Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Communism will be a system of workers’ councils or it will not exist. The “association of free and equal producers;’ which determines its own production and distribution, is thinkable only as a system of self-determination at the point of production, and the absence of any other authority than the collective will of the producers themselves. It means the end of the state, or any state-based system of exploitation. It must be a planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitudes of the market system.

Paul Mattick (in Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils)

Difficult for the workers councils over here and the workers councils over there to coordinate their production to ensure that there are no shortfalls or gluts without an effective way of allocating targets and determining the most efficient ways of reaching them.

(via argumate)

it sounds like this “association of free and equal producers” includes all producers, hence an authority that rests with the “collective will of the producers themselves” and a concept of “planned production, without the intervention of exchange relations and the vicissitude of the market system,” which is only thinkable as a comprehensive system of allocative planning

it doesn’t really sound like “the end of the state,” though; it’s just that here “the state” has been replaced by the TUC/AFL-CIO

(via xhxhxhx)

Cyberpunk dystopia where mega-unions for the largest producers dominate the Central Council by having the largest number of employees, obtaining the most resources for themselves by controlling the planning process.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[justsomeantifas]

when people say communism kills, but support the police, the military, the sweatshops with no safety regulations, the sick being refused medical care, the homeless freezing to death, the hungry starving to death, the blatant imperialism imposed on the world which kills millions upon millions, they do not truly care about loss of life, they care about loss of their wealth.

[mitigatedchaos]

Once upon a time I compared the per-capita death counts of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Augusto Pinochet.

Augusto Pinochet was not a kind man.  He killed people that didn’t need to be killed.  He dropped people out of helicopters.  He used methods of great violence.  No one should imitate him.

But he still had roughly an order of magnitude fewer deaths as a result of his great tragedies than the worst excesses of Communism.

So, for those people who believe Communism - not boring Welfare Capitalism or Social Democracy - tends towards some of its most spectacular 20th century failures, the may allow the factories, and the rationing, and the insufficient care, and still come out ahead.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[discoursedrome]

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff

If fossil fuels are so great, surely somebody should be able to make money off them without externalizing ~90% of the costs to nonconsenting others and still getting big subsidies from the state.

If one compares market solar to collectivist coal, of course market solar ends up looking worse than it actually is, because market solar isn’t taking everyone else’s money at gunpoint (or at smokestackpoint via hospital bills, disabilities etc.).

mugasofer

In what sense are negative externalities “collectivist” or “taking everybody’s money at gunpoint”? Because they wouldn’t exist in ancap utopia, because in ancap utopia all problems would be fixed?

Calling things with unaddressed negative externalities “collectivist” sounds like some kind of psyop to trick libertarian capitalists into accidentally becoming socialists. I mean, I’m happy to see capitalists acknowledging the seriousness of externalities, but trying to roll them into a capitalist economic model takes you to weird places.

Externalities tend by their nature to be subtle and off-book: they’re very hard to quantify or even identify, and companies and NGOs expend considerable resources on further obfuscating them. So you might go 20 years under a policy before you have even a crude measure of its externalities, and even then, getting that information is so costly that the crude measure will be heavily influenced by the interests of whatever group first chooses to bear that cost. And then, what? How do you actually price externalities from air pollution and climate change into carbon? As far as I can tell, you can’t except via a carbon tax (which will almost surely not price it “correctly” since it’s imposed by political fiat). Which might not sound like a dealbreaker for a capitalist, but the problem with handling broad externalities this way is that there are so many of them.

Like, okay, one thing I like to go on about is that small neighbourhood stores have major positive externalities on their neighbourhoods and broader communities, and the move toward big-box stores is one of countless ways in which companies improved margins by declining to provide those externalities. Thus big-box stores have an “unfair” advantage and which eventually leads to a world where no one can afford to provide those classic benefits and all the social structures dependent on them collapse. Morever, economic monoculture (in this case, The Only Store Is the Wal-Mart) is itself a negative externality, since it reduces the ability to weather shocks. If you really want to get serious about accounting for subtle and diffuse externalities in a capitalist model, you end up with massive interventionism and forced wealth redistribution through taxation and subsidy pretty fast, at which point you’re not really letting “the market” do things in the first place.

It seems like at some point you just have to give up and accept that the market will price things not just in accordance with their real value but also according to the ease of pricing them and of slotting those prices into a transactional model. There are countless cases where things that are very valuable are handled poorly by the market simply because they have issues with that second criterion. As long as costs and benefits vary in legibility, profit-seeking will optimize for illegible costs and legible benefits at the expense of other varieties, irrespective of their true importance.

