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If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example.
See, so that’s like, I dunno if that’s so much a problem. First off, rationality is sort of just a method that you’re using to affect some type of process, in this case, economic efficiency Under which it probably also wouldn’t make sense to, say, just throw old people off of big towers or whatever type of thing. People would probably overthrow your system, you’d deal with a high level of instability, and being unable to track people’s ages effectively, which seems pretty inefficient, people might also try to move, or leave your system as they get older. So I’d expect some level of brain drain there, which leads to another point: You’re also decreasing any worker productivity you would gain from old joe who ran the lumber yard still being around, so you can ask him questions about the quirks of the lumber yard. Maybe old joe even just boosts worker productivity by the fact that he makes his family and friends happier, and more able to tolerate bad working conditions, longer work hours, or more desirable than that, maybe he gives them the will to learn more, and bring you better higher level jobs where they will be ultimately much more efficient for whatever time they do end up spending on production. But back to rationality, that’s just a method you’re using to evaluate things. In this case, maybe “efficiency”, which is sort of a proxy value for other, more real values. Efficiency to do what? Usually by, economic efficiency, we mean like, we’re minimizing the necessary inputs, to affect some productive capacity, while maximizing the outputs, in like, a material way. But then, maybe the sort of our core value that we’re chasing after should be to maximize the happiness that old joe is capable of giving to his friends and family, or something harder to define and measure, and more along those lines. That, that would maybe be a flaw of socialist systems, that we don’t have some universal definition of a “good” to work towards, but I would say that, again, that’s not a distinct flaw of those systems in particular, and in capitalism, that just gets subsumed by a bunch of other bullshit values. You don’t have a universal definition of good, because you’re always just making short term moves to maximize the profit of your company. Moral miasma, zombification.
Getting even more off topic, I think in general though my main counterargument is just that like. Any risk we take by defining a “good”, right, a good to work towards, I think that’s a good risk to take. To take the risk that, by defining the good, you eliminate other definitions of “good” that could’veexisted, and the freedom to have those other definitions of good. It’s better to take that risk, and define that good, and then work towards it (and mostly, even to point out that such a core value exists, in practice, even acknowledge that it exists, more than anything else.). I think it’s better to do that, than substitute your “good” for “freedom”, which, like efficiency (and even like “good”, but shhh), is just a proxy value for other things. In the market, in capitalism, we define freedom as the ability to own capital, own property, spend money on what you want to spend it on, and work to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 flipping calorically and nutritionally deficient burgers for a bunch of other people who have worked to death in a soul-sucking 9-5 doing equally insane things. We define no “good” in capitalism, we just leave that shit up to the market, and the market already reaches a decision, which is that every little corporation should just replicate authoritarianism in their little shithole section of the economy. Every little corporation gets their “good”, and then they fight it out in the marketplace. Ends up that actually, we’ve just blown this up to be even every single individual, because, again, we’ve adopted freedom as our current value. Swim in the water, stop knowing that it’s there. Big shocker when the individuals at the highest level of the market, having passed through many tests to get there, big shocker when their personal definition of “good” is fucked up, short sighted, and when they can’t implement said definition if they even have one, because when they decide to do so, they get curbstomped for engaging in too much long term thinking compared to just sucking up as much of the industry as is possible at the time. I’m also not even saying that a monopoly is bad necessarily, right, as an alternative to this, I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical to the supposed value of capitalism, which should be to use market economics to do these calculations at basically every level (which I’m also not convinced would be more efficient then just doing them somewhere else). It also tends to be bad because it still exists within this context in which all this short term incentive is naturally floating around and in which the highest powers in the land are naturally selected to be bad authoritarians.
