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Little Bill
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9 yrs ago
new leg today. I AM TERMINATOR REBORN
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One man's terror group is another person's freedom fighters.
And vice versa, and anon, and so forth or whatever. To me that sounds like a good reason to be leery of political models with revolution at their core. Humans don't have a great track record with revolutions or freedom fighters for that matter. America too. Shit I bet we spent more than 100x the equivalent funds of the Sons of Liberty to help those brave and noble Al Qaedas fight off the Soviets).
If I'm gonna back a revolution, odds are, it's not gonna be the one proposed by hundreds of troglodytes who spend most of their days debating whether or not selling a unicorn frappuchino should count as a hate crime. And I bet the plastic thing it came in is made from recycled Kony 2012 friendship bracelets.
It's so of hard to go about things when specific cases aren't used. Though I also don't want to sound like I'm someone to try and defend the Holocaust, because I don't. But in most situations as I have learned about them it's less active malevolence on the part of the state (unless we're discussing someone like the Tatars, then there was a targeted effort there).
Is that, like.... better, though? "Someone else probably would've also killed a shitload of people out of incompetence" isn't exactly a roaring endorsement.
I live near one of those major industrial American, rust belt cities.
I haven't seen shit.
Damn it, I've Trumped the thread. Unregard that tangent, I realize now I'm doing a red-herring thing.
As I'm sure I already pointed out before, this too is the goal of communism.
I'm just.... sorry, I'm hitting on this like every other sentence this time around but..... the goal of communism in the past has been to, like.... feed people, and have them be not dead.
The difference being when its achieved I'm not paying Applebucks to get an Applecoffee, or that I need a basic income anyways to get what's needed because the system has already been altered where every means of production is now the public property and if there's any one thing I want I can get it. What's different is how the approach is made.
Marxists (or in this case, Marxist-Leninists) would argue there needs to be a strong state to oversee the change from A to B while Anarcho-Communists argue there needs to be immediate change from A to B since the transitional period is irrelevant. Where-as Market Communists would suggest that in order to effectively shift to communism we need to - for a while - play nice in the global market place because there is at the moment still capitalist countries that can derail the revolution in much the same way Napoleon derailed the Revolution and when he got deposed Europe just replaced the entire French power structure with a king (to then depose).
I need to learn more about the different sects? Sects, right? Whatever. I think we're overstating the role of the government. Innovation isn't.... well, isn't USUALLY a product of the state. I don't know enough about like Roman aqueducts and that sort of thing. Wild horses don't need to be led to water, or, like, some other folksy metaphor for "fuck it we're prolly fine."
Because it shouldn't be Steve Job's property if he isn't laboring to actually grow the apple, and if in the future is laboring to grow the apple then it stands that no one should own the apple.
Fucking eat the apple and stop worrying about spooks, you'll feel better.
Dammit I told you once, it's called a Krautteste. Don't make me tell you a third time. I am the krautteste baron. Don't question it.
By market rules the most accesible product on the market is the most succesful. There's a reason Apple's iPhone actually doesn't lead the smart phone revolution despite being in some ways the superior product because it's such a carefully crafted self contained environment. But it's the Android and phones like it because they used open source Linex as its operating platform and didn't spend so much money for people to stare at paper on polished wooden tables in highly polished fiber-glass office-labs while sipping twenty-dollar mocha-capacinos. Android just did it and it's a tool that works well enough, can be used as a future platform for other shit, and is cheaper than the iShit.
Soooooooooooooo peg leg?
We can drop this thread if you like. I don't think we're arguing prosthetic development on equal, uh.... footing god damn it kill me.
Can I get a helicopter ride?
I still don't fully understand this meme.
Last I checked folks like Jefferson wanted more people to be involved because if there weren't more people involved then the system isn't valid.
He may have told slaves and women to fuck off, but at the least he wasn't saying the bankers and speculators should be the only ones to be involved.
Just the white landowners though lol. Okay, so maybe I should dial down the founders-worship a touch. BUT -- the people who got a say, back in the day, were the ones who had a financial stake in things. That worked great, right? Pay no attention to the slavery or civil war or repression or clubbings. Yeah. Okay. Yeah definitely dial back the founder-worship.
They didn't send a strongly worded letter. They fucking committed what we would happily call terrorism today.
Oh, posh. That's an act of petty vandalism, fit for the cover of Enquirer at the worst. The start of the American Revolution is more accurately (probably) attributed to the already-ongoing wars of the French and British within the context of global colonialism. If it weren't for all that, honestly our shenanigans never really rose to a level which should've warranted a war. Except maybe that Declaration... I guess that would probably merit a royal bitchslap.
