Countries that make an effort towards democracy and liberalisation do rank higher in terms of personal freedoms and living standards. That’s the opposite of a sham in practice.
Using the term “personal freedom” in a liberal environment is deceiving, because often “personal freedom” also entails rights to property and other methods the bourgeoise use to oppress the working class.
Liberals have successfully merged ideas of personal freedom and capitalist freedom. It’s important that people have access to homes (which liberals call private property). It’s bad to have a leech class scalp homes (which liberals also call private property) and use their excess supply of that necessity to make a profit off working class people.
Conflating ideas is an important rhetorical strategy for capitalists that allows people to easily stomach exploitation in the name of basic personal freedoms.
That’s why society should tax the everliving shit out of those who collect property portfolios. It’s not like it’s impossible to own your own home from humble beginnings, you just have to put in the effort.
The alternative world in which nobody can buy their own home is far worse.
Home ownership isn’t a guarantee, even for people who work 80 hours a week. Maybe you think the people who work 80 hours a week aren’t smart enough to deserve a home, they’re just doing “unskilled” labor and that on its own isn’t enough. An issue with that is it’s not skill that determines wage, it’s market value (we could also get into why liberals think a skilled individual deserves housing while an unskilled individual deserves to be destitute). I make $150,000 a year as a 26 year old who didn’t go to college because I have a particularly strong interest in programming that I’ve been cultivating for the last 14 years.
I know people who have similar interests in art, have put in similar amounts of time and effort, and can’t make more than 60k a year. In the next decade that’ll be me too, I’m in my mid 20s and I realize these are my peak earning years because AI is going to destroy the labor market for programmers. I’ll be lucky if I can make over 50k a year by the time I’m 40 doing this kind of work. I’ll likely be working at Walmart or a similar retail outlet if I’m lucky.
This is all good and well for capitalism. My labor serves the interest of capital as long as I’m not being outperformed by some automated system. My value as a human goes down as technology improves, so I’ll eventually be making less and less until I get pushed out of this market entirely.
The alternative world where everyone has access to a home regardless of their social status is better. People shouldn’t lose access to their homes when technology improves and pushes people out of work, but that’s what will happen.
Unemployment will skyrocket, housing scalpers will continue to demand rents, and the reserve army of labor will grow as the needs of capital get increasingly served by automation.
Capitalism will continue to serve the interests of capital until it literally collapses society. If enough of the economy is automated away at that point, the bourgeois class will have a utopia, and the rest of us will waste away by slowly starving to death or being outright killed if we attempt a revolution to seize the means of automated production.
It’s not a guarantee but that’s a failure on lots of levels, but not an unfixable one. We need more social housing, we need to manage immigration policy better (that doesn’t necessarily mean restrictions just more in terms of planning) and we need more wealth redistribution and methods to tax excessive wealth of conglomerates and individuals including their property portfolios. Then we need to legislate for more rights for tenants and less rights for landlords including more taxation to free up homes and make people view them less as an asset and more an actual home. This isn’t impossible and can be done through the power of the vote if the left at large isn’t fighting itself in a battle of idealism versus pragmatism.
People who fail to adapt to the changing of the times always get left behind throughout history in large. Processes get automated and people bemoaned Henry Ford at the time for finding a more efficient way to build cars that required less man hours.
To be successful in this world you have to provide something that other people can’t. It’s fucking difficult but it’s the truth and would be true in any society. That includes being aware of how the wind may change and improving yourself and planning for contingencies.
There will always be bastards at the top trying to make things difficult in any organisation at any level of anything right down to the level of friendship groups and families. It’s shit, but it’s in our DNA. We are neither truly individualistic nor collective animals but a superposition of both. That’s the framework we are working in. That constrains the theory.
It’s not an inherent truth of the universe that the future will always require more work than the present. On the contrary, automation has the obvious potential to do the opposite. Imagine a future (that as I see it is incredibly likely) that all levels of human intellect are achieved by AI (that is, we reach general level intelligence in AI). This means all non-physical labor will be automated away. There will be no way to “improve yourself” mentally to keep up, we will all have to do physical work.
Now consider that physical work can also be automated, and the same is true of those industries. Lastly, consider that this doesn’t happen all at once, but over time. There will be stages where unemployment isn’t 100%, but rather 40 or 50% of humans can’t find work because that level of work is no longer needed.
