Pretty Sure That The Massive Industrialization Experienced Largely By The North, And The Development

Depends on how we define "violence" and "outcomes". On the one hand, the 1993 World Trade Center attack. On the other hand, the 2001 World Trade Center Attack.

And even if right-wing terror didn't prevent Roe vs. Wade, it certainly resulted in several dead abortion doctors and a presumably significant amount of foiled abortions-no doubt percieved as victories in and of themselves.

Over the years I've found myself more and more frustrated with the American left for one specific reason: a lack of violent direct action. Sure we'll picket and we'll insult people on twitter, but nobody's picking up guns or throwing molotov cocktails. We're all cowards and none of us are willing to die for the cause.

The reason for this is that "dying for the cause" is useless, regardless of how sexy you may find it. Violent direct action is a waste of time (and often counterproductive) outside of a very specific set of political conditions, even if one totally ignores the ethics of it. The US right spent decades violently attacking dozens of abortion clinics and literally bombing the Olympics in their attempts to outlaw abortion, and all of these efforts combined have had a smaller impact on the issue than one singular court decision made possible by an incredibly boring “long march through the institutions” in law schools, legislatures, courts, agencies, etc.

Everyone wants to be the cool guy holding a molotov in own their individualist fantasies, no one wants to do serious work that actually produces outcomes. Everyone wants to die for the cause because it is easier than living for the cause.

Laws against feeding the homeless remind me of a recent conversation I had about the "Nordic model" of prostitution where Johns/customers are arrested but the prostitutes are left unpenalized: it's breathtakingly hypocritical, and the moral contradictions within bourgeois liberalism are evident. Apparently lawmakers believe that a woman is not oppressed when she is forced by circumstance to sell herself on the street to pay for rent and groceries, but only when the proper individual oppressor (a man) buys her services. (What about woman who hire female prostitutes, or male-on-male sex work?) Similarly, a person is not oppressed by homelesness, exposure to the elements, or the likely accompanying drug addiction, mental illness, and despair, but God forbid we violate any hygiene laws while feeding them!

You know what makes me mad? I used to work at Pizza hut and everyday we would have to throw away perfectly good pizza or potato wedges or garlic bread in the bin because it was the wrong order or the customer had changed their mind. They made us bin the whole thing. We weren’t allowed to put it aside to eat from or take it home (we all earned minimum wage so it’s not like we culd afford pizza that expensive a lot). But what makes me even madder is that they could easily give that to the homeless or poor. Like, if a homeless person came into the store, we could have easily given him one of the 20 or so pizzas that we would be binning every single day anyway. Imagine all the pizza hut stores in the world. Imagine each and every one throwing away on average 20 pizzas a day. Imagine how many people that would feed. Fuck corporations man.

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

While the ML's/3rd worldists are correct that the US enjoys imperial privileges, there's so much that the US could do to improve the quality of life for its citizens that would be entirely domestic in nature, or even beneficial to foreign workers. For example, taxing the domestic wealthy to fund a higher minimum wage and safer workplaces would be a massive benefit to both American and Mexican workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and I think that a lot of ML's claim otherwise as a way of rationalizing the lack of leftist policy achievements in the US; like the only reason that California can't have zoning reform is because it's somehow mutually exclusive with stationing carriers in Okinawa and thus The Powers That Be would never allow it, rather than it being a difficult and politically unpopular fight that no one really wants to wage.

It's so funny to see a lot of western leftists who are so disgusted by the idea of marxism-leninism that all they can conceive of is like... so long as we can have a high minimum wage here and free healthcare and affordable housing everything will be fine, as if that is all that matters because these people don't actually care about the global south and the fact that those benefits are imperial in nature lol

We will never know their names.

The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it - victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done - humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow.  In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.

For a long time, there was no hope - only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.

In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.

It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it - but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.

At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.

The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.

The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.

They found none.

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I agree with you; everyone thinks that their values and groups are sacred and beyond criticism. As a result, we fight over which policies are humanitarian without making sure that we actually agree on what "humanitarianism" is.

My reply to your original post was because it seemed to imply that progressives were/are incapable of acting upon anything but cynical power politics, when something closer to the opposite is true, I think: progressives genuinely support a particular, tribally informed form of humanitarianism that may not represent the country's (let alone humanity's) as a whole. The same holds true for most of the rest of us.

Likewise, I’d be willing to agree to a number of things progressives might want on immigration, but only in such a way that it would utterly ruin any political advantage they were hoping to gain from it.

If the concern is purely humanitarian and not political, they’d agree to the bargain, but of course it never was actually pure.

