Using a nondeterministic graph isn’t a very good way to promote an economic structure
I dont think you know what the word capitalism means.
Whats your definition of capitalism?
It’s an economic system based on the maximization of economic output with the surplus production industrialization allows.
Like my point is people were paying each other for labor (or enslaving people for labor) for thousands of years before capitalism existed. So yeah we don’t need capitalism but we do need money which has existed for thousands of years, nothing to do with capitalism.
An economic system predicated on the private ownership and trade of property for the purpose of generating a profit surplus.
The graph falls apart at the loop. It neglects the existence of valuable products that come at great expense to the labourer but generates a profitable output.
Consider, for instance, coal mining. Hard to convince people to just do this for fun. But it has generated enormous profits for over a century. Same with tobacco and cotton farming.
Probably about the same as the typical tankie definition of communism or socialism
Well in my head I believe that communism is…
Uh huh
The “No” line from “Would other people be willing to work to create X if they weren’t forced to?” should just directly lead to “Then capitalism is wasting its resources on X.”
There are a lot of shitty jobs that very few people would be willing to do if it weren’t for the paycheck. I don’t know anyone that enjoys breaking up fatbergs in sewers, or changing bed pans in nursing homes, or cleaning out abscessed wounds so foul that you’d instantly vomit if you didn’t have half a bottle of peppermint oil saturating your mask.
I have yet to meet a roofer that enjoys roofing during the summer. Or landscapers that enjoy clearing out poison ivy or poison oak. You think the people that clean up road kill are doing it just for the love of the game?
I’m sure there are people that exist that do enjoy these jobs, but the demand for them is much higher than the number of people who would be willing to do it without compensation. Yet all these jobs are important. You aren’t going to convince me that maintaining a sewage system is a waste of resources. Or that we should allow wounds to fester if they’re too icky. Or that we shouldn’t care about removing rotting animal corpses.
This reads as someone that has never done a bit of physical labor in their entire life and just wants their Linux to be left alone.
I’m not a moneyologist, but I think that’s describing market economy rather than capitalism. ME is older and can solve some things that capitalism doesn’t.
In the ‘garbage / sewage’ scenario, you might be willing to do those things (ie not forced) in exchange for something else consider more valuable to you. No ownership is required for that.
I’ll play
Garbage collection
I dont get it
Garbage collection is a job nobody will volunteer for. It’s heavy, dirty, stinky work.
People typically do it because they don’t have another choice
You think people will happily volunteer for things like that before the streets become one stinking heap?bNoy happening.
Well yeah that’s why it’s often a government service, and the romans had garbage collection two thousand years before capitalism so idk, i guess i dont get the point of what people are trying to say here
People here think we don’t need a government to collect trash, communities will do that themselves, with magic!
I think we would probably have to re-imagine our relationship with garbage to some extent. Take more personal responsibility for the garbage we create. Being a garbage collector would probably be a much more respected position too since they’re doing something that directly benefits the community.
Garbage collection doesn’t have to be a life sentence either. Maybe it’s just something you work for a couple months at a time. If people don’t care about the community littering would still be a problem. But is anarchism even possible if people don’t care about their community?
Yeah, that all sounds very nice. Now tell that to the average dumbass joe who doesn’t care…
I won’t say anything bad about garbage collectors, I feel pride for them of anything, because they do the most important work that nobody wants to do
Having said that, I think we should maybe implement something where each person obligatory has to do something like this, every so often. Let CEO’s pick up garbage too, they too generate it, usually most of it
Garage goober, eat that garbage!
Ever met someone with autism? Them fuckers love garbage trucks
With an educational system focused on social goals rather than competitiveness, people would love to do something that positively impacts society like garbage collection or janitorial work. In fact, we can even see that in some capitalist countries where they hold socially beneficial work in high regard such as Japan
I know people with autism. My brother has quite severe autism. Yeah, I see him loving to WATCH a garbage truck…
Working on one with dirty heavy garbage? Yeah, that is a big fat no.
Loving garbage trucks is way different than genuinely enjoying being a person who collects refuse for living.