Capitalism doesn’t have a natural tendency to fix these problems. There’s actually an entire class of people (the bourgeoise) who benefit from exploiting this growing pain in the working class. They benefit from reduced labor costs, they benefit from increased automation.
In an ideal society, we’d all benefit from these tools. That’s not how capitalism is setup, and for as long as capitalism exists there will be a class who is actively trying to gatekeep those benefits to just their class. They’ve done an incredibly impressive job at regressing social progress in the last 40 years, and capitalism is built to exist exactly in the sweet spot it’s been in for the past 150 years. Humans see its failures, and we’ll continue to swing back and forth within the bounds of what our overton window clearly allows, desperately looking for a solution somewhere within the bounds of capitalism to a problem inherently tied to the system.
We fundamentally don’t need a class of people with social interests directly opposed to 99% of the population. The bourgeoise doesn’t need to exist, despite liberal attempts to try to band-aid capitalism endlessly to make them behave. They’re not a group of people to be tamed, it’s not like they’re some source of infinite wealth and prosperity that also happens to yearn for evil, they’re just a sociopolitical class that steals/extracts wealth and value out of the economy for their own benefit.
You couldn’t get rid of the bourgeoisie even if you tried. They tried it in a Russia by force and a different group of fat cats became in charge.
Revolutions just get people killed and create power vacuums that are also filled with unscrupulous characters. It’s childish politics. It’s extreme.
We don’t live in capitalism. It’s never existed in much the same way communism never has.
Automation can and will help society. But there is still work that needs doing, we don’t live in a post scarcity society, we need people to work to keep everything going.
I don’t know why you think there’s suddenly going to be no jobs. Have you seen trends for employment per capita? It’s the opposite.
The bourgeoise have only existed for 200 years. Capitalist realism is the ridiculous position unsupported by almost the entirety of humanity’s existence. Even if you think utopia is a dream and there will always be rulers, claiming those rulers always have to be bourgeoise is obviously ridiculous.
I understand some people think human intelligence is some special product of the soul or biology, something that can’t be captured by silicon. Like there’s something special to carbon that allows for sophisticated processing that’ll never be matched by technology. I’ve never seen any evidence of this, and so I don’t believe in a soul or whatever magical fairy dust you think makes carbon special.
AI will match (and most likely far exceed) human capabilities in intelligence. Maybe you think the bourgeoise class will hire humans out of the goodness of their hearts, and I’d say you’re foolish for believing that. Once AI can match and exceed human capabilities, humans won’t be hired. It’s not that hard to reason out.
If you’re at all in the field of AI, you’d see how much faster this is all coming than experts originally thought. AGI was estimated by the industry to be about 25 years out, 2 years ago. Now it’s estimated to be 10 years out. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential curves. Unless we get massive regulation in the AI industry to slow it down, in 1 or 2 iterations we’ll hit AGI.
Sure, philosophers (myself included) will continue having debates about whether it’s sentient or conscious, but the bourgeoise aren’t interested in that, they just need raw performance. GPT4 already exceeds 50-99% of college students in all fields in performance scores (bar exam, AP exams, biology olympiad, etc.). Yes, college students are far from experts, but not as far as you might want to believe when it comes to scaling in information technology.
AI really isn’t as good as you imagine it is, especially when it comes to high level esoteric academic fields. An AI couldn’t produce original research or come up with creativity. It regurgitates what it’s been fed.
Saying the bourgeoisie is a modern construct is basically wrong. Before they were called that they were called nobles or lords.
I’d rather deal with what we are facing than some hypothetical luddite doomer scenario.
That doesn’t refute that liberal democracies have averaged better at protecting them than any of the alternatives thus far, just that liberal democracies have the highest standard achievable, which basically nobody but ultra patriotic conservatives would be arguing.
Like 90% of leftist gripe with “liberals” is problems conservatives either have a monopoly on or are far worse enough at that leftists always attacking liberals over it first comes across as tone deaf to the current political realities.
It’s the equivalent of freaking out that the LHC might have made a mini black hole when TON-618 is standing right behind you.
Conservatives want to shoot gay people in the streets but let’s not let that stop us from reminding everyone that the liberals who don’t want that to happen are also bad because they have outdated economic and foreign policy views.
Leftists have gotta stop picking fights with liberals as if they are the only other side of the discussion in the room, and that they’re the worst other side.