[mitigatedchaos]

I mean, you say that about a Capitalist model, but any model is going to have difficulties effectively finding, evaluating, and pricing externalities. …even models that insist on “not using prices”.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[everything-narrative]

I feel like I’m the most “AFA/classical anarchist/radical socialist/murder the 1%’ers and topple their thrones” of all the tumblr rationalists/lesswrong diaspora…

Everywhere I look are libertarians aka greywashed neo-liberalists. And I appreciate that US is a lot different from Denmark, but I have yet to hear a solid refutation of Medications on Moloch.

[ilzolende]

Things which aren’t really refutations, but may be relevant: If you think that things, while in many ways bad, are mostly getting better, and most potential bad futures are bad in either apolitical ways (or in the case of nuclear war generic instability ways), you’ll probably think that the current status quo shouldn’t be altered very much. As far as I can tell, the standard rationalist EA position is “things are mostly improving, the obvious improvements look more like ‘make more malaria nets’ than ‘bloody revolution now’, and everyone in a first-world country is baaasically the 1% anyway”.

I’d be willing to discuss this more if you like, but I’m not really sure where to start.

Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, I am not the only person with the vague uncharitable impression that “the left” is mostly “a scary threatening group that is weirdly powerful in all the IRL communities that I tend to end up interacting with”.

[everything-narrative]

That seems like a good way of characterizing the situation, actually.

What I feel that I guess most others don’t, is the fact that we’re playing 1930′s musical fascism chairs again. Denmark, as you might know, was under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945, and it is still very much a facet of our cultural identity.

While it is true that things are mostly going forwards, I feel that shrugging and focusing on malaria nets commits what I like to call the “Karkat Vantas’ predeterminism fallacy:”

CCG: EVERYBODY, DID YOU HEAR THAT?? SUPERFUTURE VRISKA HAS AN IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON FOR US ALL.
CCG: WE DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT OUR PRESENT RESPONSIBILIES AND OBLIGATIONS!
CCG: BECAUSE AS IT TURNS OUT, IN THE FUTURE ALL THAT STUFF ALREADY HAPPENED. WE’RE OFF THE FUCKING HOOK!

Basically, the reason why it is getting better is that people are fighting!

And one of the things to fight for, is civil rights and liberties, and welfare, and protection of the weak, and your right to party.

So, yeah. You can save a lot of lives right now by donating to fight malaria; but if you play the apolitical game and hope for the best, Plato already schooled you on what is going to happen:

The price good men pay for indifference in public affairs, is to be ruled by tyrants.

That is, roughly, my position.

PS. Notice how “things are mostly improving, the obvious improvements look more like … than …” is one of those dangerous snow-clone type sentences. I could use that argument against malaria as well, urging people to invest in… Greenpeace campaigns against animal abuse, to name a particularly nasty example.

[bambamramfan]

I appreciate your attempt at synthesis, but as a factual matter I do not think things are getting better primarily because of the efforts of activists we are sympathetic to. Whatever improvement there is in the human condition, is coming from many disparate sources.

---

However, I do think you hit upon the very important question that a lot of reformist vs radical discussions can reduce to: do you think things are getting better?

I can admit there are some compelling reasons to feel things are getting better. Whig History says they’ve been getting better for hundreds of years, and this should continue. We have more technology to aid us than ever before. As an aggregate matter, lives over the entire world are in a better material position than ever before. If you think the current (liberal capitalist) system is stable, then there’s a lot of reason to go with the Alexandrian stance of improve, iterate, and don’t fuck things up. The radicals are just wrong then.

… The issue is that the radicals don’t think things are getting better. As you point out we may be on the verge of a fascist takeover (perhaps leading to World War), which is probably a result of decades of neoliberal inequality heightening. I’m not sure the immediate political situation of the rise of far-right parties is the only problem, but it’s suggestive of the many problems that out of control inequality will continue to throw out until everything collapses.

And of course, if you’re willing to look outside “post Renaissance Western Europe” there are many times in human history when civilizations took prolonged steps backwards, both in terms of technology and respect for human rights. “Ever forward” is not guaranteed in the human condition.

Zizek lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to “postmodern” capitalism: “The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”

Maybe you think that’s nonsense, but it’s a belief structure people can attach to. And under that logic, changing the fundamental rules of our society (not being certain what will replace them) is entirely reasonable.