Even if society plays that they should be respected that does not automatically mean that there will be enough people who want to fill these positions.
With Meth, you don’t even need autism.
Wait how do we get meth without capitalism? Would the gangs just produced drugs for the love of the game?
I am pretty sure that was a joke
Jokes are more reality than anything I have seen or heard here.
Even Ledger’s joker was more real than most I’ve heard from.
Burn the dollar. That’s an answer, for real.
Prohibition is the game. Drugs may exist without a game. Drugs are tools to fuck with your mind, in the game.
You have zero cognition of what the drugs do. Any of them. Even the best pharmacologist can knot only within. Ketamine, Dextromethorphan and a few other dissociative are the only vision outside this matrix. They are translators, if you will, to psychedelics that few can understand, even then.
I only can receive allusion through an angle in a dimension I’ve only recieved minor perceptions of unsewed. No, not angel because that is exactly what that is in dimension is thats we chose to stop percieving from.
This is an ego murdering delirium. Murder your ego to be able to acknowledge reality. That is how dissociatives translate into this delirium.
Drugs aren’t needed. They are a short path that go to knowwhere knowthing without murdering the ego.
This is how you can cognitize Thanos, Loki & He Who Remains as the true allusions drawn. Ironman is the “evil murderous ego” in that explination of the Marelvous Allusion.
Yes, it’s just a story. This delirium cannot cognitize fully what stories are, though.
MAEth is not the answer. From here you have to build a logic that can properly digest that. Logic needs no proof because even your vision and PSY hence the direction of the door butt are not the door itself. It’s just perceptable shit unsortable without basic logic.
Life never ends. To stop learning, is death itself. Death is not learning.
In Strange Aeons, even Death may die.
Look at that coast north of Europe. That is Cthulhu’s claw’s marking this continual delirium.
That’s just an extension of the “who would clean the bathrooms?” “problem” (not really a serious issue just a lazy pro-capitalist-ideology rhetorical device)
Answer: The bathrooms need to be cleaned, so people would find a way to organize it being done.
Oh, just like garbage collection (and other things people don’t necessarily want/love to do) happened before/outside of capitalism.
Before capitalism they used slaves and criminals, and before that they didn’t take have sewage systems. You just went in the woods. Which worked when the population of the village was like 100 people - not so much when dealing with the shit of hundreds of thousands.
The indus valley civilization had a sewage system
While it’s true there is no precedent for this amount of population and this complex of “sewage” requirements before or outside of capitalism, that doesn’t mean capitalism is necessary to manage a complex sewage system for a large population. When people use examples like this as a rationalization to say “capitalism is necessary” it is lazy and tunnel visioned. A million other considerations aside, the fact that capitalism is destroying the planet and making and keeping most peoples’ lives miserable, pointing to logistical challenges like “who will do this tough job” is not an excuse to maintain the coercion of capitalism’s sort of “slavery,” wage slavery. We will find a way to manage the “shit” especially since the infrastructure already exists, look, so much of it has been built and can just be managed in a different way. If we ever needed capitalism (debatable of course) we don’t anymore.
I didn’t say Capitalism is necessary. Tired of that strawman argument.
I’m saying Anarchism won’t work, and this is but one example of why. A better system is needed.
Oh, capitalism created tons of things that would not exist without it, like student debt, subprime mortgages, for-profit prisons… just think about all we would lose!
Not to mention the manmade diseases created by factory farming and the pollution
Mucking out sewers, garbage collection, manually excavating Fatbergs:
Robots. The solution for the disgusting jobs nobody really wants to do is to build machines to do it.
Or, or perhaps until these jobs can be automated, or remotely performed, you incentivize people to do them by offering privileges. Perhaps luxury items, or vacations, etc. Or, perhaps you make it something everyone in the community has to take a turn doing. Like jury duty. Could still also incentivize it.
These are necessary albeit disgusting jobs that people should be praised for doing instead of looked down on like they often are. Garbage collectors, sanitation workers, janitors and the like are some of the most important work that someone can do.