I would love to live in a world where Joe Biden was the standard bearer of the relative right wing in America, but that is not the case even remotely, and high and mighty leftists do not make me feel like we will move any closer to such a future when they have to be harangued shamed and bullied into checking some marks on a piece of paper to keep as many fascists out of office as possible.
They “rank higher” according to certain metrics and certain definitions of “democracy” and “liberty”. Take some more honest definitons, and take a more holistic perspective, taking into account how many of those countries are simply really good at exporting their exploitation, and they won’t score so highly. Also, being better than fascism is a really fucking low bar.
Or in other words, just because your shit sandwich doesn’t have cyanide in it doesn’t mean it isn’t still a shit sandwich.
Happiness of the people, rights for minorities, salaries, education.i could go on and on how countries that have democratised have made lives better for the people who live there.
Also I’ve never compared to fascism so I don’t know why you brought that up.
If you think I’m holding society to a low bar, then perhaps you’re holding society to an unrealistic and theoretical high bar? You have to work within the geopolitical constraints that you’re presented with. Please posit an alternative country that is an example of a well run and equitable society that doesn’t have democracy or liberalism?
Perhaps I was unclear, the “they” I was referring to in my original comment was tankies and fascists, as mentioned in the OP.
Anyways, this:
Happiness of the people, rights for minorities, salaries, education.i could go on and on how countries that have democratised have made lives better for the people who live there.
is a pretty vague and meaningless. In theory? Sure, sounds nice. In practice? It’s twisted doublespeak for systems that are still fundamentally authoritarian.
Again, what is democracy, really? How are these metrics measured?
There’s so much to unpack I’m not really sure where to start. Are you coming from a perspective of " capitalism can be reformed with democracy" or “voting with your dollar is democracy manifest” or smthn else?
If you think the Western world as is is fundamentally authoritarian then I honestly don’t know what to say to you. I feel like you are using the term so loosely that it becomes meaningless.
All I’m saying is that capitalism and communism are just theories and in reality the job of a government with regards to the economy is to balance tax policy and spending.
I’m saying there is no silver bullet or magical cure to the world’s ills. The world will always be fucked as long as humans are in it so the best the government can do is try to minimise suffering without completely shitting the bed and crashing the economy/society with idealism, left or right.
Anybody who tries to change the world too radically too quickly inevitably fucks it up and makes things worse, time and time again.
We don’t live in unfettered capitalism in the West. That’s as much a theoretical construct as communism.
Yeah I’ve got no quick ‘n’ easy answer to what you’re putting on the table here, take it as a compliment, lol. As an anarchist I approach things with a certain worldview which I imagine you disagree with on a pretty fundamental level.
Overall, the system we live in is still governed by capitalist principles (and assumptions about society/humanity) even in cases like the nordic model which is considered “progressive” despite being a hybrid of social democracy and corporatism.
Even putting aside the whole discussion about the “tyranny of the majority”, democracy in practice really isn’t all that “democratic”. Between lobbying, corruption, the class system, societal biases, the manipulation of information, the education system itself… if you believe all that can still add up to the best we can achieve, at least currently, and that if any change for the better is to be made it’s through this system, and you’re firmly rooted in this belief… yeah I guess there’s not much else I can say to you.
It’s a big leap from “is this the best we can achieve?” to “let’s abandon all societal structure and law”.
You think you can get rid of power structures. I’m telling you that it’s a pipe dream. We are fundamentally constrained. That’s not the same as saying society as it is is the best we can ever do.
Anarchism isn’t about abandoning “all societal structure” though. Authority and law are not necessary for organisation.
Anarchism in praxis is largely about working towards the social change required to properly challenge/undermine the power structures that control our lives.
Of course authority and law are necessary for organisation. Its beyond crazy to think otherwise. Can you think of a single organisation that doesn’t have rules and power structures?
Countries that make an effort towards democracy and liberalisation do rank higher in terms of personal freedoms and living standards. That’s the opposite of a sham in practice.
Using the term “personal freedom” in a liberal environment is deceiving, because often “personal freedom” also entails rights to property and other methods the bourgeoise use to oppress the working class.
Liberals have successfully merged ideas of personal freedom and capitalist freedom. It’s important that people have access to homes (which liberals call private property). It’s bad to have a leech class scalp homes (which liberals also call private property) and use their excess supply of that necessity to make a profit off working class people.
Conflating ideas is an important rhetorical strategy for capitalists that allows people to easily stomach exploitation in the name of basic personal freedoms.