Economic competition has also intensified to the point where shitty work conditions can happen without any real interference or conscious directions from the higher ups; all you need is the misery that comes from trying to adjust to constant, rapid technological change, the pyschological pressures of marketing in the digital age, and managing customer satisfaction in an era of instant gratification. More than ever, your boss is probably just as miserable as you, if not even worse off, which leads to a perverse kind of vertical solidarity where people identify more with their superiors than with their counterparts in different industries.

This is a thing I’ve kinda danced around saying a lot, and when the time comes for me to give my full-ass explanation it’s probs gonna be pages long but for now I’m gonna see if I can give a smaller but more functional example.

a problem, I think, with some of the more sloganeering parts of communist talkin’ on here is the image of “the boss.” The image where anyone at your job who’s higher than the lowliest pleb and/or your current job status is a cigar-chomping, pocketwatch-wearing tycoon, with a schedule that just says “laugh + roll in money.”

Which boss? My supervisor? The guy doing the exact same work as I am when he isn’t busy taking calls? My other supervisor, the retirement-age woman working two jobs and 60+ hour weeks on her feet to cover living expenses? You’d have to go two or three steps up the chain of command before you got to what was basically a mediocre office job with decent pay, and is that really the face of the traitorous capitalist bourgeois class?

I mean make no mistake, the very top of the chain – the people who owned the business – were, for all intents and purposes, a hereditary monarchy, whose every interaction with us had a distinct air of “happy now, peasants?”  but “my boss” and “company CEO” are not synonyms.

Humans : correct in making leap from wealth as currency to wealth as energy. But logic failure : wealth ultimately is extension of desires, fluctuating with emotions and state of mind. Desires : when all are supported in purely adaptable system, true wealth is achieved.

-Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human : Nature"

7 Points of Green Accelerationism

this is maybe the most coherent political ideology I’ve ever had, I’m kind of excited: 1) Climate change is irreversible.  There is no way - other than an arbitrarily restrictive and probably needlessly difficult exercise in self-terraforming - we are going to return to anything resembling a “natural” Earth system.  If there are specific aspects of the current ecosystem we would wish to conserve - such as biodiversity, temperate weather, specific local equilibria - we must isolate them from any presumed set of “natural” interrelations and figure out how to influence new conditions to maintain and generate them in new ways.  2) Climate change is not a crisis based on scarcity or depletion of resources for consumption. It is quite literally a surplus of productive solar energy in the Earth system which its current structures are inadequate to use productively or expend, and which unused can only destroy.  Some proportion of solar energy must always be wasted (Bataille), and our current systems have little or no effective control of this waste; where they do, the forms it takes are not desirable. The “accursed share” must be decided on and disposed of collectively and rationally; the share that can be used productively can and should be maximized.  Climate change can and should be seen as a positive opportunity; attempts to simply “mitigate” instead of harnessing it are not only doomed but regressive. 3) In a non-orthogonal, unconditional sense, all of this (the Anthropocene, the formation of radically new systems of energy circulation) will inevitably happen regardless of our efforts.  The goals of “Green Accelerationist” praxis, therefore, should be understood in strictly political terms (and from my stake in this comes in, leftist ones: the capacity for productive energy use and the right to a say in destructive expenditure should be fairly distributed, not only among humans but, as far as possible, throughout the biosphere as a whole).  However the most effective methods for achieving those goals will likely be found as far from the “political” as currently understood as possible.  All present “political” institutions - states, activist organizations, - are as obsolete as the ecological ones, and will only drain any energy invested in them.  The “economic”, as a direct site of energy circulation, is a more useful site of contestation, and traditional working class tactics of organization and disruption will likely remain valuable tools for redirecting energy into more sustainable cycles.  However, the “technical” (including not only positive acts of production, but hacking and sabotage) will become a probably more important site of political contestation, as well as (to an extent identical) the “ecological” itself.  Different technologies will open radically different political and ecological prospects - and different social deployments of technologies conversely must be thought of as technically, not only politically, different.  Technology, ecology and politics are no longer feasibly separable: they are all concerned with directing energy circulation at a global scale. 4) Technical development as a form of praxis must not be allowed to be monopolized by existing institutions such as corporations, universities and governments, which determine its current “political” character.  We must not treat the control of technology by obsolete and reactionary forms as a politically neutral fact whose products are then to be harnessed and regulated by a separate “politics”, as in naive forms of “ecomodernism”.  Control of the means of research and development is as if not more important to political outcomes in the near term than control of existing means of production.  Making scientific research widely accessible is perhaps the most significant struggle currently being fought; it should be understood as the minimal precondition for almost any effective ecological praxis. 5) Green Accelerationism should be distinguished from naive ecomodernism, not only in its radical approach to the specific conditions of technical development, but in adopting a general critique of extractivism.  Extractivism is a specific, dangerous, ineffective and inherently reactionary technical, ecological and political formation that treats vast swathes of sophisticated circulatory infrastructure purely as sites of energy extraction for a small set of processes.  Extractivism should not be conflated with technology itself, whose role is now to design as many new mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships as possible. 6) Green Accelerationism should strive not only for interdependence but independence, not only for humans or an economic or national elite but for as many living beings as possible.  With a large energetic surplus and sophisticated, redundant social, political & ecological technologies permitting a wide multiplicity of sustainable relationships, the coercive dimension of ecological interrelation (understood by the Enlightenment as “nature”) can be minimized. Nor should we limit our sights to the “terrestrial”.  Access to the resources, energy and literal space of the rest of the universe would increase the flexibility and resilience of systems on Earth to change, as well as allowing greater individual independence for individuals.  Clean space travel is an ideal non-destructive outlet for excess energy that cannot be redirected into circulation on Earth. 7) The category of “ecology” resolves the antinomy of “praxis” and “anti-praxis” posed by the Unconditional Accelerationists.  No single element, including the human, within an ecological process can direct it, but ecological relationships are always reciprocal, even if unintentionally: struggling to adapt and struggling to influence are the same.  Green Accelerationism, however, emphatically rejects the claims that powerful nonlinear, nonhuman processes are incomprehensible - perhaps by humans, but the act of comprehension itself can be ecologically distributed - and that (extractive) “technocapital” is out of all of these inevitably the most powerful, except insofar as any combination of energy and intelligent organization is “technocapital”, a definition that obscures the territorialization of energy flows at present by a specific extractive class that is inadequate to the force it has unleashed.  Technocapital is not the genie, it is the bottle. The unharnessed share of solar energy increasingly exceeds that enclosed in existing “technocapital”.  Whoever or whatever controls this share controls the future.  