I'm rambling. The Tea Party would never pass for terrorism. Unless you consider pouches of Earl Gray as citizens...... wait are you British?
Through deregulation, we are sowing the next recession, and if it is as bad as the last one, god help us all.
Insofar as growth is a necessary precursor to 'lack of growth,' sure.
Industrialism certainly is.
Just saying, "You didn't build that." Yeah, I get it, we should be careful about how we assign credit for all these wonderful things, but at the same time, the argument that capitalism has NOTHING to do with all these wonderful things is wholly unsupportable. Especially in light of all those command-economies in industrialized nations that failed miserably. Hypothetically, sure, we coulda got here without it in a thought experiment -- but we're here, and capitalism got us here.
My fear is that democracy is being slowly stifled by the needs of capitalism, and the inevitable result will be stagnation.
All fears are valid, I suppose. Mine is that we're increasingly saying "fuck democracy, we'll just do it with administrative or judicial power." If anything is killing democracy, in my estimation, that's it.
Is it corrupt or is it not corrupt? You are waffling, sir.
Not waffling. Pointing out that raw participation statistics in a free society (especially in a liberal democracy) don't mean what you are arguing. A basketball team can only manage to put five players on the court at a time, but soccer can put eleven. Is basketball FAILING?
AntiFa would be patriotic if
I'm gonna not, lol, this has been civil.
I suppose I can summarize my opinions on this thread in a statement; one of the dumbest things Marxists argue is that their philosophy will "End history", that they have the key to fixing every problem forever and always. I think the most alarming things coming from the capitalist apologist crowd nowadays is exactly that same thing. Capitalism has ended history. This is it. All of our current problems are not problems at all, but instead are the way things are supposed to be.
My argument is simply "this is working." Communism never has, and with the RoboLabor Singularity right around the corner, I think it's pretty silly to switch from a winning horse to a losing horse in the middle of the race.
it's.... so..... LONG!
...is what she said. Anyway. Moving on, and gratuitously cropping the discussion just so we're manageable going forwards (if I don't comment, assume the default answer is a chin-rubbing nod and a gentle "Hmm," but in like a sophisticated way, befitting the srs naychur of Spam threads)
Basque finally surrendered its last arms, and Spain is cool now I guess, but for the record, Spanish revolutionaries didn't stay cool forever. Granted, all I really learned of the Spanish Civil War came from Pan's Labyrinth, and at least in that depiction the government wasn't exactly cool either. I can find absolutely nothing negative to post about the Zapatistas, and as much as I generally appreciate Kurdish efforts to blast away at nasty people in the middle east, apparently lots of Kurdish groups are themselves terror networks and it's goddamn impossible for me to separate all the who's from all the other who's over yonder. Confuzzling. Anyway. I only commented to throw some more gas on that 'revolution fetish' catchphrase I pseudo-invented in the previous post, primarily because romanticizing the nobility of any one particular quasi-terrorist struggle is inherently dangerous. I'm sure Spanish anarchocommunists were generally sweet from (at a minimum) a few perspectives -- just saying.
Yeah Yugoslavia didn't really, ah, break that whole genocidal mold we were worrying about, in the end.... But you're certainly (implicitly?) correct that it's pretty unfair to lay THIS PARTICULAR mass-slaughter wholly at the feet of communism.
Real quick -- people have been arguing that since about 1782, so let's not put too much stock in the fear-mongering.
NOTABLY: cities run by leftists are also the ones falling apart and/or literally shooting themselves and/or burning themselves down while packed into a warehouse because they can't afford their own inflated rent and/or rioting about the damage in the city while damaging their city. Texas, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs.... they're doing just fine. Which of course begs the (admittedly pretty partisan) question, why the fuck would we listen to the other guy here? Ya know? I mean that's harsh, yeah, but.... come on now. The world's orange-est capitalist took power 100 days ago and the industry in these old manufacturing towns has been on a non-stop skyrocket ever since, slowing only when rumors began to swirl that he was't going to deregulate quite as much as people thought he might. Who left who behind again? The Rust Belt made their opinions on the matter quite clear, much to the chagrin of -- well, basically everybody else in the world. My own stated perspective aside, I'm taking their word for it.
Or any number of things in-between, or nothing. Teach a man to fish and he'll drink on weekends, give a man a living basic income and he'll eat forever. Give a man a 105" UHDTV and he'll forget he's supposed to eat. Inequality only matters in a context of scarcity. You walk past some untold number of Starbucks mugs every day, and even if you're not currently holding a starbucks mug yourself, it's simply not a big deal -- of course, if you're on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and the other guy is holding a snicker's bar, that's worth killing for.
