None Of Which Is To Say That Strikebreaking Is *admirable* Per Se. But Analyzing The Material Precursors

Aiming for the impossible

It seems like most of the leftist writing I see, from publications like Current Affairs or Jacobin to everyday posts on tumblr, abandon any attempts to imagine what a socialist society would look like in favor of arguing for a better welfare state, higher wages, unionizing, and so on. I understand that abolishing property may not be politically feasible in the immediate future, but fuck, why should we be afraid to openly call for the core of our political philosophy? Abolishing private property is literally the first and foremost (if not the singular) demand of Communists, and yet so many leftists apparently fall into the trap of arguing against income inequality/the market mechanism rather than against the fundamental injustice of private property itself. Fighting libertarians over income inequality is useful, to be sure, but what if income disparities in some circumstances are actually due to individual choice/outside factors unrelated to discrimination, and the market is working as fairly/efficiently as it could? Imagine if your only criticisms of feudalism focus on the actions of evil kings and exceptionally cruel farming conditions, rather than the roots of the system itself.

I chalk this tendency up to Freddie deBoer’s observation that most leftists “want to lose” and would rather live a safe, predictable life of endless struggle against capitalism rather than doing the hard, boring, unsexy work of envisioning and campaigning for alternatives. And I get it, change is hard and growth is painful, especially when it weakens your identity/self-perception. But fuck that, I want my kids to see snow days. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “Aim for the impossible and you’ll get everything that is possible thrown in. Aim for the possible and you’ll get neither.”

Very few believers will seriously claim that morality can only come from religion anymore (that argument seemed to die with the religious debates of the early aughts) but they've seemed to switch tactics recently to claiming that culture and religion are inseparable. This strikes me as an even worse argument: arguably, religion *destroys* culture by suppressing full human thought, creativity, and exploration of ideas- often other religions!

Once again begging anti-theists to realize that to get to a world without religion you’d have to commit cultural genocide. So maybe you shouldn’t push for that

This Armistice Day, what better way to repay veterans than to ensure that none of them are ever made again?

Perhaps it's time to resurrect the tradition of Soviet jokes, but retooled for modern cyber-capitalism.

"We pretend to pay them and they pretend to make us happy."

People make bones about the USSR’s project of creating a “new Soviet man” - how quaint! - without appreciating that the American-led development of the 20th century “demand economy,” culminating in (but by no means limited to) the creation of the “postwar middle class,” represented a human-engineering project of no less ambition and infinitely greater sophistication than the Soviet one. The new Soviet man is a joke, a failure; we are the new capitalist man. And we don’t even realise it!

What is the new capitalist man? It is a person that desires infinite houses quantities of things they cannot use. It’s a person constitutionally incapable of stopping to say “I have enough, I’m happy.” Can you imagine how threatening a contented mindset is to ever-expanding commodity circulation (in other words, to national GDP growth)? Can you conceive of the vast resources, private and public, that were and are being poured into permanently eliminating every hint of that mindset from the American psyche?

This is the essence of the advertising industry, the raison d'etre of Madison Avenue and its (historically overlooked) collaboration with the U.S. government: the manufacturing of demand to meet supply, and the manufacturing of an indefinitely increasing demand to meet a supply of comparable dimensions. It is, as a necessary stepping stone to the manufacturing of this demand, the wholesale reshaping of what it means to be a human being: not into a selfless, musclebound Superman, as the Soviets would have had it (and say of that what you will), but into a spiritually impoverished and pathetic wretch, a meat-vehicle for a ceaseless material appetite.

It’s not that it’s not commented on. Many people have observed the way that interfaces like YouTube and Facebook keep us trapped in miserable little cycles of consuming, clicking, consuming, clicking (and to what end, financially? Serving us advertisements! Yet more psychological conditioning!). But too often this is understood as something sui generis, a unique malady of Internet capitalism, rather than as an elaboration of and refinement upon a single, vast project that has been in the works for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The “loops” and tiny dopamine spurts of social media and video games are in fact just one more chisel in the hand of those sculptors attempting to fashion, from the soft stone of the human psyche, the type of person that can sustain global capitalism.

Is it cybernetic? Automatic and self-perpetuating? Certainly, to a degree. But it was planned, once. And for every clearly pathological and immiserating behavioral pattern that is discovered through new technology, there is a person whose job is to find out how to get more people to behave that way and use it to move product.

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

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

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

The last paragraph is the worst part. It's chilling that anyone would be impressed by-and offer a job to-someone so manipulative and deceptive.

Welcome to the tech industry, where cruelty, dishonesty, and callousness are rewarded as long as they're innovative enough.