Nursing, and Doctoring often entails just as disgusting of work as the aforementioned jobs. Some are only willing to do the work for the money. Some will always be willing to do it for the desire to help society, and the recognition they receive. As long as their fundamental needs and more are met, people will be willing to do disgusting jobs for the greater good.
Robots. The solution for the disgusting jobs nobody really wants to do is to build machines to do it.
Then people will complain because it probably uses AI
You don’t think people would volunteer to maintain sewers or collect garbage if the alternative was shit/trash everywhere?
To me it just looks like an easy way to do your community a service.
100% people would volunteer to collect garbage.
Community cleanups occur regularly in my local area.
Let me put it this way: maybe society is so filled with angels that things like this wouldn’t be a problem.
Regardless, we should probably set up incentive structures such that pro-social behavior is rewarded rather than depending on the kindness of everyone’s hearts, and being completely fucked otherwise.
Also, it’s still going to be more efficient for one person to go around collecting their neighbors’ trash and driving it to the dump, and it kinda sounds like someone’s gonna still end up doing that, they just won’t be getting paid for it.
I dunno, could just be like jury duty. Terry’s on trash truck this week.
Driving a garbage truck doesn’t look that easy to me. There’s all kinds of levers and hydraulics and it’d be easy to crush someone accidentally
That could work for something like garbage collection, where the stakes and skill level are relatively low. But there’s also jobs that are critical and high skill, like operating a power plant. You’re probably going to want the same people doing that consistently, and again, it’s relying on skilled people sacrificing a lot of time and energy, with no clear reward or incentive.
You are underestimating the weaponised autism.
If the option of college was open to me and a life of corporate drudgery wasn’t forced upon me, I would have happilly served my country by becoming a nuclear reactor operator/technician, that shit is dope.
I never get this argument. “…with no clear reward or incentive.”, isn’t having electricity enough of a reward and incentive. The same goes for everything else. Why wouldn’t having the product or thing you rely on in daily life be incentive enough to produce it? Like why do you need a specific reward for working a power plant? What’s that reward now? Money? There are enough other jobs they could work to make money. They chose to work in a power plant because believe it or not, some people just find that shit interesting.
For other things like garbage collection that doesn’t require too much job specific expertise I believe a rotation system would be the best solution though if you don’t find enough people doing it voluntarily, but maybe you would. People do free labor for community events all the time, sell or make food and beverages, plan the event, help build stuff for it. For many people the community recognition would be incentive enough.
I just believe we have enough people with diverse interests and goals to make this work. Some people thrive on community interaction, some people like to do technical labor or science, etc.
Imo in the end most things would naturally balance out.
I never get this argument. “…with no clear reward or incentive.”, isn’t having electricity enough of a reward and incentive.
believe it or not, some people just find that shit interesting.
The issue is that we’re not talking about pitching in occasionally, we’re talking about like a full time job that you do for no pay. And the difference isn’t necessarily electricity on or off, maybe you end up with a skeleton crew that isn’t able to keep up with maintenance and the like, leading to more frequent outages.
And if your answer is mutual aid, then you’re basically just suggesting that everyone gets paid via GoFundMe. Instead of a consistent salary, that you can spend on whatever you like you get whatever and however much the community decides to give you. You’d have to worry as much about making sure everyone knows that you’re keeping the lights on, as you do about actually keeping the lights on.
For many people the community recognition would be incentive enough.
Is everyone going to be recognized by everyone else? There’s so many thankless but essential jobs. I have no idea who works to keep my house powered now, and I’m not sure how I would.
Imo in the end most things would naturally balance out.
The fact is that there’s a certain demand for jobs and there’s a certain supply of people who are interested in those jobs, and what you’re suggesting is that the supply and demand is going to happen to line up perfectly for every job. There’s no reason why that would be the case. Of course you can just say, “well some people find garbage collection really fun” for any job but the chances that there will be exactly the right number of volunteers, who are willing to work that job 40 hours a week long term with no pay, for every single job that needs to exist, the chances of that are infinitesimally small. This just seems like wishful thinking. I don’t think we should set up systems where plan A is everyone being angels and plan B is society falls apart completely.