But take the ICE, for example. I fucking hate the ICE. Mostly because it has enabled mass market automobiles to become a thing, which has impacted our transportation infrastructure in a very adverse set of ways, with an adverse set of incentives. Suburbanization blows up out of white flight as america, conceived as a sort of colonial experiment in a time of slavery, obviously has a lot of hangups around 18th century conceptions of racial superiority. Then you have the corporate lobbying that affects the political system, on top of the general political system just being tailored for the wealthy from the jump (and being tuned to the wealthy over time), and badda bing badda boom pretty soon you’re ripping out LA’s streetcars to instead flood the streets with massive chunky automobiles that kill a ton of people per year, fill the air with leaded and mostly unregulated particulate emissions, and we’re like a century into that as a system now, so we’re basically locked in, and none of the fundamental problems with cars as a format have been solved, even with EVs, you’re still getting particulate emissions from brakes, lithium mining issues, you’re still getting road wear and expenses from that, you’re still spreading out cities much more than they need to be which massively increases the necessary power consumption by decreasing the r-values of homes by increasing the surface area of homes and increasing the surface area of a home in which a singular person is going to live and increasing the volume of air inside the home per person which is necessary to be heated, and then we have relay stations so we need to spend more money to pump more electricity and water a longer distance and so on and so forth. We can talk about socialism as a distinct set of values as mostly divorced from questions of authoritarianism, because it’s assumed that we’re doing this, in good faith, to decentralize ownership of everything, ownership of the workplace, restoring the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat and all that good shit. We can assume all that to be the case, right, oh, and then since we don’t want market economies to really re-emerge, replicating class dynamics inside of the apparatus of the corporation, we go from having a co-operative to just having the corporation be owned by the public, and then maybe that’s “authoritarian” even if we have a more democratic voting system than a capitalist country is allowed to have. Whatever, those are all good debates to have, those sorts of debates, they’re what socialists are gonna talk about in a sort of abstract sense, and then they’re all gonna draft up lines like, oh, I’m a marxist because of XYZ, whatever. My concern, personally, is sort of like, I look at the market economy, at capitalism, and the supposed “freedom” it provides people, in the market, to make totally dunderheaded, propagandized decisions, that if you look at them in the abstract, make totally no sense whatsoever. My concern is that we currently find ourselves in a system where all of that shit about the ICE exists, and the ICE isn’t just used to power like, a bunch of farm vehicles somewhere, and then everyone else takes the train because if I talk through every other point about car use then obviously none of it makes any sense to any set of values that isn’t “I want to kill people with my car” or “I want to waste a lot of gas” or “I want to intentionally spend a lot of money” or “I want to look cool and feel cool and manly”, type shit. That, is multiplied for like every other facet of the economy, that times a million. I hate that shit, mostly more than anything. That we can come to the correct takeaways and decisions, and then do nothing about it because the system doesn’t care. I don’t care so much how we get there, or even necessarily how authoritarian a given system is, because I think about the most that can be expected from people who have been in a capitalist society is to vote for the replication of said capitalist society with maybe some socialized benefits, democratic socialismo style, and I fully expect that shit to get rolled back in 50 years and also to exploit the third world since obviously people outside the jurisdiction of the state aren’t allowed to vote in the state’s elections. Really all I want is for everyone to just have healthcare, everyone to have good regional transit, for our energy infrastructure to make sense, our food infrastructure to make sense, I want people to stop dying in wars, whatever. The current global system fucking sucks for all that stuff. That’s mostly the only reason why I get pushed towards socialism. Mostly the specifics only exist for me insofar as they affect or not my ability to enforce that idea of “good”, which I think is pretty sensible once it actually gets spelled out into the material.
I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.
If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in. Probably could’ve read das kapital, and taken notes on it, and then shot those notes at a professor or other talking head online or even just some other random commenter, and then probably been done with it in the amount of time you’ve spent talking about that shit on lemmy. And that’s probably the most dense and fundamental book on the subject if we’re not getting into weird french postmodern bullshit.
Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:
to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.
Which sounds pretty much completely incoherent at its face. I have no conception of what that would look like, because the ownership of capital is a foundational enough belief in capitalism to be what the system is named after. It’s like socialism but without any socialized stuff, or communism without communal ownership.
Like, I’ve never heard of socialism entailing that you buying a product a company sells entitles you to shares in that company. You’re not a worker at said company, that doesn’t really make any sense. You also later on talk about “schizo” capital (?), shit about where money comes from (you can answer this one in capitalism, as well. Also, money =/= capital), and the economic calculation problem, which, I dunno man. I’m not going to say so much that that shit’s made up, but it’s not really a big problem, and it’s also a problem that capitalism still basically has to reckon with at a fundamental level, it just ignores it and then decides to crash every decade or so, so that the market can “prune” itself or whatever bullshit. Go hit the paul cockshott vape pen, or go read the book about walmart or whatever.
Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth. Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted, maybe there’s a better measure of “efficiency” there. You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be. You can’t assume that there aren’t externalized costs that aren’t factored into the initial price, like how suburbia is subsidized, like how climate change is happening. You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.
Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.
I mean, I dunno. It’s been the “future of the internet” since the 90’s, but nobody can solve the fundamental problems with such systems existing in the actual real material world, so we just get hit with an ever dwindling supply of larger and larger social media monopolies. Same as it ever was.
You know you’re also using the internet, right?