[mitigatedchaos]

One need only look at previous Leftist revolutions without adequately-tested plans for society afterwards, as well as prior predictions of total system collapse by Leftists to see that this probably isn’t the greatest idea. One can even see that the Capitalists did better on the environment than the Communists, even despite their systemic design towards resource consumption. So while radicals may think this is a good viewpoint, I think it’s pretty easy to conclude that without an adequately planned and tested system already prepared for after The Revolution, a revolution will just kill a whole bunch of people and significantly damage the economy without improving governance at all or helping the environment very much. Also a revolution is not going to install mere social democracy, since it has to be sufficiently radical just to be effectively carried out.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitoticcephalopod]

I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.

[collapsedsquid]

One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“  Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.

[mitigatedchaos]

Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.

[argumate]

don’t ancoms need a way to “unenforce” property rights? why is that less powerful than a state?

[mitigatedchaos]

The vibe I got was that this would be done by The Community somehow. …which basically means it is the state, only power will be more evenly distributed or something and it will dissolve afterwards when not needed?

Of course there’s a reason I’m a Nationalist not any kind of Anarchist. Naturally I don’t expect that to work. At least it’s better than Tankies though.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[punlich]

I can’t wait for liberals to go “ok we marched and we wore these cool hats now we’re done, we finished it, things will be fixed now”

[mitoticcephalopod]

See but that’s the reassuring thing, it means that people won’t actually be out in the streets assaulting random civilians for looking like nazis.

[punlich]

I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the beautiful sound of Richard Spencer’s glass jaw cracking under the force of glory-knuckled justice

[mitoticcephalopod]

why are you all like this

[punlich]

Because people keep asking me stupid loaded questions on my posts lmao

[mitoticcephalopod]

look I don’t want to live in a world where lots of people are roaming around looking to start fights with people who disagree on which batshit crazy political ideology they should implement, and I think you would too.

I’m annoyed at the liberals spamming “punch nazi” memes, but it’s reassuring to know that basically all of it is just posturing and signalling, and that most of them can’t be bothered to get off their asses to do the very things they advocate.

[leafyhotdog]

in? what? world? could? u? be? possibly? living? in? where? nazis? getting? attacked? isnt? something? to? cheer? for? ??? you act like this wasnt a known neo nazi that questions if jewish people are people and if black peoples “are neccessary” like lmao how about instead trying to act above violence you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like??? messy messy messy

[ranma-official]

In this world.

you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like

Tankies call for mass murder and genocide literally non-stop and unironically, yet they are on the other side of the fist for some reason. But they should not be. ///

[leafyhotdog]

i support them doing that tbh a fascist is a fascist, one should not and i mean never tolerate intolerance that bitch wants the government to control every aspect of peoples loves yeah she and anyone like her should be killed simple as that, theres no arguing their stupidity only crushing it

[ranma-official]

You missed the part where you people can’t tell who the Nazis are. “She must have been a Nazi anyways, right?”

[leafyhotdog]

“you people” who people??? pretty easy to tell whos a bigot when they down talk someone else for race or talk up their own as some sort of master race like??? no, its not hard to see whos arrogant and punishment of who is arrogant is more than good, also any liberals who wanna defend bigots on the basis of free speech can feel free to join the pile of bigoted garbage

[mitigatedchaos]

That is right, comrade. Anyone who questions our use of political violence is our enemy, and we must inflict political violence on them until the work camps swell with their numbers for the good of Communism. Only those who have already always ever agreed with us and those who are silent out of fear have virtue.

There is no possible way that expanding this sentiment of violence might have terrible consequences and get our regime labelled as one of history’s great monsters - after all, we are good Communists, and by definition, all monsters are counter-revolutionaries in disguise, right?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@zvaigzdelasas

“surplus value” is critiqued within capitalism not because it’s a priori bad to create more of something than you need to fill your own needs, but because capitalists by definition appropriate that surplus for themselves without having done anything which creates value in and of itself. This is what “profit” means within capitalism; not just more of something, but an exploitative impersonal relation which drives destructiveness and sickness.

This isn’t a fully-accurate picture, as it completely ignores the existence of the risk undertaken by capital in funding potentially bad ventures.  Many businesses fail.

Is it all a risk premium?  No, there is also rent-seeking, the ability of larger players to even enter the market in the first place, etc.  I’m not a True Capitalist.

However, if you didn’t realize there is a risk in there that’s being compensated, then you aren’t suitable to run the Economic Planning Office, since under a planned economy the State does the same.

