- 0 Posts
- 53 Comments
Yeah, no one is mad at you because they’re libs. They’re downvoting you because you missed the entire point and went off on some bullshit.
You say “working on someone else’s plan” is what you mean by “working for”. You then go on to talk about selling your labor. These are two different things.
Under capitalism, the capitalist doesn’t make a plan. They make a bet. Part of that bet is hiring planners to make the plans that other people will work on. This is why I asked the question I asked.
When you and the manager both sell your labor power to the capitalist for a wage, you both work for the capitalist, but you don’t work on the capitalist’s plan. You work on your manager’s plan.
If you take the capitalist out, and if we define “working for” as selling labor, then “working for” is abolished under socialism, even though hierarchy remains.
If instead the definition of “working for” is “working on someone else’s plan”, then we have a discussion about the fact that planning is a type of labor. In some context, planning can be done by the people doing the work at the expense of efficiency, which is fine when our goal is maximizing liberty. But there are other contexts where the work to be done and the planning are significantly arduous and complex enough that different people need to do the planning and the execution.
When this is the case, inevitably, anarchists start talking about “voluntary hierarchies” as the correct prefiguration, but this meme is raising the common objections from some anarchists that there is no such thing as a voluntary hierarchy.
Hence, the discussion below about the reality of stratified systems and levels of complexity creating naturally stratified labor distribution, which lends itself to hierarchy.
Honestly, what does this mean? If you abolish ownership, then working “for” someone changes in meaning.
Once ownership and profit are gone, working “for” someone stops meaning “for their economic interest” and starts meaning something very ambiguous. Don’t carry over the emotional meaning from one mode of production to the other.
You might mean working according to someone else’s plan. Is that working “for” someone? Maybe you mean working with someone who has the power to bar you from participating in the work or has the power to stop you doing certain actions?
It’s not clear what you mean, so it would be helpful if you clarified.
It’s not even just differences in skill and experience. The person who is busy cutting a path through the first necessarily cannot also see the entirety of the forest. The person who is taking the aerial view of the forest necessarily cannot be cutting through it.
There is a hierarchy of scale and complexity. It can be solved with voluntary hierarchies of work, but it cannot be ignored. Consequences of actions can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades to emerge. The people worried about the immediate consequences of individual actions are not going to have the capacity for also worrying about the long-term consequences of collective actions over time.
We know this. We see this all the time. And yet this axiomatic-bordering-on-religious stricture against hierarchy chooses to believe there’s some way to handle hierarchies of complexity without hierarchies of coordination.
Thanks for reposting. The commenter appears to be a member of the semi-conscious liberation army.
Grrrr
You should study North Korean politics and political structures.
The standard you are using, which is that there should be constant changes in leadership, is an attempt to use your existing liberal democracy as the only possible model for liberatory politics.
Think about it. Is the ONLY way you would ever accept a political system when it has constant leadership churn? Ok, grant that. Then ask, what causes constant leadership churn?
The answers will be either constant fighting between major ideologically opposed factions OR constant disapproval by the people being governed.
Neither of those conditions are good healthy conditions.
Now instead imagine if there were no competing ideologies, the capitalists have been purged and domestically the entire population has a shares collective trauma from the massive bombing campaign by the psychopathic US.
What’s the behavior gonna be? Well, if any leader is capable of leading them out of the caves and to safety from napalm, kidnapping, fire bombing, and famine - that leader is either very lucky and when their luck runs out they will be ousted, or that leader is actually very effective, responsive to the needs of the people, and is capable of adapting to changing times. In that case, the people will have absolutely no desire to put another leader in place.
When that happens, especially in a culture that puts huge importance on multi-generational families, the children of that leader are likely going to be the best equipped to carry in the program. Not necessarily though. They would have to remain constantly engaged, constantly proving that they are capable.
What would that require? It would require a system where by existing leadership cabinets were capable of selecting and assigning those descendants to specific posts. And guess what… That’s exactly what DPRK has.