I’m gonna try not to go line by line here because I think it would end up swelling the comment sizes to a ludicrous degree like when I was vent posting and also I just woke up so I don’t wanna do that, but I dunno. I am mostly convinced that markets are not actually good at allocating things because they assume rational actors, they externalize costs and thrust them upon the public and the government, because they replicate centrally planned monopolies anyways. I also don’t like them because we broadly don’t look a the core power structures that end up manifesting under markets, which are mainly authoritarian and thus obviously have information problems allocating resources, on top of information problems that arise as a result of competition between market actors. I would rather just organize the economy in a way that makes sense, even if it ignores the fundamental right, the fundamental good, the fundamental freedom, of private property and capital.
The broader point I was trying to make about rationality and ethics, is that capitalism and markets have a core conceit of what like, is good, fundamentally. This idea of “freedom” right. Maybe it’s cooked up by the americans, I dunno, not really my point, I’m just looking at the fundamental core values that differentiate each system. In socialism, I’m gonna be looking at like, the organization of power structures, whether or not they’re democratically organized, I’m gonna be looking at central planning vs, I guess the markets would be considered a decentralized form of planning, maybe, though you could also have like decentralized little anarchist communes running around or whatever. Socialism is a pretty broad tent. In capitalism, though, I’m gonna be looking at the ownership of private property, of capital, as a fundamental, core value that makes the system turn. The ownership of capital is thought of as a good, as a fundamental right, a fundamental freedom that people should be afforded. That’s what capitalism is.
Also, again, I’m not so sure you can just be like, “killing old people is economically rational” type of thing. That’s assuming a kind of core value to those economics that you’re using, economics, like rationality, like, we commonly assume a value when we use economics because we live in a sociopolitical context where the people who use economics are going to be using them for a very specific purpose, right, but ultimately “economics”, what we call economics, is just sort of the study of like, resources and how they’re used and shit. I dunno if I wanted to come up with a better definition I can, but ja. But we still have to come up with a core value that motivates the shit along, there, is what I’m saying.
That’s what I’m talking about. The fact that so often in capitalism, the values are assumed. Maybe it’s because we exist in a kind of post-history, end of history reality, where capitalism and neoliberalism won, or whatever, but we assume that whatever is good is whatever makes money, and we assume that whatever makes money is economically efficient. And then, if killing old people can make us money, we do that. But we don’t pay attention to the broader contexts under which all of this takes place, which shapes the incentive structure, it shapes whether or not a particular company can make money doing something or not. That’s my point, is that we don’t look at those core systems, their incentive structures, their organizational structures, we just say “leave it up to the market”, and then the market just sort of shakes out somewhat randomly but mostly towards little authoritarian fiefdoms and monopolies. And we do that because we assume that to chase after private property, and capital, and to be a capitalist, is a sort of core freedom, a core good, a core moral value, which is supposed to exist for everyone.
Also, I must address this, right:
So, collective hive mind, right, I dunno. Halfway, that sounds like democracy to me. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, again, divorced from the organizational structure, that I’ve put forward in my previous comment and I could put forward now, you probably know the arguments already, as to why higher density housing is a good idea, why it’s rational, why it’s logically sensible, especially when done at scale. If we give most people the “freedom”, to choose which housing they want to live in, then we kind of run into a prisoner’s dilemma where people of means believe that it’s in their best interest to turn themselves into antisocial suburbanoid hermits that can live apart from the “others” that live in the city, they can commute in and out, they can retain some level of status as a result of their lifestyle, and maybe because of this they can gain some level of luxury through living in suburbia, at least for the first 20 or 30 years before their house fucking crumbles into dust cause it was made of particleboard and sad dreams.
So, is their “freedom” to choose to live in suburbia, is that thought of as more democratic than the popular will might be, because it afforded that minority of people the power to live as they chose, right? Or is it actually less free, is it actually less democratic, because it imposed the will of that minority of people on the majority of people which would’ve rather lived without the issues that suburbia brings to them? i.e. racism, increased utilities costs, increased maintenance costs, financial and economic insolvency leading to crumbling infrastructure, pollution, massive ecological costs, I’ve said this shit already, you get the point. I would say that the former, obviously, forcing people to live either in high density housing, then having some proportion of people live in like, cabins in the woods where they do permaculture style farming, and then maybe having the rest of the people just live totally separate from your society maybe even if they so choose, right, I can argue why that makes more sense as a whole in material reality, why it logically makes more sense. But the question as to which one is good, which one affords more freedom, which one is morally correct, that’s an open question. I put my chips, so far as that exists, in the camp where we’re not doing massive amounts of ecological damage.
But, that’s the core sort of, distinction I’m trying to get at, here, which motivates the difference between capitalism and, not even socialism or communism necessarily, but just between capitalism and other systems. That core ideological divide, that belief in chasing capital as a right, that’s what I’m trying to get at.