grumpyoldcommunist

[grumpyoldcommunist]

This feels the same as saying "why would a revolutionary oppose cutting welfare, this will just anger the proles and leave them with nothing left to lose!" People would probably react to mandatory service/conscription the same way they react to most hardship; with passivity and obedience rather than full revolt.

Many countries have mandatory service and it doesn't seem to have made them any more rebellious. Arguably the mandatory service of, for example, Israel and South Korea only serve to entrench their nationalist cultures (and in South Korea, it seems to play no small part in fueling a bitter and resentful mens' movement/backlash to feminism).

I think expecting a soldiers' revolt in today's world is to ignore that the best example we have (revolutionary Russia) only happened in the context of many millions of peasant soldiers being thrown into a horribly unpopular war for a government that many of them had never even heard of before. Many peasants did not even consider themselves Russians, and it still took tremendous slaughter before they began to seriously revolt in large numbers.

Finally, as an American I'm very loath to support any policy that would encourage anyone to join and support the military. Growing up in the War on Terror, a lot of people spoke positively about mandatory military service and I don't think that that program, if enacted, would have resulted in anything other than further suffering for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

i’ve made this post and argued about this before but i don’t get if you’re a revolutionary (of basically any stripe) why you would oppose mandatory military service—what could possibly be better than the state paying for training your future cadres and the people being just one seized armoury away from resembling an actual force—the point of all revolutionary movements is to start and win a civil war and somehow the volunteer service model is going to make that easier

also obviously conscripts are going to be easier to radicalise into defection than volunteers

[grumpyoldcommunist]

Very strongly endorsed. I see lots of predictions/imaginings of socialism that envision 90% of people living in (dependent) luxury while a small number of enginners and planners actually "run the economy." I don't consider this an ideal system!

I think it also explains why so many people have these purely destructive/venegful understandings of revolution - the prospect of fighting and dying just to win the right to discuss/debate production statistics every month isn't very appealing. Yet I think most people feel powerless because they have no way to provide input or control over the society/economy as a whole. The only antidote to powerlessness is power, which goes hand in hand with responsibility.

Got this phrase stuck in my head: "socialism is the fight for the right to take responsibility". Haven't quite worked out what i mean by this, but something to do with it being a move from a mass of atomised and so helpless individuals who have no ability to effect change and so can flee from any sense of responsibility for the state of the world to the formation of a working class collectivity which can take decisive control of society and so the members of which must face up to the responsibility this control entails. This is why revenge fantasies or apocalypse fantasies are ultimately antithetical to socialism -- they're a flinching from responsibility, a retreat to that irresponsible atomised view of the world.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

*medieval Ben Shapiro voice* well, technically, they aren't slaves, they're SERFS, so your argument is a fallacy,

not to put too fine a point on it but like, isutzumi was fully 100% a slave of shuro's family

[grumpyoldcommunist]

Maybe lots of people are answering "not sure" because the question seems to be written like a trick question? Most people know about the holocaust and believe in it, but couldn't tell you when it/WWII started and ended. So the question can't be answered unless you know that the holocaust started in 1939, which is probably beyond the grasp of many Americans.

A recent poll by YouGov showed that ~20% of adults under 30 in America believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is rather worrying (to put it mildly), so one has to wonder why. The direkt reason is probably that those people end up reading stuff by Holocaust deniers on the internat. But I suspect that is only convincing because history education generally only teaches that the Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews but doesn't teach how we know that Nazis murdered ~6 million Jews. If people have only accepted a claim based on authority, even weak arguments may convince them that it isn't true. Education about the Holocaust needs to get into the weeds of the methods historians use to establish what happens: census data shows that there are ~6 million fewer Jews in the world in 1945 than in 1933; we have reports about what was happening at the death camps by people who encountered them from many different perspectives (prisoners, guards, soldiers when they liberated the camps, Polish resistence fighters during the was - the earliest reports afaik); we have pictures and documents that conform to these reports. Refuting the arguments by Holocaust deniers is important, but that on its own will do little. People need to know the evidence for something to believe it, not just the evidence against the supposed evidence against it.