Your insistence that freedom is defined exclusively by multi-party systems that give “equal” voice to capitalist and working class interests is a form of chauvinism.
It wasn’t slave labor, exactly, but it was massively exploited labor. 75 years ago China was easily the poorest country in the world and it’s people were living in the equivalent of $1/day, possibly less.
However, the entire goal of the socialist program was to alleviate that poverty and exploitation, not by enslaving people but by developing the country’s economic and industrial base.
Today, Chinese people have a higher average purchasing power than US citizens do. That means the average Chinese family can afford to buy more goods and services than the average American family. Wealth inequality is also way lower in China than in the US which means that way more of Chinese people have better purchasing power than USians do, simply because that’s how averages work. The US raises the average by making very few people very wealthy and China raises the average by making their billion residents sustainably and incrementally more wealthy.
As for slave labor, the US imprisons more of its people than any other nation on the planet and all of those prisoners are subject to slave labor and massive debt burdens. Official US slave labor from prisons produces over $11Bn in goods and services, much of which goes to the profits of for-profit prison management companies.
China has no such system.
51·11 days agoWhat propaganda? They have said for decades they won’t attack Taiwan and look at that, they haven’t attacked Taiwan. What exactly am I supposed to believe? That despite all the evidence to the contrary, China really wants to attack Taiwan?
Only fools would believe the incessantly lying US war machine that has lied for decades about its reasons for war, its plans for war, and its opponents. When China says it’s going to do something, it seems pretty clear that it goes and does that thing. China has been crystal clear about not using military force to end the decades of estrangement from Taiwan that the West enforced on the Chinese people with gun boats.
If you still think you can trust something that both Nancy Pelosi and Pete Hegseth agree on, I may have a bridge to sell you.
That’s because China has been saying for decades that they have no interest in invading Taiwan. And that’s because they know that invading Taiwan, even with an overwhelming military victory, will not achieve their aim. Taiwan will adopt the 1 nation 2 systems structure through a peaceful process or not at all. China has been saying this over and over again. The only people talking about invasion are the US and the only time China talks about military action on Taiwan is to stop the US from deploying significant military capabilities. Which means, that if the US doesn’t want China to invade, all it has to do is stop trying to build up its military capabilities on the island.
41·14 days agoThat not at all how it works. The point is that dropping bombs for the purposes of imperialism is different than dropping bombs for the purpose of anti-imperialism. The USA is the torch bearer of the globe spanning empire that they took over from Western Europe. That empire at its height dominated 80% of the world’s population and to this day that empire continues to cause more death and destruction than any other movement in the world. We are now in the fifth century of this empire’s existence.
The Russian Federation is not an empire and it is not imperialist. Just a few decades ago it’s entire system of government and economics was completely ended and rebuilt under the dominance of the empire (described above). The Russian Federation does not occupy any colonies or subjugated territories, as the US does (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, etc). The Russian Federation is not the continuation of a settler colonial state like the US is. The Russian Federation does not have 600 military bases all over the world where it operates without legal oversight.
Russia has done lots of bad things. All worthy of criticism. But that criticism needs to be contextualized, because while those bad things are worth analyzing and discussing, they can in no way ever be used to justify the actions of the global spanning baby killing family starving genocidal eugenicist world destroying empire.
A lot of reading, listening, arguing with people I disagreed with, forcing myself to contend with discomfort, to reexamine my beliefs, trying to disprove what others were saying or writing, and lots and lots of time.
I was already a relatively well-read kid by the time I hit college, and I had some counter cultura approaches to political beliefs (like taking care of people being more important than raw profit), but I was fully invested in the American project and had a ton of unexamined racism, mysoginy, classism, and cultural appropriation that I just replicated without question.
I studied philosophy and my particular path through that degree forced me to develop not only the ability but the respect for the process of arguing something from multiple perspectives equally well (or aspiring to that as best we can). So by the end of college I was committed to taking up the best version of anything I disagreed with so I could understand it better but also to boost my ego so I could defeat it more soundly.
