Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
There are two reasons I've seen that people are homeless.
The first reason, prevalent in third world countries, is because people are ostracized from society by people who don't consider them fully people. See tribal conflicts in Africa or India.
The second reason, more common in the US, is because we conflate 'homelessness' for 'mentally ill' due to the dearth of mental health facilities. These people, due to how they behave, are not people most people want to interact with. By and large, most normal behaving homeless in the United States end up not homeless about a year later, and the data show this. There is almost zero family houselessness in America. Almost no families begging on the street. Pretty much the only families you see begging in America are gypsies who are lying about their lot in life. In much of the world, there are destitute families literally begging on the street for survival.
> That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard,
They are inherently different. Countries like my parent's birth country of India have more than enough resources to be rich but are held back by a social system in which some people are considered less than dirt and others are elevated to be besides gods. India is - or used to be at least - a socialist country, and is still just barely capitalist. The idea that capitalism causes poverty is... insane. I would encourage people to travel to other countries and see what homelessness looks like there. If you get out of the western bubble, you'll realize that the homelessness of America is of an entirely different quality and kind.
It's possible that oil traders are still trading on the assumption that the war will be over Soon™, in which case the expectation is that we won't hit the bottom of our stockpiles and thus there'd be no reason to price in that eventuality. I don't know if I agree with that, and I would certainly be surprised if traders generally thought as much -- but who knows!
No. If you read 2-3 articles about the war in Iran per day, be sure they read 20 or 30, and they probably use LLMs to summarize 3000. For us, it's only the feel-good of being smart. For them it's money.
> AI represents a unique opportunity to enjoy a two-for-one special and both cut staff and portray themselves as leaders in the sector that's achieving massive efficiency gains.
This is not what a scapegoat is. Definitionally, a scapegoat is innocent; here, however, AI is being used as a tool of disciplining labor.
This is anticipatory obedience and it's actively harmful.
You are also wrong. Contracts, ordinances, and everything related to governance get rolled back or changed all the time. Especially at the local level.
If you have lost the initial battle you can do the same thing as them: you keep attacking their presence and you only need to win once to undo it.
The UK didn't just repress its citizens, it ultimately caved to them. The voting reforms of the 19th century gave people essentially everything they wanted, at the time, and as a consequence when the rest of europe was going thru 1848 Britain was chilling. But just a few years beforehand there was legitimate fear that the government would be toppled by rioters! You can't judge centuries of history just by looking at the end result.
In all my life of being Catholic (I’ll turn 50 this year), I’ve heard less than 5 homilies-sermons that amounted, in whole or part, to a reflection on a papal encyclical. Over time there may be juicy papal quotes that make it into Sunday preaching, but that’s about it.
Instead, priests tend to focus on the readings for that Sunday’s Mass and more general themes.
That being said, I hope many priests do read an encyclical any time a pope publishes one, but they’re very, very busy most days and weeks, so whether any one priest will commit time to reading a particular encyclical, old and dusty or hot off the presses, will depend on a lot of factors that are as varied as their individual circumstances and personalities.
While this is certainly the more interesting question, the unfortunate reality is that the ideological complex of capital (even if weakening, and no longer effectively reproducing itself) is still strong enough that most in the West can't even imagine a better world (other than "less bad capitalism"), much less think about how to get there. Consequently messages like the above are of great value in moving more people towards a point where questions like yours become relevant.
Well, in that case, my "how" has always been along anarchistic lines: establishing parallel forms of resource distribution, establishing habits and communities of mutual aid, and in doing so, delegitimizing and rendering obsolete the State, capitalism, and systems of hierarchy.
Fun techcentric utopian speculation about this: Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" and Ruthanna Emry's "A Half-Built Garden."
Essentially, can we leverage our current post-scarcity society to expropriate everything people need in a sustainable way that cuts capitalism and the State out of the loop? For example, why would people buy food if they can get it for free from farming syndicates or similar? (see: Global Village Construction Kit, Food Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns) Why would people buy medicine if they can print it for free from pirated recipes? (see: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective)
I see the Right to Repair and FOSS movements as a foundation to build upon for this. Anarchism (or at least, anti-capitalism) exists right under everyone's noses, in all the FOSS software installed on their computers. Existent example of people laboring without profit motive and contributing to the commons.