If something needs to be done reliably and consistently, then you need to make sure there are reliable and consistent incentives. I don’t see how it’s different from saying, “We should cut food stamps and let donations cover it.” Donations and volunteer work aren’t going to be as consistent as an actual program.
i feel like every discussion about capitalism ends up like the wkuk skit about anarchy
Yeah, love that sketch!
Unplugging your toilet?-> yes.
Unclogging a hot guy/gal’s toilet?-> yes.Unclogging an old gramma’s toilet -> nah, I pass thank you!
This char literally says “If no one wants to do X then it isn’t valuable.”
The logic sorta tracks, but also kind of not. Basically it’s saying civilization is not valuable, which I might agree with under certain circumstances.
Capitalism is just legalized exploitation of the have-nots that would be wholly illegal under a just and equitable system.
Radio waves were thought to have no value, to the point that the person that discovered them thought so too.
Following this graph, we would never have radio, because it didn’t have value. Which was true.
There’s many things where something didn’t have value but does later on. That’s where this graph has a huge flaw.
Unless you want to extinguish all progressivism.
This graph also doesn’t work at a large scale. Good luck figuring out food distribution logistics that everyone just accepts at a scale of even 200,000 people, let alone millions. “But just make an organization of volunteers that deals with that!” - congratulations, you just reinvented “government”.
Unfettered Capitalism is extremely obviously not the answer, but neither is idealistic anarchism that at best works only with a smaller sizes community that does not rely on anything post-industrial era due to advanced complex logistical systems of creation. There needs to be a new system.
I agree that this is extremely simplified, however your radio example implies physicists only do physics for money and nobody would have explored the applications of radio waves without a profit motive which seems at odds with… Well, literally every scientist I’ve ever met.
It wasn’t a physicist who found an application for radio waves though is the thing.
It was someone looking to monetize it somehow, who also happened to be a scientist in a different field.
Now, would someone else maybe eventually look into using radio waves somehow? Probably. But when the physicists are saying “neat, but useless”, it’ll probably delay such discovery even further since there’s only one motivation, not two. Not to mention, said scientist would now have to convince the community to give them materials to look into this radio waves thing that physicists think can’t be used practically. Materials which could be used for something else that could be deemed more important at the time because it’s use might already be known, like bridges or infrastructure or just electricity wiring in general.
Not necessarily. Just because someone at one time didn’t think it had value, that doesn’t mean nobody ever would think it didn’t have value.
The graph only states “is x valuable”. The consensus among discovery was no, until another invention (that itself didn’t have inherit value at the time) was created was it maybe from someone else.
Like I said, the graph is flawed. Because by the graph rules, any further investigation would not be done.
Infinite loop detected
Only if you’re stuck in a mindset of “it’s valuable even if literally nobody wants it enough to make it”
Cleaning sewers? Generally anything waste related?
There are some people that actually kinda love those jobs, but idk if there are enough of them. And a game of chicken where the first person to become too annoyed at the smell in the streets fixes the issue would be… not great.
But anyway that’d only ever be an issue if there’s no market at all but that’s not a necessity to not have capitalism
Pretty sure once the waste starts to pile up it’d be valuable enough to society to remove it that lots of people would be willing to do it. There’s people out there right now working full time jobs and still picking up garbage on the side of the road in their free time because they don’t want to look at it.
Yeah but you don’t want to leave waste up to “we’ll do it when the problem gets bad enough.”
It requires maintenance and prevention, and while there might be people who recognize that and want to do the prevention there are almost certainly not enough for how large of a task it is. Especially because some of that prevention involves wading around in the poopy water, no body wants that without incentive.
It’s the same thing for things like road maintenance and electrical and plumbing maintenance. There are people who would do some of the jobs for free, again maybe, I’m just letting that go for the sake of argument. But those tasks are huge and require vast networks of people with a lot of education doing them professionally. Most are only there right now because they get a paycheck.
This can be a critical mass thing, though. Some projects are pointless unless you get enough people involved, but then have worthwhile results.