The point being this: in a distant future where work is no longer required for production, even first-world problems are (logically and presumably) as rare as an actual genocide. Case in point -- nobody goes to war for control of emojis. You can already have as many emojis as you need, want, or accidentally utilize. Scarcity of emojis does not exist. The concept of struggling over them is ludicrous (at least it should be, I'm sure there's a guy). In the future we're talking about, basically everything is as readily available as emojis. I'll grant you that capitalism isn't prepared to deal with that -- sure. Communism DAMNED SURE isn't ready either; nobody is. It just so happens that Capitalism is taking us there, and for the life of me I can't think of a reason we should stop. Shit man that's gonna be awesome.
....and I started going forwards and realized you addressed some of that, but fuckit, we're doing long srs posts in spam now, this am me srs face.
...but like, why? We're in the garden of Eden, arguing over who gets to name the apple. Just fucking take some, have a bushel, call them Krauttestes if you want.
I absolutely get what you're saying -- it's just that this is so radically and empirically inferior to this. And I'm not, like, super patient about the gradually-improved-over-time process for like my actual limbs. I say that with the utmost respect and appreciation for all you small-arms dealers out there -- you're doing an awesome thing, and I hope someone's paying you lots of money to do it. Just.... you know. We've had, what, all of human history to figure out prosthetics? Then in the last fifteen years we started throwing actual money at it, and went from hooks and strings to fucking Evangelion in a decade. As the interested party, I'm going with money on this one.
I mean compare it to the similar period east/west counterparts. Capitalism generated wealth and Meemaw got to eat Chef Boyardi from her microwave oven. Communism generated poverty and Babushka got buried in a mass grave with political dissidents (assuming she hadn't been executed by the state for wearing glasses).
Dysfunctional is a strong word. For all we know, American politics is just boring (preposterous suggestion after last year, I know). Nonparticipation is only an issue if it's compulsory, and in the US it's only compulsory in the case of convicted felons. I'd hardly call that a crisis. In short: let's not spend too much effort trying to straighten the horns on a bull here. Maybe they SHOULD be curved.
I'm jumbled a bit. Sounds like what you're saying is essentially that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. My meme-level response is that Communism doesn't equal liberty and AntiFa ain't patriots -- flesh that out in your mind, what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al agonized over the decision to go to war with England -- not out of cowardice or their inability to be effective, but out of wisdom. More frequently than the proponents of glorious revolution would care to admit, the goons running around cracking skulls are just that -- goons.
...is what she said. Anyway. Moving on, and gratuitously cropping the discussion just so we're manageable going forwards (if I don't comment, assume the default answer is a chin-rubbing nod and a gentle "Hmm," but in like a sophisticated way, befitting the srs naychur of Spam threads)
Communists and Anarchists partook in part during the Spanish Civil War in the thirties and among the Republican ranks held considerable sway and actually administrated their own land. I have heard in cases they were more productive in their use of land and labor than before and George Orwell has written positively about the revolutionary egalitarian spirit found in Anarchist Spain at the time, calling it the mystique that attracts men to Socialism in the first place.
...
More recently we have post-Bookchin groups like the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico advocating for absolute horizontal democracy among the population there and the Rojava Kurds asking very much the same
Basque finally surrendered its last arms, and Spain is cool now I guess, but for the record, Spanish revolutionaries didn't stay cool forever. Granted, all I really learned of the Spanish Civil War came from Pan's Labyrinth, and at least in that depiction the government wasn't exactly cool either. I can find absolutely nothing negative to post about the Zapatistas, and as much as I generally appreciate Kurdish efforts to blast away at nasty people in the middle east, apparently lots of Kurdish groups are themselves terror networks and it's goddamn impossible for me to separate all the who's from all the other who's over yonder. Confuzzling. Anyway. I only commented to throw some more gas on that 'revolution fetish' catchphrase I pseudo-invented in the previous post, primarily because romanticizing the nobility of any one particular quasi-terrorist struggle is inherently dangerous. I'm sure Spanish anarchocommunists were generally sweet from (at a minimum) a few perspectives -- just saying.
Tito's major flaw though would probably have been his penchant for allowing greater and great autonomy among the constituent nations of Yugoslavia and/or a failure to ensure a stable government for after his passing and failure to negate nearly an entire region's history of animosity towards one another.
Yeah Yugoslavia didn't really, ah, break that whole genocidal mold we were worrying about, in the end.... But you're certainly (implicitly?) correct that it's pretty unfair to lay THIS PARTICULAR mass-slaughter wholly at the feet of communism.
To tackle this: good for you. However, it doesn't do much to change the fact there's a wealth shift going on in this country. Peter Temin of MIT has released a study on this, here's an article. And here's another. The basic idea is we're falling apart fast, and as he's even quoted:
“America is not only reverting to developing-country status, it is increasingly ripe for serious social turmoil that has not been seen in generations.”