But “no go” zones always bothered me. For example, we studied the classic skeptics Descartes and Hume, but never responded to them once. We simply examined how their skepticism led to the impossibility of knowledge and then just never solved it. Worse, whenever someone used an argument that was sufficiently skeptical, it was met with “well that just leads to solipsism”. That bothers me as it’s not a refutation. What bothered me more was the position that if anyone used arguments from solipsism that we could just dismiss them as bad faith and ignore what they had to say.
That particular aspect of my path built this sort of vigiliance for these “no go” zones of thought and I saw them popping up all over the place. If a Republican said something, some people would immediately dismiss it without examining it at all, and the same would be true for different people if a Democrat said something. The same was true if a Chinese or Russian report made a claim. The same was true about satanists, communists, addicts, and many others.
These were far more numerous than people arguing strong skepticism. And the positions being discussed didn’t threaten all possible knowledge or the existence of reality, but they did threaten deeply held personal beliefs.
So, overtime, when I witnessed someone else saying “well, that’s pro-China so it can’t be trusted at all”, I slowly started to examine these things. And then I found myself saying the same thing - “oh you’re a communist, you can’t be trusted with anything you say”.
That’s when I realized I had some built-in problems. And it was about that time I started to question my long held beliefs that I wasn’t racist, that I wasn’t sexist, that I wasn’t mysoginst. And that was really hard. It took years of stop and start, years of resisting the evidence, years of not paying attention because it made me uncomfortable.
But eventually 2020 happened, I was forced to slow down, I had far fewer social connections reinforcing my behavior and beliefs, and the national discourse at the time gave me huge opportunities to “argue it from the other side” and examine what was really going on. And that was a hell of a ride. Anger, depression, rage, resentment, just everything came up. But my commitment to earnest engagement with ideas and reality and facts and history forced me through the process.
There were distinct periods where (1) I believed the USA was the greatest country in the world and also I and most of the people I knew were not racist, mysoginst, and white supremacist, and then (2) the USA was the greatest country in the world with some problems and I can see how I have unconscious racism but I can fix that and I’m not mysoginst or white supremacist and most of the people I know are not either, and then (3) the USA is a pretty bad actor but at least it’s better than Russia, China, DPRK, Cuba, Iran, etc and racism is actually a system not a personal moral failing and while I can work against it I have been raised in this way and also wow ok I realize now that mysoginy is insidious and embedded in so many of my ways of relating to the world but I can work on that and then (4) oh wow the US is the evil empire and racism and mysoginy and white supremacy are actually these massive historical processes that I haven’t even begun to wrestle with and I actually can’t really say anything about them until I really dig in and am willing to be wrong in ways that makes me sick to my stomach…
And my process is still ongoing now, but, this is maybe a long winded story about how I escaped the matrix.
Have you ever seen a super cut on YouTube of 50 US news stations literally repeating the exact same line over and over and over again?
Do you really think you could propagandize a billion people with 55 distinct and recognized cultural groups speaking different languages after having nearly every single communication appartus totally destroyed in a civil war 75 years ago while England and the US, who have uninterrupted propaganda operations that go back centuries have been deploying their empire’s propaganda against China since the Opium Wars?
No. Absolutely not. You imagine that China has deep propaganda control over a billion lemmings because your propaganda system is so strong it’s convinced you of something so ridiculous.
You don’t even understand the social credit thing. You have no idea what it is, how much of it is real versus propaganda, and how it differs from the credit score system in the US.
Democracy: China is constantly evolving it’s democratic mechanisms, currently referred to as whole process democracy. In the West you can change the party but not the policies. In China you can change the policies but not the party.
Free Speech: defending the KKK with arguments for free speech is not the high minded position you think it is. Free speech includes fascism, cultism, chauvinism, and neoliberalism. Working against those things is a perennial obligation of any liberatory movement.
This is puritanism brain worms. Your position is that socialism done correctly is subsistence living. What a terrible vision.