It's hard to look at senior politicians like McConnel or Pelosi and conclude that experienced politicians are somehow any more resistant to lobbyists than freshmen. Fundamentally Congress relies on lobbyists because the government has to interface with the private sector at some point, and certain private interests can make or break the fortunes of entire states. Even Bernie will jump when Lockheed Martin (a major employer in Vermont) tells him to. But this list is definitely a good starting place.

What sort of reforms would you suggest if you think term limits for Congress would be bad/more corrupt? I don't see how it would be any more corrupt than how things currently are. It's too late for me to think too in depth right now on it, but I feel like it would be harder for lobbyists to sink their teeth into a politician if they can only serve a maximum of X years. People that can just be voted in every single election would be more likely to be corrupt imo.

And how do you feel about term limits for the supreme court?

On the contrary, it is much easier for lobbyists to sink their teeth into new members of congress. New members of congress who want to survive have a strong need for legislative information and institutional experience; professional lobbyists have both, and are very eager to build relationships with the new lawmakers who need it. This is why there's an event attended by all new members of congress which is basically a convention led by lobbyists and business executives. Term limits do mean lobbyists have to create new relationships more often, but they're also the easiest type of relationship to make.

Grose, et. al. (2022): "Our survey reveals that lobbyists in states with term limits reported meetings [with legislators] in social settings more frequently than lobbyists in states without term limits (e.g., 79% of lobbyists in term-limits states met a legislator at a coffee shop and 65% in states with no term limits; p≤:01)."

I have a long list of ideas for reforming congress but if we're talking about addressing corruption specifically:

Ban members of congress, their spouses, and their senior staffers from owning individual stocks, instead requiring them to keep all of their money in pre-approved mutual or index funds while in office.

Restrict members of congress from accepting suspicious outside payments, like high-paid speeches at corporate events.

Lifelong ban on lobbying for former members of congress, along with public disclosures of their income in the years after leaving office. (Doing this effectively would also require expanding our definition of what counts as lobbying).

Completely overhaul our anti-revolving door policies and lobbying regulations to address ethics and corruption directly (this could be a long list in itself).

Turn the Office of Congressional Ethics into an independently-funded organization with authority over both chambers of congress. Further empower ethics committees as well.

Expand independent congressional organizations who can replace the role of lobbyists in providing policymakers with important legislative information (CBO, CRS, GAO, etc.)

Strengthen truth-in-testimony rules so that people providing testimony to congress have to disclose their institutional conflicts of interest.

Pay congressional staffers better, encourage their unionization efforts, and provide congressional offices with the resources necessary to conduct their own research.

(There is also a large and unambiguous body of evidence suggesting that paying legislators themselves better reduces corruption, but this is such an extremely unpopular idea that I don't really waste time advocating for it)