Real quick -- people have been arguing that since about 1782, so let's not put too much stock in the fear-mongering.
And while the area around a new mall has repaved the highway to make it first world, Detroit, Baltimore, Appalachia, and Newark are falling apart as the eyes and interests of the nation leave them behind because now they got to spend on the fashionable coast where the middle class are going. [+some more snipped stuff, but let's highlight this part first and then seamlessly flow]
NOTABLY: cities run by leftists are also the ones falling apart and/or literally shooting themselves and/or burning themselves down while packed into a warehouse because they can't afford their own inflated rent and/or rioting about the damage in the city while damaging their city. Texas, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs.... they're doing just fine. Which of course begs the (admittedly pretty partisan) question, why the fuck would we listen to the other guy here? Ya know? I mean that's harsh, yeah, but.... come on now. The world's orange-est capitalist took power 100 days ago and the industry in these old manufacturing towns has been on a non-stop skyrocket ever since, slowing only when rumors began to swirl that he was't going to deregulate quite as much as people thought he might. Who left who behind again? The Rust Belt made their opinions on the matter quite clear, much to the chagrin of -- well, basically everybody else in the world. My own stated perspective aside, I'm taking their word for it.
To answer the end question first: my primary concern over the course of things is letting such a small group of people have such control over our lives, and to without necessary input of labor by the consuming body of the population enjoy a quality of life in excess of the rest of us. This may either lead to a sort of hardcore Swedish-”Socialism” by necessity with living wages granted to every individual irregardless of activity, or we riot and everything goes full post-Rome as Vilage doesn't want to happen in his life-time.
Or any number of things in-between, or nothing. Teach a man to fish and he'll drink on weekends, give a man a living basic income and he'll eat forever. Give a man a 105" UHDTV and he'll forget he's supposed to eat. Inequality only matters in a context of scarcity. You walk past some untold number of Starbucks mugs every day, and even if you're not currently holding a starbucks mug yourself, it's simply not a big deal -- of course, if you're on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and the other guy is holding a snicker's bar, that's worth killing for.
The point being this: in a distant future where work is no longer required for production, even first-world problems are (logically and presumably) as rare as an actual genocide. Case in point -- nobody goes to war for control of emojis. You can already have as many emojis as you need, want, or accidentally utilize. Scarcity of emojis does not exist. The concept of struggling over them is ludicrous (at least it should be, I'm sure there's a guy). In the future we're talking about, basically everything is as readily available as emojis. I'll grant you that capitalism isn't prepared to deal with that -- sure. Communism DAMNED SURE isn't ready either; nobody is. It just so happens that Capitalism is taking us there, and for the life of me I can't think of a reason we should stop. Shit man that's gonna be awesome.
....and I started going forwards and realized you addressed some of that, but fuckit, we're doing long srs posts in spam now, this am me srs face.
But we could still fulfil certain conditions of communism by way of workers control of the means of production with some adaptation.
...but like, why? We're in the garden of Eden, arguing over who gets to name the apple. Just fucking take some, have a bushel, call them Krauttestes if you want.
But this argues that reward is necessary for something to become better. But the recent trend towards opensource/open access software and hardware. While perhaps it may not survive a nuclear blast, Easton LaChapelle's open-source prosthetic hand is totally open and free to tinker with on your own time. Just like the code for the internet. It's not going to be massive an noticeable sweeping change like with what you would get for getting a DARPA grant, the method of open sourcing effectively means that the product will be gradually improved over time, and in the spirit of open source may even become part of the product for free for the next guy.
I absolutely get what you're saying -- it's just that this is so radically and empirically inferior to this. And I'm not, like, super patient about the gradually-improved-over-time process for like my actual limbs. I say that with the utmost respect and appreciation for all you small-arms dealers out there -- you're doing an awesome thing, and I hope someone's paying you lots of money to do it. Just.... you know. We've had, what, all of human history to figure out prosthetics? Then in the last fifteen years we started throwing actual money at it, and went from hooks and strings to fucking Evangelion in a decade. As the interested party, I'm going with money on this one.
It would be argued that disability in east and west traveled on much the same course so attempting to compare the two is a strained effort because it's comparing something from the 40's or 70's to today.
I mean compare it to the similar period east/west counterparts. Capitalism generated wealth and Meemaw got to eat Chef Boyardi from her microwave oven. Communism generated poverty and Babushka got buried in a mass grave with political dissidents (assuming she hadn't been executed by the state for wearing glasses).