I would also put ‘safety’ in the “valuable, but no one wants to use it” category (note - not create safety systems, but convincing the truck driver or forge worker or backyard chemist to implement and use them).
you get a lot of really passionate advocates for safety once one of their loved ones dies because of a safety incident. And assuming they don’t live under capitalism and thus have freedom of work, they can choose to dedicate their life to advocating for this safety issue.
And there we have the difference between advocating and enforcing. Plenty of people now have the time to focus on safety issues; doesn’t mean they get any more effect than the people advocating for veganism or environmentalism.
In a functioning system (and bear in mind that sometimes the US doesn’t have that, and I’m certainly not taking the US situation as a goal), a regulator is often going to step in and make you stop.
People only caring once it affects them personally means that the people who haven’t been affected yet are going to keep vibe-coding dams and drag-racing on public roads.
Social pressure is the most effective enforcement mechanism we have.
Rules and punishment not only create hierarchy but are surprisingly ineffective.
Then you need to get enough people willing to work on it. If you cannot, then its value is non-existent because it cannot exist without coercion.
When it comes to safety, as long as they are informed and not harming anyone else to do so then it is their choice to take as much risk as they are comfortable with taking. People tend to value their own safety but each values it differently than others, and it is their right to do so as long as they are not imposing harm on anyone else through their actions.
Coercion can be a relative thing - anything from slavery to a gentleman’s agreement that if you help me build a house, I’ll help you build a house, because neither of us wants to lift rafters on our own.
The work required to e.g. build a (reasonably large) bridge is substantial; the work required to maintain that bridge in a safe condition is also substantial and it’s quite well known in free software circles that maintenance is a lot less sexy than building another shiny new bridge - government can struggle with this too, but that’s where rigid safety and oversight systems come into it. Start looking at dams and it gets way more scary.
Many many safety failures affect far more than the person who made the decision. That said, you often find the opposite - many people value others’ safety more than their own.
That’s not the criticism that’s being made here. The criticism is not in how the power plant is organized, which the sketch doesn’t talk about that at all. The criticism is that you’d need people in the plant and if that work isn’t rewarded or paid in some way, they’re not going to be able to provide for themselves.
Yeah I know, I watched it.
So what is your answer to the problems it raises?
At the social level: recognition and respect from community members, status grounded in contribution rather than wealth, reciprocal relationships and mutual aid, and the experience of belonging.
Mutual aid is already acknowledged in the sketch. I don’t see any answer to the problem of doing it at scale.
If you need to provide hundreds of people with mutual aid for decades, then you’re probably going to have to have some sort of system to ensure people contribute to it and it goes to the right people. Congratulations, you just reinvented government, and contradicted the meme.
Mutual aid networks can be scaled up indefinitly tho
Solarpunk folks be like “would you be willing to CAD a tensegrity-constructed X and print it on your solar-powered 3d printer out of compostable polymer sustainably synthesized from hemp?”
The answer, obviously, is “hell yeah”.
How would we produce the processors necessary for the 3d printer tho?
“Well, this one’s powered by an FPGA that used to be my dad’s old retro gaming system. I repurposed it after he died. I still reprogram it to be an SNES every year on the anniversary of his death and play some Super Metroid and remember the good times with him. And then reprogram it back into a 3D printer main board whenever someone in the community needs a pair of shoes or parts for a Microlab. See these controller ports on the front of the printer casing here? I added those last year just so I don’t have to disassemble and reassemble it every time I want to play Mario Kart. I just plug my controllers into the printer.”
“I’ve got a buddy down south who was able to reclaim a microcontroller from a vending machine to build a 3D printer. I’ve heard there are some folks out in the desert region experimenting with self-growing crystal lattice structures for ‘growing’ chips. But being honest, I think they’re a long way out from producing anything workable with that. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, but until we have a way to make chips, we’ll keep scrounging chips out of old smart phones and DVD players. Occasionally, someone will get lucky and find a broken 3D printer in a landfill that just needs some TLC.”
Damn, I forgot you could reprogram those
But nobody even likes twitter ☹️