(By the way, I think it is a mistake to assume that everyone who goes down the Holocaust denial path already has an antisemitic worldview before that. Holocaust denial can be a gateway drug to antisemitism.)

[grumpyoldcommunist]

We will never know their names.

The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it - victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done - humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow.  In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.

For a long time, there was no hope - only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.

In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.

It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it - but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.

At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Ra��ka, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.

The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.

The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.

They found none.

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

I'm certainly not a Hamas supporter, but the idea that Israel has ever been interested in working towards a peaceful 2-state solution (and that their relation-building with Saudi Arabia has anything to do with that) is laughable.

Israelis may disapprove of Netanyahu, but from the polling data I've seen, it has more to do with his attempted subversion of democracy than his treatment of Palestine. So the idea that popular opinion in Israel was about to result in a sudden relaxation of the political and economic repression of the Palestinians (if only those no-goodniks in Hamas hadn't ruined it for the rest of them! Ah well, maybe we can try again in 50 years) is bullshit.

Israel (it's voters, state, and institutions) has had decades to do something to end the cycle, and they are indeed the ONLY party that can end this cycle. If the Palestinians' only choices are: 1. Give up and accept total defeat on Israel's terms or 2. Rage impotently and drag a bunch of innocents down into hell with you out of spite, maybe Israel should consider offering them a better set of choices?

Obviously Hamas actions are abhorrent and the rise in antisemitism is uncalled for. What is the proper the response to 75yrs of apartheid though? Something has to be done about that or his cycle will never cease.

So you came from the post in which I explicitly named three organizations working for a two-state solution. And didn’t think… to look into… their proposals for a two-state solution…

As a reminder, before Hamas’s attack, Israel was working on normalizing peaceful relations with Saudi Arabia. That’s dead in the water because Hamas broke a ceasefire and killed a thousand Jewish civilians.

Before Hamas’s attack, there were massive, frequent, and often daily protests among the Israeli public, speaking out against an administration comprised of anti-Palestinians. Those are on hold now, because a thousand Jewish civilians were killed, and the country is at war. But Netanyahu’s coalition of asswipes is built like a house of cards, and they’ll suffer in the next election. That much is clear.

Hamas wasn’t looking to gain territory, win, or free Palestine on October 7th. Israel has never lost a war in its modern history, and it has overcome far worse odds than a couple thousand terrorists. There’s no feasible way for Hamas to have won. They broke the ceasefire and killed civilians anyway. Why? Why waste those lives and those resources, knowing that Israel would retaliate against Gazans?

Because Hamas looked around and saw something that horrified them. They saw Arab nations, once their allies, walking away from the idea of killing millions of Jews in favor of normalization and peace with Israel. They saw the citizens of Israel, rallying in unprecedented numbers for peace and democracy. They saw Fatah, their Palestinian enemies since 2007, ready to come back to the bargaining table for a peaceful two-state resolution.

Hamas broke a ceasefire for a media ploy. They did it, knowing that it would stop the normalization process between the Saudis and Israelis. They did it, knowing that it would bring an abrupt halt to Israeli protests. They did it, knowing that Israel would retaliate, and that the world would be watching as Hamas put Palestinian civilians in the line of fire and blamed it on Israel. They were looking to propagandize a dying movement, and friend, it seems like you bought into it.

Something does have to be done about Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians. Something does have to happen to end this cycle of violence. And plenty of things were being done about it, in the Knesset, on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But Hamas considers peace without genocide to be a failure. Peace without genocide leaves Hamas out of a job. So they put a stop to it, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives.

And you don’t gotta take that from me. Ask them. They aren’t trying to hide it, they’ve been saying it all month. It’s in their founding charter.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

I have a knee-jerk disgust reaction to the Tweet, but it's because Israel cannot credibly claim to even value the lives of its own people, so I interpret any claim to the contrary with maximum uncharitability: "If you really wanted to save families, you'd declare a ceasefire. You value your citizens solely to the extent that they can provide cannon fodder or victims to motivate the cannon fodder."