At consistently below 50% of the population participating in elections at all, it might be said that government in the US has a very low mandate to even exist.
...
It would be supposed then that if the country's democratic process has become dysfunctional, then action is needed.
Dysfunctional is a strong word. For all we know, American politics is just boring (preposterous suggestion after last year, I know). Nonparticipation is only an issue if it's compulsory, and in the US it's only compulsory in the case of convicted felons. I'd hardly call that a crisis. In short: let's not spend too much effort trying to straighten the horns on a bull here. Maybe they SHOULD be curved.
Violence if [sic -- "isn't," I think] preferable, but of the actions it's one that produces results, it's just the political management after and how the pre-existing structure of the previous state is managed to conduct what ends are needed.
I'm jumbled a bit. Sounds like what you're saying is essentially that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. My meme-level response is that Communism doesn't equal liberty and AntiFa ain't patriots -- flesh that out in your mind, what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al agonized over the decision to go to war with England -- not out of cowardice or their inability to be effective, but out of wisdom. More frequently than the proponents of glorious revolution would care to admit, the goons running around cracking skulls are just that -- goons.
I don't give a shit. Does that make me both a sexist and a racist?
Unfortunately that makes you a Presbyterian.
Here we go, a real one!
This provides some insight (to me anyway) on the disconnect within the US. See, here, every time the right wing says "Hey, we really need to decentralize power to avoid a totalitarian state," the left freaks the fuck out. Here in the US, present day, the left and the communists are conflated (to what extent exactly is up for debate, but there's a conflation there). Part of that, certainly, is old-school cold war era propaganda, and also, part of it is the idealistic appropriation of the left. Not intending to point fingers, merely to express this: you're talking about the one thing (small government, empowered population, democratic representation at the local level, etc) and that's a FAAAAAAaaaaar different thing than "communism," as it exists (conceptually or otherwise) in the present day. So to converse properly, we each have to understand one key thing (and I get the sensation that we each recognize it already): that the brand of communism which you discuss is neither the mainstream, nor one that has existed in any nation in the history of the earth.
Am I wrong? I'll just continue on the assumption that I'm not wrong. It's more constructive that way, and apparently that matters in Spam of all places.
It's similarly notable that Marx had a lot less history of Marxist (and/or so-called Marxist) governments to draw from. I'd love to see an intellectually honest follow-up from his ghost, written in 2017, but hey. Anywho I've never heard of Kropotkin in my entire life, so I'm woefully outgunned here. I'll take your word for it.
I don't have one single issue with the dissolution of federal power. For that matter, if California wants to go full-on socialist, I don't think Texas should have any power whatsoever to prevent it (property issues notwithstanding), if you catch my drift. If "all politics are local politics" as the adage says, then why are we ruled by 545 strangers in Washington with a single-digit collective approval rating? Split that shit up. One shouldn't have to secede from the union to achieve a degree of self-determination.
In my estimation, the disruption of federalization is not a communist issue. In light of that, the snipped, split, and quoted section of your post -- while intriguing and light-shedding and a bit educational -- isn't really relevant to the conversation. Like if I told you that Christianity preaches charitable giving, and you agree that charitable giving is the tits, that's still a bit of a red herring when it comes to the "is there a god" conversation, no? Anyway. The clever bit in all this is, in no way shape or form does this communist vision, which you're conveying well, resemble whatsoever the version peddled in the OP. So going back to that whole conflation bit, communism has a bit of a branding issue and I think that explains at least part of the at-each-others'-throats nature of any conversation on the subject. Communism apparently means whatever anybody wants, and in (so-called) practice it has only ever produced tyranny, genocide, and abject state failure. So yeah, we on the right tend to come in hot a little bit, but like..... you know.....
Arguably we all benefit today. The only sticking point is that I don't actually OWN the big shopping mall that agreed to rebuild 60 miles of aging highway in exchange for development rights -- but I still get to drive on it, I still get to shop at the mall, I still get to walk around the park they built. There's a bit of a false-binary here, by which it's implied that the rational self-interest of capitalism benefits only the self, and the shared interest of communism benefits only the community. The limosines of the ruling party, and the electric self-driving space trains or whatever of Elon Musk, should put that right to bed. Interest, benefit, and the common good are not political issues at all. We don't need to radically alter the political makeup to control or achieve them; to do so invites, well, Stalin, Mao, Kim, Chavez, Castro, etc. We, collectively, should only alter the political structure when it is in OUR interest to do so -- when WE are the ones taking advantage (a la American Revolution, French Revolution, and pretty much every other good one in history). Capitalist? Yup. Good for the community? Yup.
Backtracking -- because I clipped rather a lot, and got distracted by that last point.....
