, Pro-Slavery politicians in neighboring Missouri responded by crossing the border and straight up murdering Free-Staters. "Si vis pacem, para bellum." If you want peace, you gotta be ready for war. This is as true with social causes as it is with geopolitical ones.

Just because something has always happened a certain way, doesn't mean it'll always happen that way. I believe your argument is an appeal to tradition.

It's an appeal to evidence. It would be an appeal to tradition of there was no tangible connection between violence and revolution. Needless to say, the connection between violence and revolution is so tangible that the two are practically synonymous.

I don't believe they exist, because I find the idea to be a horrendously vague, double-edged sword that can be used to justify oppression. The "upper class" will use it to scare the "middle class" into obedience, and lure the "lower class" into providing them political support. Meanwhile, the violent revolutionaries will use it to mobilize the "lower class" for their purposes, then turn around and take their property after the revolution is over. We can sit here all day and argue about definitions, but I'd rather spend my time providing everyone with the means to survive and prosper without relying on the rest of society.

The problem is that none of the things you mentions would be efficacious if the classes didn't exist in some tangible form. They are vague in the same sense that race is vague, but none the less they exist. Like I said before, if you can draw a circle around a group of people and say they have more or less access to their society than another group of people, you have a class.

No person is an island at present, but modern technology is advanced enough to make people self-sufficient. It's relevant, because many political struggles are based on the majority of society lacking what they need to survive and prosper.

I don't actually think this is true. Even with your robots, the idea that you have to purchase self sufficiency from another person is kinda funny tbh.

However, it's possible that allowing modern capitalism to function without hindrance can lower productivity growth. Some employees recognizing their expendability will become lax, due to a morale loss. Some investors becoming very wealthy will refrain from supplying the market with ever-increasing capital, due to bubble risks. As for the impracticality of requiring Wall Street to research ethical codes, I'd rather such a task be done by those that are actually concerned about their malpractices.

I actually agree, yeh, you do have to intervene, because capitalism has all the intelligence of hungry dogs jumping at a carcass. You just have to be insanely tactical about it because, just like intervening with the dogs, it's very easy to screw up.

Regarding the Marxist revolutionary scenario, how does one impartially prevent capital from reaccumulating into the hands of a few? Also, without the forces of supply and demand to gauge value through evolutionary means, how does one impartially ensure everyone receives exactly what they put into the system?

By not recognizing the legal status of capital. Most forms of property require the law to recognize them, elsewise everything is by right of conquest. The Syrian Kurds have this system right now where the community is allowed to vote on the allocation of property. The effect being that you can build up capital if you wish, but if your community decides that your private pool of capital is bad for the community, they can vote to redistribute it. In the west, property is held up as a sacred right in all forms, so we tend to think of even the redistribution of something as abstract as capital as being theft equal to burglary. If we could vote on the allocation of capital though, perhaps we wouldn't have the problems we currently have.

For the most part, I agree with you. However, I believe it's in the best interest of all people that every person and mutualist system has the means to survive and prosper without reliance on the rest of society. That way, should one portion of the gestalt falter, the remainder can simultaneously repair the damage and operate with little-to-no loss in productivity.

It sounds nice, and maybe automation will do this, I just really doubt it. Just taking the farmbot alone, someone will figure out that it's more practical to specialize in one form of produce and trade with their neighbor. This process will move up and down the line because this form of sharing surplus is the way all human societies, from tribalist to capitalist to socialist, create the abundance that makes our species so much more impressive than the animal kingdom. We are inevitably a social species, and we will create social constructs that, if taken away, would make our lives poorer. If society fell right now, people would still live. It would just be a harder life than we are used to. Likewise, if that automation society collapsed, the farmbots would eventually wear down for some people, and we would be back down to square one.

Borgies pls go

Not every society where one is unable to gain employment leaves such people to die. Some do, but I find policies held by such societies unacceptable.