That’s why society should tax the everliving shit out of those who collect property portfolios. It’s not like it’s impossible to own your own home from humble beginnings, you just have to put in the effort.
The alternative world in which nobody can buy their own home is far worse.
Home ownership isn’t a guarantee, even for people who work 80 hours a week. Maybe you think the people who work 80 hours a week aren’t smart enough to deserve a home, they’re just doing “unskilled” labor and that on its own isn’t enough. An issue with that is it’s not skill that determines wage, it’s market value (we could also get into why liberals think a skilled individual deserves housing while an unskilled individual deserves to be destitute). I make $150,000 a year as a 26 year old who didn’t go to college because I have a particularly strong interest in programming that I’ve been cultivating for the last 14 years.
I know people who have similar interests in art, have put in similar amounts of time and effort, and can’t make more than 60k a year. In the next decade that’ll be me too, I’m in my mid 20s and I realize these are my peak earning years because AI is going to destroy the labor market for programmers. I’ll be lucky if I can make over 50k a year by the time I’m 40 doing this kind of work. I’ll likely be working at Walmart or a similar retail outlet if I’m lucky.
This is all good and well for capitalism. My labor serves the interest of capital as long as I’m not being outperformed by some automated system. My value as a human goes down as technology improves, so I’ll eventually be making less and less until I get pushed out of this market entirely.
The alternative world where everyone has access to a home regardless of their social status is better. People shouldn’t lose access to their homes when technology improves and pushes people out of work, but that’s what will happen.
Unemployment will skyrocket, housing scalpers will continue to demand rents, and the reserve army of labor will grow as the needs of capital get increasingly served by automation.
Capitalism will continue to serve the interests of capital until it literally collapses society. If enough of the economy is automated away at that point, the bourgeois class will have a utopia, and the rest of us will waste away by slowly starving to death or being outright killed if we attempt a revolution to seize the means of automated production.
It’s not a guarantee but that’s a failure on lots of levels, but not an unfixable one. We need more social housing, we need to manage immigration policy better (that doesn’t necessarily mean restrictions just more in terms of planning) and we need more wealth redistribution and methods to tax excessive wealth of conglomerates and individuals including their property portfolios. Then we need to legislate for more rights for tenants and less rights for landlords including more taxation to free up homes and make people view them less as an asset and more an actual home. This isn’t impossible and can be done through the power of the vote if the left at large isn’t fighting itself in a battle of idealism versus pragmatism.
People who fail to adapt to the changing of the times always get left behind throughout history in large. Processes get automated and people bemoaned Henry Ford at the time for finding a more efficient way to build cars that required less man hours.
To be successful in this world you have to provide something that other people can’t. It’s fucking difficult but it’s the truth and would be true in any society. That includes being aware of how the wind may change and improving yourself and planning for contingencies.
There will always be bastards at the top trying to make things difficult in any organisation at any level of anything right down to the level of friendship groups and families. It’s shit, but it’s in our DNA. We are neither truly individualistic nor collective animals but a superposition of both. That’s the framework we are working in. That constrains the theory.
It’s not an inherent truth of the universe that the future will always require more work than the present. On the contrary, automation has the obvious potential to do the opposite. Imagine a future (that as I see it is incredibly likely) that all levels of human intellect are achieved by AI (that is, we reach general level intelligence in AI). This means all non-physical labor will be automated away. There will be no way to “improve yourself” mentally to keep up, we will all have to do physical work.
Now consider that physical work can also be automated, and the same is true of those industries. Lastly, consider that this doesn’t happen all at once, but over time. There will be stages where unemployment isn’t 100%, but rather 40 or 50% of humans can’t find work because that level of work is no longer needed.
Capitalism doesn’t have a natural tendency to fix these problems. There’s actually an entire class of people (the bourgeoise) who benefit from exploiting this growing pain in the working class. They benefit from reduced labor costs, they benefit from increased automation.
In an ideal society, we’d all benefit from these tools. That’s not how capitalism is setup, and for as long as capitalism exists there will be a class who is actively trying to gatekeep those benefits to just their class. They’ve done an incredibly impressive job at regressing social progress in the last 40 years, and capitalism is built to exist exactly in the sweet spot it’s been in for the past 150 years. Humans see its failures, and we’ll continue to swing back and forth within the bounds of what our overton window clearly allows, desperately looking for a solution somewhere within the bounds of capitalism to a problem inherently tied to the system.