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

It's hard to look at senior politicians like McConnel or Pelosi and conclude that experienced politicians are somehow any more resistant to lobbyists than freshmen. Fundamentally Congress relies on lobbyists because the government has to interface with the private sector at some point, and certain private interests can make or break the fortunes of entire states. Even Bernie will jump when Lockheed Martin (a major employer in Vermont) tells him to. But this list is definitely a good starting place.

What sort of reforms would you suggest if you think term limits for Congress would be bad/more corrupt? I don't see how it would be any more corrupt than how things currently are. It's too late for me to think too in depth right now on it, but I feel like it would be harder for lobbyists to sink their teeth into a politician if they can only serve a maximum of X years. People that can just be voted in every single election would be more likely to be corrupt imo.

And how do you feel about term limits for the supreme court?

On the contrary, it is much easier for lobbyists to sink their teeth into new members of congress. New members of congress who want to survive have a strong need for legislative information and institutional experience; professional lobbyists have both, and are very eager to build relationships with the new lawmakers who need it. This is why there's an event attended by all new members of congress which is basically a convention led by lobbyists and business executives. Term limits do mean lobbyists have to create new relationships more often, but they're also the easiest type of relationship to make.

Grose, et. al. (2022): "Our survey reveals that lobbyists in states with term limits reported meetings [with legislators] in social settings more frequently than lobbyists in states without term limits (e.g., 79% of lobbyists in term-limits states met a legislator at a coffee shop and 65% in states with no term limits; p≤:01)."

I have a long list of ideas for reforming congress but if we're talking about addressing corruption specifically:

Ban members of congress, their spouses, and their senior staffers from owning individual stocks, instead requiring them to keep all of their money in pre-approved mutual or index funds while in office.

Restrict members of congress from accepting suspicious outside payments, like high-paid speeches at corporate events.

Lifelong ban on lobbying for former members of congress, along with public disclosures of their income in the years after leaving office. (Doing this effectively would also require expanding our definition of what counts as lobbying).

Completely overhaul our anti-revolving door policies and lobbying regulations to address ethics and corruption directly (this could be a long list in itself).

Turn the Office of Congressional Ethics into an independently-funded organization with authority over both chambers of congress. Further empower ethics committees as well.

Expand independent congressional organizations who can replace the role of lobbyists in providing policymakers with important legislative information (CBO, CRS, GAO, etc.)

Strengthen truth-in-testimony rules so that people providing testimony to congress have to disclose their institutional conflicts of interest.

Pay congressional staffers better, encourage their unionization efforts, and provide congressional offices with the resources necessary to conduct their own research.

(There is also a large and unambiguous body of evidence suggesting that paying legislators themselves better reduces corruption, but this is such an extremely unpopular idea that I don't really waste time advocating for it)

[grumpyoldcommunist]

As someone working at a university my two cents is that the primary goal of a university is to get lots of state and federal grants and build lots of labs and hire lots of brilliant researchers and make lots of money and intellectual property so they can hire more researchers and get more grants and build more labs.

Education of the general populace is a desirable but more or less secondary byproduct. There's a reason the lectures are free online but the research papers (also funded by your taxes) are locked behind a paywall.

how am i seeing communists earnestly argue that the function of the university (in capitalist society!) is to educate people

[grumpyoldcommunist]

The humanities are too important to be left to the humanities majors.

without humanities you will fall for the first lie somebody tells you that punches in the gut because you never learned how those gut-punches work

"people who didn't go to university are easily fooled morons. I am not classist."

[grumpyoldcommunist]

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

I would try to design enough formal feedback channels (besides voting) so that public opinion could be inferred without a doubt. We already live in a time where people can yell at BART officials on Twitter directly about poor service; I don't think any official who ignored or willfully misinterpreted those demands would last very long in office. And again, the public would ultimately need to approve an economic plan, and could freely reject any that doesn't reflect their interests. This doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority, but it should prevent tyranny by the planners.