@catchamber

That was a bit of hyperbole to drive the point home, but not the point itself. I suppose what I am really trying to say is that the contract is invalid because there is no choice involved. It's like being told the only way to engage with society is to eat shit or, conversely, to eat shit. We have to engage with society because, well, we are human, we are more or less built to do that. Most production has been made capitalistic. Statistically speaking, a majority of the people have to live this way, we couldn't all be entrepreneurs even if we really really put in the effort and all had the talent. The current contract stipulates that a certain number of people must work in the service industry, for instance.

They don't just sit down and receive money. They manage the division and efficiency of labor, ensure that the facility meets certain standards, and that everyone is compensated as their contracts dictate. If you consider this an effortless set of tasks, you should totally become a CEO.

Managers do that. I do believe most people doing that are being paid more than their worth, because I don't buy the roundabout logic of "Their worth is what the market says it is because the market decides their worth." That being said, yeh, you are describing managers. CEO's delegate most of that type of work.

And for the record, I believe anybody in this thread would make an acceptable CEO if we were given a sixth month training course and the opportunity to try. As it stands now, either the stars really have to align for you, or you have to be born to it.

In my view, everyone that owns property has the right to retain said property. It doesn't matter if you're an aristocrat or a prole, or if a plurality, majority, or everyone but you thinks otherwise. A society asserting its autonomy and independence from an oppressive government is one thing, but using such conditions as a pretext to steal property is another. In the case of the American Revolution, the colonists were refused the right to representation, and had a claim to independence by virtue of the social contract's violation. In the case of the factory owner and the workers, the employer didn't violate the contracts, so the workers have no claim to repossess her property.

This argument is mostly an argument to status quo. You could take this exact same argument and condemn Frederick Douglas violating his own legal status by running from slavery. Both the slave and the worker can claim coercion was used to put them in their place, and if the law of the land fails to recognize that claim, both are within their rights to press the claim by force. For the slave, by stealing themselves away from their master, and for the worker, by claiming the means of production from their employer.

Not all revolutions require theft, as societies can peacefully and voluntarily transition from one government to another.

Somebody loses every revolution. Even the Glorious Revolution, possibly history's most celebrated bloodless revolution, required the theft of the crown from the Stuarts. This is assuming we are talking about social revolutions and not technical ones like the Industrial revolution, which is another type of thing.

Personally, I don't believe in classes. I also don't believe that all welfare and taxes are theft, as it's possible that one could create a government where citizens can refuse to pay taxes on the basis that they lose the right to benefit from public services.

You don't believe classes exist or you don't believe they should exist? Because it would be an uphill battle to prove the former. Remember, we are talking classes, not castes. Inter-class mobility doesn't prove the lack of classes. If you can draw a society up by distinct differences in access to portions of that society, then you have classes, and arguing against them is arguing against language. For instance, if you can draw separate bubbles around "People who have the means to buy off a politician" and "People who do not have the means to buy off a politician", you've discovered a class. That's not the only line to draw, but one of many. The argument of people opposed to class warfare is not "There are no classes" but rather "These classes are already in their just and natural positions within society."

In my view, everyone on this planet is poor, as they are dependent on the rest of society to provide them with goods and services necessary for them to survive and prosper.

All you have discovered is that no man is an island. This detail might be important in a crisis, but so long as society is set at it's normal pace, saying all men are poor because they aren't off-the-grid hermits is sort of silly. Like, it sounds cute, but it's irrelevant.

I agree that current corporate law puts significant authority in the hands of shareholders, primarily those that outrank colleagues with fewer shares. I suggest drafting legislation that forces them to become, or limiting your economic support to, companies that guarantee a greater voice to the employees and the shareholders with fewer shares. Shareholders contribute capital, even if they generate it through automated trading. Simply stripping them of wealth and hoping that fixes everything is as foolish as scrubbing a toilet once, and expecting it to stay clean forever.