My personal life goal is to figure out how to capture that same energy to tackle the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy.
I really like the sound of that, but these proposals never acknowledge the monumental challenge of truly incentivizing people to help each other, beyond shallow niceties.
I'm not entirely cynical, people generally are very open to be generous with one another and collaborate for a common good, but up to a point.
Currently people spend the majority of their hours doing relatively hard work for the collective's benefit (kinda). Exactly because capitalism makes selfishness into selflessness (very kinda). Also people are relatively civilized to one another thanks to the considerable latent force of the state's monopoly on violence.
People will be nice to each other when it doesn't cost them much and/or when the opposite costs them dearly. But will they work as hard as now for each other just to be nice? Will they not harm each other when there are no significant consequences and something to gain?
A fair free market is far from a natural phenomenon, it needs to be protected and maintained by some external force. If you let things unfold naturally, what you get is kings, and many layers of dominating hierarchy underneath, exploiting the masses, which exactly what we had the whole time.
I suppose that the post-scarcity idea is that people neither need to work hard, nor have significant reasons to harm, if they have everything they want. Sure, let's talk if we ever get there, but until then we have other problems to deal with.
PS: Don't forget that people are able to do FOSS because they have well paid jobs that don't completely drain them of their energy. For others, getting the reputation and/or experience for a better job is the incentive. There's a very different social infrastructure making that work, FOSS doesn't sustain itself, not even close. But yes, it does prove that when people's needs are covered, some of them will do great things for everyone without much incentive, but usually not enough to cover everyone's wants.
I really like this comment, you are outlining exactly the sort of things that our society has convinced us are ground state truths, that are actually just capitalist norms enforced by the State.
I really think you'd enjoy Peter Gelderloos' "Anarchy Works," because you can keep asking "but what about..." and the book will keep giving you examples from history to answer that exact "what about?"
To your points:
First, people don't do hard work for the collective benefit, they do it for the benefit of the owners of capital, who allow just enough leftover profit for people to keep themselves alive and for very little else.
A lot of that hard work isn't for the good of society, it's bullshit work that maintains artificial scarcity and the systems of capital, like the entire beast of health insurance in the USA, military procurement, landlord administration, advertising, corporate compliance rituals, or predatory lending.
Second, capitalism doesn't turn selfishness into selflessness, it rewards and selects FOR selfishness, and punishes and selects AGAINST selflessness. Why publish FOSS under MIT, the most selfless choice, when a major tech company will then just take the library, make money off it, and give you nothing in return? Why contribute to FOSS deployed by a big tech company when that contributes directly to a big tech company's bottom line for nothing in return to you?
Capitalism doesn't create incentives through rewards, it redirects people's inherent incentives towards less socially useful or rewarding projects that instead serve the needs of capital and the state. I read a lot about motivation to understand it in myself better, and one thing that keeps coming up as core to motivation and happiness is finding it inherent to a given activity, achieved through improving at and mastering that activity, and then being recognized for that improvement and mastery. Then, potentially, introducing novelty by finding something else to improve at and maybe master. Basically, humans love work, especially when it's useful or they can become good at it. Capitalism creates structures around this to try to redirect that labor to things that are useful first and foremost to capital.
Third, yes, a free market paradoxically requires regulation to maintain or it tends towards wealth accumulation, monopoly, and then as exploitative a labor relationship it can get away with - slavery, if it can manage. The free market is thus impossible because under capitalism, capital is power, and capitalism is a system designed for the accumulation of capital. More capital means you can chip away at the rules, which means more capital, which means less rules for you, and so on, until you get situations like today, where billionaires can diddle our kids and there's quite literally nothing we can do about it: the State's monopoly on violence is serving them, protecting them from us.