The Tinder Hacker

When I asked Sean about his hobbies, I wasn’t prepared for what he said.

tl:dr: Guy writes a script to connect two men together on a dating app, both of whom think they are talking to a beautiful women. Many seem to like a woman as sexually forward as they are, some are confused, more still are thrown off by the not-so-great pronoun-switching part of the script.

He turns it off before things go too far. We learn some things about men (maybe), and about online dating.

Thoughts?

This tendency always fascinated me. There's a guy in my neighborhood with a big sign on his fence claiming that Obama passed a certain law making propaganda legal, as though Obama (or any ruler) would want to make sure his naked seizure of power was legalized prior to doing it? Such a strange mix of total paranoia combined with a childish belief in the law as inviolable.

i’ve been thinking about a bit in a recent Shaun video, where he has a short clip taken from a terf or anti-vax or wayfair truther rally, i don’t remember which (sort of the point, these groups all bleed into each other), where someone was claiming that the mRNA vaccine was a plot by transhumanists to alter people’s DNA so they wouldn’t be human anymore and thus, under the law, they would no longer have human rights.

and, like, the major takeaway here is just “oh, these people are crazy crazy,” but i can’t help but be kind of astounded at the logic regardless. like, the existence of legal rights predates the discovery of DNA. your rights as a person do not at all depend on your genome. nevermind that the casual conflation of DNA with the true essence of a living organism is a fundamental misreading of science; if you could magically remove all the DNA from someone’s body, they would still (in the brief interval before they died horribly) have human rights! no court anywhere on Earth would entertain the argument that someone’s legal status as a person is dependent on a DNA test.

and obviously there are much more salient objections to this whole line of reasoning, which is purely emotive “technology bad” nonsense rhetoric, but like… do they think that if they trick someone into standing next to a strong gamma-ray source, they have the legal right to murder them??

Kaiser Health News

How Political Maneuvering Derailed A Red State’s Path To Medicaid Expansion

When Kansas elected Laura Kelly as governor, Medicaid expansion looked like a shoo-in, with seemingly broad support across state government.

The impression I have is that while the poor rural voters may want Medicaid, the land/business owners who gerrymander their states to hell and back will stonewall them, as in the article. You can blame the poor for being demoralized, but many of these people also voted for Obama as recently as 2008, so maybe they currently don't have any good local liberal/left candidates to throw their weight behind.

Your stupid villains might be on to something

It’s a genre we hated since it’s inception: the right-thinking reporter descending into some godforsaken poor white corner of rural or rust belt America in order to find out why they won’t vote like the author thinks they should. Unsurprisingly, the author finds character flaws and racism at the heart of the issue. The right finds this condescending, the left doesn’t consider the opinions of the unwashed unworthy absent intersectional demographic cover. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This Monica Potts NYT number fits the bill, right down to borrowing some racial material from someone else’s work to round out all the elements. Potts, a former Arkansan, heads back home after being away for two decades and finds the community both economically decimated and deeply suspicious of any government spending. The article is pegged on the county library, which became the subject of a local controversy when it wanted to offer a raise to a librarian. It’s a neat encapsulation of the perspective of the author: the smart ones (like her) moved away and all that remains is an angry, anti-intellectual rump who views any attempts at improvement as useless taxation.

Potts’ perspective can be challenged in two ways. One of which, she lays out clearly: Van Buren County, where this story takes place, had a natural gas boom during which it spent a relatively large sum of money on a library that it now has trouble paying for, to the point at which the sales tax had to be raised to pay for it. The librarian, though her salary would have been commensurate to her education, was far above the county median. Libraries are good, but not every library expenditure makes sense, especially to a community that just sunk a lot of money it didn’t have into one.

The second one is the Facebook group where the revolt started (see the graphic above). It got a little nutty after the article ran, but scrolling back, you’ll see one conspiracist nutter posting, but mostly it’s unobjectionable community stuff. Most interesting to anyone trying to parse the Times article is a controversy over rising water bills. Dig into the comments and you’ll find that a large water treatment plant was built for a chicken processing plant that has since closed, leaving nobody to pay for it but regular rate-payers, who are watching their bills balloon.

The library and the water bills create a pattern. Due to small populations, rural areas are much more susceptible both to the boom/bust cycle and to white elephant projects that can shred government budgets for years. Van Buren County, unlike these federal government, can’t print more money. It also has few of the fixed, immovable amenities that allows a community to make demands of richer corporations and people. Overspending during booms leads to both real constraints during busts and a “once bitten, twice shy” mentality when it comes to spending.

Urban liberals live with the notion that there is an unlimited pool of money that we could spend to solve all of our problems if we could just claw it away from the rich. The people of Van Buren county disagree.