I’d rather just tax it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate.  The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized.  This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place.  Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms.  Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!”  It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.

One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate.  If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.

(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”.  I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)

Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.

[bambamramfan]

I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.

[whitemarbleblock]

As I am not only a Communist but also a Transhumanist, I am perfectly within my rights to see your elephant metaphor and raise you a great big fucking “Why yes, this is an excellent example of why we should all upgrade to delicious machine bodies as quickly as possible.” 

Also, I don’t think that you understand the meaning of “profit” as it’s being discussed in this context. There are multiple senses of the word, because we are not Reverse Oceania and we do not restrict words to having only one definition so that each word is perfectly, utterly precise. 

In Communist thought it is totally plausible for a group of e.g. farmers to grow more grain than is necessary to meet the group’s needs, and then save this for a period of famine. There is a sense of the word “profit” that excludes this case but include’s e.g. ExxonMobil. If you’re reading an essay on Communism that seems to despise the idea of producing surplus in general, then either that’s a very stupid essay and not representative of Communist thought in general or you’re misunderstanding, which in fairness could be attributed to poor writing (in which case I hope that this helps). 

[mitigatedchaos]

As I am not only a Communist but also a Transhumanist, I am perfectly within my rights to see your elephant metaphor and raise you a great big fucking “Why yes, this is an excellent example of why we should all upgrade to delicious machine bodies as quickly as possible.”

I am a Transhumanist, actually.  Still, somehow, these mere human bodies have managed to conquer Earth, despite their mortality.

Although of course not all Communists are like this, having seen Transhumanism treated as a topic of “rich white nerd greed” before doesn’t get me excited about prospects for life extension under Communism, since it seems like it would get immediately drowned out by “what about the third world?”  (Whether that’s halting research to spend the money on developing nations, or redistributing all resources to the point that it shuts down technological development because “justice”, etc etc.)

Also, I don’t think that you understand the meaning of “profit” as it’s being discussed in this context. There are multiple senses of the word, because we are not Reverse Oceania and we do not restrict words to having only one definition so that each word is perfectly, utterly precise.

In Communist thought it is totally plausible for a group of e.g. farmers to grow more grain than is necessary to meet the group’s needs, and then save this for a period of famine.

Aside from having seen arguments about “use-based economics”, it becomes more challenging as this principle of only buffering is extended to all sectors of the economy.  The current prosperity is in many ways a product of never being fully satisfied, continuing to pursue advancement until the entire context is transformed.  It’s like the difference between producing enough iron to make plows and horseshoes and swords, and continuously choosing “Produce MORE Iron” until you can build entire buildings out of steel.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate.  The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized.  This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place.  Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms.  Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!”  It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.

One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate.  If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.

(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”.  I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)

Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.

[bambamramfan]

I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.

[mitigatedchaos]

Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.

This is were I think the “moral aspect” factor comes in.  It doesn’t really make sense, especially when a lot of the close alternatives will produce worse outcomes, to say “Capitalism is contradictory” unless it’s being used as a moral system.  

There are people such as Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists who do use it as a moral system, as well as various other right-wingers who don’t understand the true power of AI yet.  (The latter group I am having mixed success on winning over.)  “Your espoused moral system is contradictory” works as a critique for them, certainly.  (I’d go so far as to say that the Anarcho-Capitalists are unwitting enemies of humanity.)

But otherwise, it’s like saying “your elephant is mortal”, and like, I know my elephant is mortal, I’ve looked at a number of elephants and this one and its close relatives were the best ones I could find.  I’ve heard people claim immortal elephants exist, but I’ve never seen one.

A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”

And it’s good to show these people compassion, but I think the presence of contradictory demands is going to be a thing so long as tradeoffs must be made - and thanks to opportunity cost, which still very much exists under Communism, there are always going to be tradeoffs.  In other words, I don’t think Capitalism is particularly special in this regard.  (Again, unless one is using it as a moral system.)

Certainly, attempts at Communism have resulted in collisions with reality, where someone is subjected to contradictory expectations, which are partially responsible for the black markets and corruption that resulted.  

The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying?

The problem is, aside from wage subsidies or basic share/income, which are still within the same species of elephant, I don’t really see a better elephant right now.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@bambamramfan

Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:

My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate.  The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized.  This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place.  Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms.  Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.

Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.

So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!”  It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.

One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate.  If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.

(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”.  I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)

Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.