Fourth, people aren't considerate to each other because of the state monopoly on violence, they are considerate in spite of it, and despite the incredible violence the State and forces of Capital subject them to. Daily interactions are anarchist: you don't shove people out of the way on the street because it's illegal (depending on how you do it, it might not even be illegal), you don't do it because it's rude, it's antisocial, it will make people hate you, and because do it enough and you might yourself get slugged. Multiply this to basically every interaction, and then consider that the State isn't preventing the Big Crimes anyway like rape or murder, and itself facilitates the most widespread form of theft: wage theft and theft of profit. It doesn't stop or punish pollution, billionaire child rape, eviction, exploitative loans, or corporate fraud.
The State's monopoly on violence doesn't prevent domination, it enforces authorized dominion.
Will people work when there's no cash to gain? Well as you said, if their basic needs are met, why wouldn't they? If they don't have to dedicate at minimum 40 hours of their week to generating profit for some billionaire, what else might they spend their time on, and for what reason? Would they even need to work 40 hours a week if they aren't upholding systems of capital? Is their exhaustion inherent to the human social experience or an artifact of the artificially scarce society we've created? They already don't shove people out of the way on the street, there's probably some kind of social instinct there, right? What about you, in what ways would you contribute to the world around you if the world around you was already ensuring your basic needs are met? Would you look for ways to ensure the sustainability of those basic needs? Seek to improve comfort and delights? Seek to defend against exploitative forces?
I'm all in favour of grassroots experimentation and a search for something to improve upon, and then replace capitalism. This is how capitalism itself came about and spread, though we can argue about how much it was imposed after it ceased being the underdog.
What I am weary of is that such experimentation, and the energy it generates, will eventually be overtaken by the next iteration of people who want to stop nibbling at the margins and break a few eggs already, some sort of anarchist revolutionary vanguard. Much like with communism, skilful opportunists with a thirst for power will be all too happy to take over this energy and direct it toward building the next totalitarian regime, one which will of course claim to be rendering the State obsolete, but will be about as anarchist as North Korea is a people's democratic republic.
That's an important point. It's so hard to think of a better system, if you take the task seriously and actually think through all the consequences of each option.
As a result, as usual, the loud people that ignore all the details end up capturing everyone's imagination with a good story, and we stumble upon yet another century of nightmares.
Do you truly have a answer for a social architecture that is substantially better than a capitalist social democracy, flawed and compromised as it is? Because I really don't if I'm being honest with myself, and I am yet to hear one.
I don't have the mental power at this moment to write out my full thoughts on the subject so forgive my rambling thoughts that follow (an aside- withdrawing from SSRIs is an _unpleasant experience_)
I think the problem I find with arguments that Capitalism is the best/least bad system tend to be that they start from a false premise, in my opinion. I have a friend who makes the joke all the time that any system of government works if people were just nice to each other, but he has a point. I often hear that "oh, communism doesn't work because humans are inherently selfish." That's true, if you believe that humans are inherently selfish, but my counter-point to that is asking how much of it is innate vs. how much of it is trained by our culture and reflects back in those communist attempts because the sudden change in social architecture didn't give enough time to 'train it out of' the culture.
Back to the thing my friend says - if you believe that communism doesn't work because humans are inherently selfish/greedy/etc, I'd say to you also that capitalism is currently not working _because humans are being selfish and greedy_ in a system _that explicitly rewards that_. Which, maybe is worse. Not as in the outcomes are worse immediately than Soviet Russia etc. but for the long-term trajectory of human society.
I don't pretend I have an answer for how we can get from point A (capitalist system) to point B (future space communism) in a way that slowly shifts human thinking towards mutual aid and collective action, but I think it's short-sighted to assume that the way humans act in a system that rewards greed/selfishness is innate.
> the unfortunate reality is that the ideological complex of capital (even if weakening, and no longer effectively reproducing itself) is still strong enough that most in the West can't even imagine a better world (other than "less bad capitalism")
That's one way to put it. Another perspective (mine) is that capitalism enables anyone to try and make things better, and if you make things better for the right user, they will reward you.
But the decision is still subject to heavy scrutiny; in fact, more than with normal for profit corporations. It does not seem like the board acted in the best interests of the nonprofit here, they acted in their own.
How much did people on the board benefit from OpenAI going for-profit? Either directly by owning shares of the new for-profit, or knowing they eventually would, or by business connections to the new for-profit entity? I imagine most or all of them.
Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
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