Exactly, what if people could propose what they want on the ballot via referendum, then the planners could crunch the numbers and come back with costs for the most popular choices? They could try to pull a fast one and say "actually bars and strip clubs will cost 10 million labor hours each; pick either booze or hospitals but not both" but I think the public would push back against that estimate. If the government's estimates are compromised, people could recall planners (or perhaps a new group of planners could be chosen randomly by sortition) and ultimately vote for any plan that seemed desirable and attainable, regardless of the source of the plan. If Jim Bob from Duluth has had better success in predicting costs than the professionals, there would be nothing stopping people from voting for his proposal instead.

On your point about labor discipline, this is kind of one of socialism's basic arguments: when capitalist states (or historical socialist states) suppress labor movements and protests, not only is it immoral, but it also denies the government the opportunity to solve the public's problems or inefficiencies. If the public is unhappy with working conditions, then their rights to free speech, protest, and even to prevent production via striking must be protected- not only because it is morally right, but because their dissent is the only means of epxressing their real preferences to the planners and society at large. Ultimately, control of production (and of enforcement, to whatever degree necessary and practical) must belong to the workers, because otherwise they are at the mercy of whoever really calls the shots and can set the narrative (whether that is a capitalist state or state socialist planners.)

Finally, about the market: the market primarily allocates goods depending on peoples' ability to pay, not their willingness. The working class is kept in a state of debt (and in some places, literal) slavery and fear of absolute poverty. Those with vast wealth can artifically and disproportionately skew demand towards their own interests. Thus markets often fail to capture accurate demand, and we end up with outcomes that are bad for the majority but benefit the owning class (privatized health insurance, private cable monopolies, etc.) On the supply side, goods and services are overproduced and wasted (food, unsold vehicles) or are underproduced/overpriced due to regulatory capture (such as laws forbidding direct sale of vehicles by manufacturers), poor policy (either the result of upper class interests, or of government attempts to compromise between opposing classes, such as rent control). Even when production of goods adjusts to market signals, it is slow and imperfect. What if we could just decide to produce however much we would likely need to satisfy a certain goal or demand, plus a bit extra?

Overall, I feel like we're talking past each other somewhat, and I also think I could give you any number of policies, whether practical ("planners could be recalled at any time by the public") or ridiculous ("people could humiliate planners in the street to discourage them from acting too arrogant") and your response would either be (understandably) skepticism, or some variant of "the Serious People will always be around, and will find a way to exploit any system or rule to their own ends and/or to enable bullying". I don't expect to change your mind, especially with nothing but hypotheticals, but I don't think it would be productive to continue the dialogue. But nevertheless, I have appreciated the opportunity to clarify my thoughts and beliefs via answering your questions, and I am sincerely appreciative that you have asked your questions with civility, given how bad other leftists seem to have treated you. I hope I have extended you the same courtesy.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

[grumpyoldcommunist]

Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."

You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)

So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")

I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

[grumpyoldcommunist]

Good writeup. Maybe I'm too dumb to comprehend the answer, but I do wonder why bother with predictions markets instead of just letting people vote on what they want?

Say you get 100 votes and can allocate them across different desires/outcomes proportionally to how much you want them ("I want more free time", "I want more of good X/Y", "I want faster public transport") which could be used by planners to determine total public preferences and provide an outline of a resource/labor budget. For example, if the majority of people strongly favor shorter commute times, planners could calculate the necessary labor time and resources required for R&D of new vehicles, transit software, etc. Then the budget would be put before public comment and approval. As a result, people would be committing to an actual expenditure of their time, labor, and resources rather than trying to play a game of signalling, like @brazenautomaton mentioned.

a sketch of a socialism

mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today

(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)

short version

nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on

new pareto inefficiencies this creates

reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run

I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs

normal consumer markets

you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today 

prediction markets to replace financial markets

financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors. 

the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!

in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.

almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets

lending/investment decisions

cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:

investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives

discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods

loans at fixed interest rates

“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time

the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions

because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute

bigger firms as SOEs

big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:

rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed 

appointment by a permanent planning agency

sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)

prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric

election by the employees’ union or consumer groups

direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens

and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique

smaller firms as cooperatives

if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.

cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control. 

to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this

universal jobs

if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking 

cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time

state ownership of land

blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences

[grumpyoldcommunist]

"Faced with devastating declines in government services, many have stepped in to provide basic social services and natural disaster training. This is particularly notable in rural counties in states like Oregon, where the combination of long-term collapse in timber revenue and dwindling federal subsidies has all but emptied the coffers of local governments.