@catchamber

I feel you are sort of in a weird spot where you think the legal system is in the business of creating laws in, like, an almost scientific sense. You can't really dicker with the internal trading mechanism of capitalism without slowing it down. Any time we pass a law regarding the inner workings of capitalism, we have to consider its effects on trade. Requiring Wall Street to, like, research the ethical code of every company they invest in is just simply impractical, especially when you consider how bundled up the trade system is.

Your analogy in this case seems to assume that we're talking about a reset revolution; that we strip the investors of their capital, distribute it, and all go to wall street to start a bidding. In a hypothetical Marxist revolutionary scenario, assuming everything goes the way it is expected to, the process of capital accumulation is simply stopped. Instead of portions of labor going into growing pools of individual capital kept by a small cabal of private investors, everyone receives exactly what they put into the system.

Automation isn't the issue, but how it's applied. FarmBot Incorporated provides open sourced automated farming units that could indefinitely feed the unemployed.

To provide a rebuttal to the Grapes of Wrath quote, "Why the fuck did the man with a tractor accept a contract that turned their asshole into a gaping chasm?"

Yeh, how it's applied is the issue.

The political right has a very valid point about how Soviet style Marxism ended up playing out. By putting everything in the hands of a single-party government, the revolutionaries created A: An untrustworthy 'Party Class' of officials and bureaucrats who took a hold of private capital and behaved with it much like any aristocratic class with different privileges than the rest of society, and B: Wrapped up their entire economy in one single fragile social structure.

That's the problem inherent with basically the popular liberal ideas of how we fix the automation problem. Capitalism has many faults, but it is a very good system for diversifying the assets of a civilization. It's more unstable than total state control, but that problem can be fixed with a comparatively more limited amount of interventionism (unless you are a libertarian, then you see it as an issue of needing more virginal bodies to throw to the volcano god Capitalism.) If we fix automation with government programs to the point that we are all absolutely reliant on the government, we face the creation of a brittle societal core. If the government goes through crisis, the entire system freezes up. This happened to the Soviet Union, and it is happening now to Venezuela. When you put all your eggs in one basket, and you then drop that basket, you lose all your eggs.

If a theoretical left-wing revolution avoids the creation of an ossified state core, and instead successfully manages to divest the productive energy of the society to the people as a mass, this problem goes away. To put it simply; if you require the government to give you everything and that government collapses, you lose everything. If everything is owned democratically by the mass of people, well, it would require humanity to collapse all together to bring down the society.

I'm not married to the ideas I am arguing for here by the way. I totally recognize there are some glaring flaws here. But I think, generally speaking, any place where you deprive the general population of power is a net negative, whether this be in government or in the economy. Shit, I think the only political idea I am totally married to is the idea of civic engagement as, like, some sort of 11th commandment.

Borgies pls go

The thing that tends to nag at the back of my brain despite being a filthy commie or Anarcho-Com depending on the time of day is what happens to the distribution side of things, my father being a small-business (hardware store; over a hundred year old establishment now) and how that might effect such places as those. Presumably if the target is only manufacturing then not much would actually change for the retail distribution network, at least at a scale as small as my dad's. No one's really working on owning the means of production at Home Depot, they're just working to get the end-product of another factory organized on the shelves so they can be distributed out the populace on the presently used as-needed basis under the rules of capitalism.

But at the ultimate end, I suppose employees of Walmart, Staples, or Home Depot or what not would end up taking ownership of the stores they work in and taking full ownership of the warehouse/storefront and being able to dictate what product comes in, how much of it, and all the other details of working retail or just consumer-level distribution.

The situation for my dad may not actually change much, since he's either the only person working at the store, or the people that work with him are practically on the same level of operational hierarchy and the only notable difference between he and them is an official legal recognition that he pays all the bills and taxes.

