What I find interesting about this article is that it critiques heavily about the first 200 pages, says almost nothing about the next 600, and then says the conclusion is unsatisfactory because it didn’t quote the book the author wrote in 1991. It’s transparently personal.

Academics write books. Get over it.

Yeah it’s a summary work that draws on decades of research. Both of these authors are extremely well-published in their respective fields. I’m like a third of the way through Dawn of Everything and it’s just as academic as “Debt” was, and neither are mass-market pulp. But work like this always draws hit pieces because it’s a way for critics to get their name out there.

Check out “The Dawn of Everything” by Wengrow and Graeber

You forgot about using said military to destabilize the rest of the world and force migration to the metropole to replace your workforce

Could you link a source? I just want to believe this; I’ve never actually seen evidence of it.

Lol. Enjoy your goal posts, soccer friend.

If you live in a state in which your vote will not matter anyway, you are better off voting for a candidate who actually wants a ceasefire. Jill Stein will secure more funding for the Green party if she breaches the 5% threshold. This bickering over which corporate oligarch party is less genocidal will get us nowhere.

Jill Stein needs 5% to get the Greens increased federal funding. I live in a state where my blue vote wouldn’t matter. Seems pretty simple to me.

Yeah let me join the downvote crowd. The most powerful military and the largest economy in the world is unable to stop its vassal state from carrying out a genocide for 10 months. But if I vote for this cop and her soldier friend instead of a real estate guy, we’ll magically change our ways and the bombs will stop falling. I have a bridge to sell you.

I’m looking for the cop unicorns though. Raised, indoctrinated, excels, realizes how fucked we all are, tries to do the most good possible within their power. Probably gets assassinated. Idk.

And no, I don’t think Kamala is this lol

Think of the system like a force field (the physics kind, not the scifi kind). It pulls bastards into it. If you’re not, you’re in its presence, and you’re susceptible to its effects. It’s more like “No Humans Are Immune To The Corrupting Influence Of Militarized Institutions” but ACAB is a lot easier to say.

He started out like this

https://youtu.be/J2UhXgOT1sk?si=ybradRRtcdW3AMeG

And now he’s this

https://youtu.be/j2KDj7qxnds?si=m13q6lBRa5Epgq-b

I haven’t been over there in a while but I noticed the AIs are starting to show up here. How was it over there? Rough percentage of how many?

And Aaron Swartz is dead.

It’s called digital enclosure. Enclosure was a movement that began in Britain in the 1700s (but really it’s always been going on…) to close off the commons that pastoralists had been using to publicly graze their sheep. It happens to all new media because it’s the only way capitalists can imagine their operations.

Obligatory visual aid:

https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Yeah, it’s not an easy problem to solve. As someone who is mainly versed in the socialist tradition I view class conflict as the primary impedement to social progress. And any system that incorporates competition will, in my view, generate class conflict. It’s all or nothing: you can’t have a cooperative structure operating within a competetive framework.

In practical terms, this has meant a lot of different things over the past few centuries. Nobody has found the correct answer. In the present system, the first step is unionization and increasing class consciousness among the labor force. The second step is coordinated action via targeted mass action (think cross-industry work stoppages that disrupt production and logistics). Essentially you cripple the owner class at large by disrupting their profits and force them to make concessions. You could have a gradual move towards cooperative ownership by forcing down the ratio of CEO to average worker pay. You could force the passage of the types of tax reform that you are arguing for. You could force the passage of social welfare reform.

But ultimately this movement would have to be worker-led, because the ruling class will always invent new ways to entrench themselves in power. John Maynard Keynes referred to the “euthenasia of the rentier class”. In other words, they would humanely pass into the dust bin of history because they would no longer exist as a class, because the workers would not tolerate them.

Haha yeah this thread has been insane. I think the Fediverse needs a decentralized vetting system for this so we don’t go the way of Twitter.

It already exists. See for example Mondragon

The major issue is that it has to compete on a global market that’s exploitative.

If you want to maintain a market system under socialism you need to separate it from public production. We would need to democratically decide what is a public good (e.g. housing, food, medicine, etc.) and what is a market good (essentially luxury goods). The private market would also have to be heavily regulated to prevent capital accumulation and associated power concentration. It’s a really difficult problem.

One of the reasons the Soviet economy failed is because computers were not advanced enough in the 1950s-80s to automate the kind of consumer goods production that a command economy would require to be able to compete with a market system. I think if we tried this again today we would have an easier time of it, and if you look at a large vertically integrated corporation like Walmart, they’ve more or less figured it out already.