In this situation, the Oath Keepers began to offer basic “community preparedness” and “disaster response” courses, and encouraged the formation of community watches and full-blown militias as parallel government structures.

While filling in the holes left by underfunded law enforcement in Josephine County, for example, Patriot-affiliated politicians were also leading the opposition to new property tax measures that would have allowed the hiring of more deputies.

By providing material incentives that guarantee stability, combined with threats of coercion for those who oppose them, such groups become capable of making the population complicit in their rise, regardless of ideological positions...often many in a population can’t be said to have any deep-seated ideological commitment in the first place. Instead, support follows strength, and ideology follows support."

-Phil Neel, Hinterland

For nearly a decade, the Oath Keepers — which formed in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency — have responded to disasters like hurricanes and floods by administering rescue operations, serving hot meals, and doing construction work. Disasters provide the Oath Keepers with opportunities to fundraise and gain the trust of people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to their anti-government cause. By arriving to crisis zones before federal agencies do, the Oath Keepers take advantage of bureaucratic weaknesses, holding a hand out to people in desperate circumstances.

This all serves to reinforce the militia members’ conviction that the government is fallible, negligent, and not to be trusted. And every time a new person sees the Oath Keepers as the helpers who respond when the government does not, it helps build the group’s fledgling brand.

[…]

“There’s a long-standing conspiracy theory among the far right that everything that FEMA does is dual use,” Jackson said. “It has this surface-level purpose of responding to emergencies and disasters and all that kind of stuff. But also it’s building up the infrastructure so that one day when martial law is declared, there are these huge detention camps and there are deployed resources to be used by troops who are enforcing martial law.”

Many Oath Keepers subscribe to that belief, but they’re not vocal about it. Publicly, Jackson said, they portray themselves as supplementing FEMA’s efforts and even working in tandem with the agency. It’s part and parcel of the group’s founding ethos — understand the system, work within the system, and be prepared to defeat the system when the time comes.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

I'm not sure why anyone would seriously mourn the death of Ted Kazcynski, when both a) his basic critique of technology is stupidly, fundamentally flawed to anyone who thinks about it for five minutes and b) plenty of morally palatable and effective enviormentalist protestors exist. But nobody's making any "Jessica Reznicek did nothing wrong" memes.

[grumpyoldcommunist]

So much awful American car discourse could be avoided if we simply RetVurned to Tradition and built big beautiful trains from sea to shining sea.

one of the things that’s been lost in the recent “let them buy electric” kerfuffle is that there’s a sort of feedback mechanism at work where americans can’t estimate distance correctly and companies see this and are unwilling to put the electric cars that might serve them well on the market. the go-to cheaper electric car on the north american market is the $30k+ nissan leaf. one thing i’ve often found in twitter threads discussing it is americans who say that its 150 mile range simply isn’t big enough for their needs. however, if you’re commuting an hour each way to work, 150 miles is enough to stop in somewhere and pick up groceries. few americans even drive 50 miles a day for work. meanwhile, in europe and china, much cheaper options exist. the dacia spring sells in france for 17,000 euros, or under 20,000 usd, and has a range of 143 miles. the hongguang mini sells in china for the equivalent of 5000 usd and has a range of 100 miles. for many americans, either of these cars could easily replace their current vehicle, especially for those who live in cities, if companies were willing to bring them over. you can see the proof in sales of electric bikes, which now outpace electric cars and have the sort of price and range needed for <10 mile trips (not to mention, some have cargo compartments for grocery rides). however, given the high profit margins on SUVs (as well as america’s addiction to the idea that bigger cars are always safer), it’s unlikely that companies will want to undercut themselves with efficient smaller electric vehicles.