@Dinh AaronMk

In pure Marxism, these details and the obvious complications is where the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" came in. Thing is, Marx was only into arguing that the revolution must occur, and doesn't predict the exact details of it. His schtick wasn't to discuss the problems of Communism, which he was leaving for future generations, but rather the point out what he saw as fatal problems in capitalism.

I feel like Marx's place in modern society is more about giving a second perspective. Clearly his doomsday didn't go down quite the way he assumed it would, but because he didn't ace the test doesn't mean he didn't have some perspectives that should be taken into consideration. Modern socialism I feel is looking at a different set of problems, namely the twin problems of economic stagnation in developed countries and the looming threat of final automation. Because the Marxists failed, after all, doesn't mean that Capitalism is the word of god for all time and always. We gotta look at the problem from all angles instead of, like the An-Caps do, hunting for virginal sacrifices to feed to the Volcano god called capitalism. Or, like the liberals do, assume it will be CURRENT YEAR forever.

Mind rephrasing this? Because it sounds like they're not only getting paid, but also profiting from the sale. If they voluntarily agree to a contract that limits their compensation to one of those forms, is it not ethical to hold them to their word?

@catchamber

Because they didn't have a choice. The contract was coercive in the sense that they either sign the contract or die of starvation. If you are freezing to death and wandering from house to house, and everyone requires you to emasculate yourself before you walk in the door, would your inevitable castration be considered truly voluntary?

If you're compensating others to do the work on your behalf, why do you need to work? For all we know, the owner-resident of the factory could be mentally and physically incapable of operating the machines, but still be capable of fairly managing labor and distributing compensation.

What you are saying is if the guy is good at sitting down and receiving money, shouldn't he be allowed to sit down and receive money? I mean, sure. I'd like that gig too. I'll sit down real good and you guys can give me millions.

My issue with this scenario, and the American Revolution incidents in the higher quote, are that the workers are forcibly and illegally taking away property. It's one thing to say you're going to create a new society that's based on voluntary transactions, and another to say that while you're basically stealing property from others.

That's a matter of perspective. The American Revolution was an illegal taking away of property as well. All revolutions necessarily are. The King was not allowed to choose whether he renounced ownership of the North American colonies. You might think this is a funny comparison, but legally speaking, it's the same deal. If we are going to argue for the rights of aristocrats, we need to be consistent.

Borgies pls go

<Snipped quote by scribz>
"Lefty" also seems misguided. What if the factory is also my house? Why should I give my house away to the people that I hire to work there?

@catchamber

That's a bizarre circumstance. Usually anything that looks like that actually involves somebody doing the actual work and hiring assistants. In which case the circumstances really don't change, aside from the assistants get the full value of their labor.

Remember it's not the property itself in question, but the value produced by the operation of that property. If you're some really weird factory owner who lives under the machines for some reason, your living circumstances don't change. It's just that the wealth generated by those machines go in full to the people working them. You can still live under the machines, you just have to work them sometimes and actually create value in order to make a living so to speak. You could always give the machinery over to those workers. But if you decide to lock people out, then yeh, there will probably be an altercation, since those machines happen to be the way your recently liberated employees make a living. This would probably become one of those unhappy circumstances revolutions tend to create, in the same sense that employees of the crown found themselves in a bad place during the American Revolution despite most of them being law-abiding and honest people. There are wrinkles in any instance where a society moves from one method of organization to another.

A more practical weird circumstance I thought up while trying to imagine a more realistic petite-bourgeois scenario than yours was the circumstance of a factory I worked at a couple of years back. It was a small place owned by a woman who was wealthy, but not full Mr Burns bourgeois. In a revolutionary circumstance, that factory would naturally become the purview of those who actually worked on the floor. Thing is though, the place was full of dogs, because she was a big part of the local rescue community. Those dogs would be hers of course. In the completely unrealistic scenario of a clean-break revolution where everything changes over a short period of time and no actual blood is spilled, there would probably be an awkward moment where she has to come into the factory she no longer has control of in order to get her dogs.