Yeah, the labor picture is gonna be RADICALLY different in a very short while (if you think 3D-printed industrial tools and robot factories are an issue, just wait until we get self-driving semi trucks). What you're leaving out, though, is that the notion of scarcity is radically changing right along with it. Maybe in a hundred years we're not gonna have the kind of workforce participation we've counted as essential to the functioning of society...... but also you'll be able to fly to New Hampshire in your pickup truck to grab unobtanium for your phase-assembler for like a buck, if and when your phase-assembler ever runs out, and the clever, self-interested money-makers will STILL be looking for better ways to build a mousetrap so they can get more spacebucks. To categorize this as 'slavery to the wealthy' (my words) is rather pessimistic -- slavery, when all labor is robotic anyway? To what extent can tyranny even exist in the first place, in such a world? I garner no horror, no concern whatsoever from the prospect of a mechanized future workforce. It's the part between here and there that concerns the shit out of me. Into what corners will we legislate ourselves in this interim? How much (human, apparently) sacrifice are we going to tolerate, in order to arm the toilet-scrubbers of the Indobekistania with soon-to-be-obsolete manufacturing talents? Why are we revolutioning again? What is the goddamn point?
Democracy is also known (to Toqueville anyway) as the "tyranny of the majority." To consider a revolution with democracy in it is a bit of a conundrum, innit? Because, if your democracy needs to violently compel people to play along, does that represent self-determination anymore? Is that even democracy anymore? Remember that concept of self-determination is what drives revolution in the first place (else what's the goddamn point -- "We VIOLENTLY REFUSE TO HAVE A SAY!"). Communism which must compel even one citizen to participate, dooms itself to counter-revolution. I seem to recall that being part of the whole idea.... whatever. My point is, this can only work at a local level, and even then it's very iffy.
Problem.
So here's a riddle for you. I'm disabled -- missing a leg. Let's magically transplant me into Communism 2050 -- we've got some pretty sweet robot legs, and I'm part of the community so I own one. Now let's say I want a better one. Who devises it, and why?
See today, Ossur invents the Genium X3 because they won a contract from DARPA to develop a microprocessor-controlled knee which can withstand water, sand, fire, and (allegedly) a gunshot, with a battery that lasts a week and recharges in four hours, and weighs less than eight pounds. In exchange, Ossur gets a shitload of money, and when they make a better leg, they get a shitload more.
So in Communism 2050 -- why are they building an X4? I've already got an X3, and we both already own everything. My accommodation is already sufficient that I should be plenty capable of sculpturing or whatever it is I'm allowed to do. If it costs one unit of unobtanium to feed an average citizen, but two units of unobtanium to build me a better leg, what right do I have to a better leg?
It's a riddle. Bear in mind, collectives in the past have not been kind to the differently-abled -- we were offed along with the other undesirables in just about every genocide in history. Frankly we're more trusting than we ought to be, and any disabled person with any kind of experience in social healthcare (be it VA, NHS, or elsewhere) has the scars to prove it.
Violence is a fickle thing, wielded far more often by those in the wrong than by those in the right. Do not embrace it easily. We (the people arguing against communism atm) are flagging this because it's like "Well, we're gonna have to crack some skulls. OH WELL. We won't shoot guys we like." That's not how you empower a community, that's how you empower a tyrannical group (which may, admittedly, hold a temporary ideological majority, and thus have 'some democracy in it'). Communism in general has a revolution fetish and that should REALLY give you pause.
But anyways, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita argues in his book The Dictator's Handbook that the stability and a strength within a democracy is its egalitarianism.
...
Basically, like with America's second amendment the theory here would be the workers should be allowed to be armed and assemble into militias to defend themselves should a government attempt to reorganize labor and to centralize it. It's a threat of physical terror to keep the Vanguard in check.
This provides some insight (to me anyway) on the disconnect within the US. See, here, every time the right wing says "Hey, we really need to decentralize power to avoid a totalitarian state," the left freaks the fuck out. Here in the US, present day, the left and the communists are conflated (to what extent exactly is up for debate, but there's a conflation there). Part of that, certainly, is old-school cold war era propaganda, and also, part of it is the idealistic appropriation of the left. Not intending to point fingers, merely to express this: you're talking about the one thing (small government, empowered population, democratic representation at the local level, etc) and that's a FAAAAAAaaaaar different thing than "communism," as it exists (conceptually or otherwise) in the present day. So to converse properly, we each have to understand one key thing (and I get the sensation that we each recognize it already): that the brand of communism which you discuss is neither the mainstream, nor one that has existed in any nation in the history of the earth.
Am I wrong? I'll just continue on the assumption that I'm not wrong. It's more constructive that way, and apparently that matters in Spam of all places.
It's also notable the time Marx wrote his theories, in the early half of the 19th century. He had access to a different and not entirely fully developed body of scholarly work, study, and industrial development than perhaps the likes of Kropotkin and the development of Anarcho Communism in the later half of the century. Under Marx there would need to be a Vanguard body to guide society to a point of post-scarcity under which they'd dissolve authority to the workers when there needed to be less oversight. Though by Kropotkin's predictions this Vanguard would turn, and forty-years after he wrote Conquest of Bread Stalin happened.
It's similarly notable that Marx had a lot less history of Marxist (and/or so-called Marxist) governments to draw from. I'd love to see an intellectually honest follow-up from his ghost, written in 2017, but hey. Anywho I've never heard of Kropotkin in my entire life, so I'm woefully outgunned here. I'll take your word for it.
I would suggest that should a revolution happen it needs to happen on a certain American model with power not vested in a single Vanguard body but local or regional bodies handling local affairs with a federal body in a relationship much like what we have or had with the federal government today, and the nature of senators and representatives becoming more like delegates to the national congress. But this gets into a whole other thing.
In short: broader democratic control prevents or makes less likely dictatorial control when all people have the freedom to dictate, discuss, and practice their own government on the understanding there's a mandate that nothing should at least permanently be given to a single person or representative body.
Begin arguing, party splitters.
I don't have one single issue with the dissolution of federal power. For that matter, if California wants to go full-on socialist, I don't think Texas should have any power whatsoever to prevent it (property issues notwithstanding), if you catch my drift. If "all politics are local politics" as the adage says, then why are we ruled by 545 strangers in Washington with a single-digit collective approval rating? Split that shit up. One shouldn't have to secede from the union to achieve a degree of self-determination.
In my estimation, the disruption of federalization is not a communist issue. In light of that, the snipped, split, and quoted section of your post -- while intriguing and light-shedding and a bit educational -- isn't really relevant to the conversation. Like if I told you that Christianity preaches charitable giving, and you agree that charitable giving is the tits, that's still a bit of a red herring when it comes to the "is there a god" conversation, no? Anyway. The clever bit in all this is, in no way shape or form does this communist vision, which you're conveying well, resemble whatsoever the version peddled in the OP. So going back to that whole conflation bit, communism has a bit of a branding issue and I think that explains at least part of the at-each-others'-throats nature of any conversation on the subject. Communism apparently means whatever anybody wants, and in (so-called) practice it has only ever produced tyranny, genocide, and abject state failure. So yeah, we on the right tend to come in hot a little bit, but like..... you know.....
One of the big things I get from communists, or used to hear several years back was that in this societal structure people would have free access to the information and education needed to move from one trade to another based on his own whims or wants.
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If it's in our communities, it belongs to us and we can all benefit.
Arguably we all benefit today. The only sticking point is that I don't actually OWN the big shopping mall that agreed to rebuild 60 miles of aging highway in exchange for development rights -- but I still get to drive on it, I still get to shop at the mall, I still get to walk around the park they built. There's a bit of a false-binary here, by which it's implied that the rational self-interest of capitalism benefits only the self, and the shared interest of communism benefits only the community. The limosines of the ruling party, and the electric self-driving space trains or whatever of Elon Musk, should put that right to bed. Interest, benefit, and the common good are not political issues at all. We don't need to radically alter the political makeup to control or achieve them; to do so invites, well, Stalin, Mao, Kim, Chavez, Castro, etc. We, collectively, should only alter the political structure when it is in OUR interest to do so -- when WE are the ones taking advantage (a la American Revolution, French Revolution, and pretty much every other good one in history). Capitalist? Yup. Good for the community? Yup.
Backtracking -- because I clipped rather a lot, and got distracted by that last point.....
Yeah, the labor picture is gonna be RADICALLY different in a very short while (if you think 3D-printed industrial tools and robot factories are an issue, just wait until we get self-driving semi trucks). What you're leaving out, though, is that the notion of scarcity is radically changing right along with it. Maybe in a hundred years we're not gonna have the kind of workforce participation we've counted as essential to the functioning of society...... but also you'll be able to fly to New Hampshire in your pickup truck to grab unobtanium for your phase-assembler for like a buck, if and when your phase-assembler ever runs out, and the clever, self-interested money-makers will STILL be looking for better ways to build a mousetrap so they can get more spacebucks. To categorize this as 'slavery to the wealthy' (my words) is rather pessimistic -- slavery, when all labor is robotic anyway? To what extent can tyranny even exist in the first place, in such a world? I garner no horror, no concern whatsoever from the prospect of a mechanized future workforce. It's the part between here and there that concerns the shit out of me. Into what corners will we legislate ourselves in this interim? How much (human, apparently) sacrifice are we going to tolerate, in order to arm the toilet-scrubbers of the Indobekistania with soon-to-be-obsolete manufacturing talents? Why are we revolutioning again? What is the goddamn point?
Group decision is a fundamental part of communism, and is why Hungary revolted against the Stalinists in the 50's. The argument of strong-Vanguard parties like the Marxist-Leninists is that a strong central authority is needed to guide society to a point where it can be democratically run. But by holding power the Marxist-Leninist institutions of Stalin and Mao created a second Bourgiese class that derailed the goal, and then again come Krushchev and Deng Xiaopeng.
Orthodox Marxism, and even orthodox Luxembourgism/SocDem is that there needs to be democracy in the revolution.
Democracy is also known (to Toqueville anyway) as the "tyranny of the majority." To consider a revolution with democracy in it is a bit of a conundrum, innit? Because, if your democracy needs to violently compel people to play along, does that represent self-determination anymore? Is that even democracy anymore? Remember that concept of self-determination is what drives revolution in the first place (else what's the goddamn point -- "We VIOLENTLY REFUSE TO HAVE A SAY!"). Communism which must compel even one citizen to participate, dooms itself to counter-revolution. I seem to recall that being part of the whole idea.... whatever. My point is, this can only work at a local level, and even then it's very iffy.
See above. DemSoc/SocDem is part of the Marxist lineage, though in the west it derailed itself in the twenties and thirties in most of the west to ascribe to Keynesian economics than anything else. Unless it can be fixed, modern SocDem/Labour will probably always be the party of John Meynard Keynes
Problem.
To some, the disabled or elderly can still benefit the society as a whole, just not involved directly in the labor process as the younger generation. The old model of the nuclear family would have three generations living in the same house or close together so the elderly can at the least help raise the children as their own children work or perform their own labor to sustain both generations. But if the fundamental goal of Communism is to get to a point where labor is slowly minimized and the means of production of commonly owned by all men then notions of disability and age is all but irrelevant. According to the ends of Kropotkin at least the goals of communism would be to make physical labor irrelevant, ownership nonexistent, and that the individual can put more time into cultural and artistic pursuits to advance society's artistic and cultural richness and less its material.
So here's a riddle for you. I'm disabled -- missing a leg. Let's magically transplant me into Communism 2050 -- we've got some pretty sweet robot legs, and I'm part of the community so I own one. Now let's say I want a better one. Who devises it, and why?
See today, Ossur invents the Genium X3 because they won a contract from DARPA to develop a microprocessor-controlled knee which can withstand water, sand, fire, and (allegedly) a gunshot, with a battery that lasts a week and recharges in four hours, and weighs less than eight pounds. In exchange, Ossur gets a shitload of money, and when they make a better leg, they get a shitload more.
So in Communism 2050 -- why are they building an X4? I've already got an X3, and we both already own everything. My accommodation is already sufficient that I should be plenty capable of sculpturing or whatever it is I'm allowed to do. If it costs one unit of unobtanium to feed an average citizen, but two units of unobtanium to build me a better leg, what right do I have to a better leg?
It's a riddle. Bear in mind, collectives in the past have not been kind to the differently-abled -- we were offed along with the other undesirables in just about every genocide in history. Frankly we're more trusting than we ought to be, and any disabled person with any kind of experience in social healthcare (be it VA, NHS, or elsewhere) has the scars to prove it.
...if violence was totally out of the question we wouldn't have had the liberal revolutions we had, either out of the notable use of violence to achieve it or the threat of violence.
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To get the demands they wanted it was best for them to physically take control of the factory and literally seize it.
Violence is a fickle thing, wielded far more often by those in the wrong than by those in the right. Do not embrace it easily. We (the people arguing against communism atm) are flagging this because it's like "Well, we're gonna have to crack some skulls. OH WELL. We won't shoot guys we like." That's not how you empower a community, that's how you empower a tyrannical group (which may, admittedly, hold a temporary ideological majority, and thus have 'some democracy in it'). Communism in general has a revolution fetish and that should REALLY give you pause.
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That's one way to put it. Not the right way, but a way.
Also, quips are much more fun. And effective. I mean shit I never saw you get this riled up over thoughtful pedantry.
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fair enough, I looked in the last 10 or so pages and I don't see anything. maybe I'm going off old info and you stopped pretending.
It's like Trump said. I got tired of winning.
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yeah but you come in acting like you want to have a discussion or reasonably discuss something, but instead you just take the piss when people do respond.
Show me. Show me one place where I acted like I wanted to have a discussion or reasonably discuss this crock.
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