We fundamentally don’t need a class of people with social interests directly opposed to 99% of the population. The bourgeoise doesn’t need to exist, despite liberal attempts to try to band-aid capitalism endlessly to make them behave. They’re not a group of people to be tamed, it’s not like they’re some source of infinite wealth and prosperity that also happens to yearn for evil, they’re just a sociopolitical class that steals/extracts wealth and value out of the economy for their own benefit.
You couldn’t get rid of the bourgeoisie even if you tried. They tried it in a Russia by force and a different group of fat cats became in charge.
Revolutions just get people killed and create power vacuums that are also filled with unscrupulous characters. It’s childish politics. It’s extreme.
We don’t live in capitalism. It’s never existed in much the same way communism never has.
Automation can and will help society. But there is still work that needs doing, we don’t live in a post scarcity society, we need people to work to keep everything going.
I don’t know why you think there’s suddenly going to be no jobs. Have you seen trends for employment per capita? It’s the opposite.
The bourgeoise have only existed for 200 years. Capitalist realism is the ridiculous position unsupported by almost the entirety of humanity’s existence. Even if you think utopia is a dream and there will always be rulers, claiming those rulers always have to be bourgeoise is obviously ridiculous.
I understand some people think human intelligence is some special product of the soul or biology, something that can’t be captured by silicon. Like there’s something special to carbon that allows for sophisticated processing that’ll never be matched by technology. I’ve never seen any evidence of this, and so I don’t believe in a soul or whatever magical fairy dust you think makes carbon special.
AI will match (and most likely far exceed) human capabilities in intelligence. Maybe you think the bourgeoise class will hire humans out of the goodness of their hearts, and I’d say you’re foolish for believing that. Once AI can match and exceed human capabilities, humans won’t be hired. It’s not that hard to reason out.
If you’re at all in the field of AI, you’d see how much faster this is all coming than experts originally thought. AGI was estimated by the industry to be about 25 years out, 2 years ago. Now it’s estimated to be 10 years out. Humans are terrible at understanding exponential curves. Unless we get massive regulation in the AI industry to slow it down, in 1 or 2 iterations we’ll hit AGI.
Sure, philosophers (myself included) will continue having debates about whether it’s sentient or conscious, but the bourgeoise aren’t interested in that, they just need raw performance. GPT4 already exceeds 50-99% of college students in all fields in performance scores (bar exam, AP exams, biology olympiad, etc.). Yes, college students are far from experts, but not as far as you might want to believe when it comes to scaling in information technology.
AI really isn’t as good as you imagine it is, especially when it comes to high level esoteric academic fields. An AI couldn’t produce original research or come up with creativity. It regurgitates what it’s been fed.
Saying the bourgeoisie is a modern construct is basically wrong. Before they were called that they were called nobles or lords.
I’d rather deal with what we are facing than some hypothetical luddite doomer scenario.
That doesn’t refute that liberal democracies have averaged better at protecting them than any of the alternatives thus far, just that liberal democracies have the highest standard achievable, which basically nobody but ultra patriotic conservatives would be arguing.
Like 90% of leftist gripe with “liberals” is problems conservatives either have a monopoly on or are far worse enough at that leftists always attacking liberals over it first comes across as tone deaf to the current political realities.
It’s the equivalent of freaking out that the LHC might have made a mini black hole when TON-618 is standing right behind you.
Conservatives want to shoot gay people in the streets but let’s not let that stop us from reminding everyone that the liberals who don’t want that to happen are also bad because they have outdated economic and foreign policy views.
Leftists have gotta stop picking fights with liberals as if they are the only other side of the discussion in the room, and that they’re the worst other side.
I would love to live in a world where Joe Biden was the standard bearer of the relative right wing in America, but that is not the case even remotely, and high and mighty leftists do not make me feel like we will move any closer to such a future when they have to be harangued shamed and bullied into checking some marks on a piece of paper to keep as many fascists out of office as possible.
They “rank higher” according to certain metrics and certain definitions of “democracy” and “liberty”. Take some more honest definitons, and take a more holistic perspective, taking into account how many of those countries are simply really good at exporting their exploitation, and they won’t score so highly. Also, being better than fascism is a really fucking low bar.
Or in other words, just because your shit sandwich doesn’t have cyanide in it doesn’t mean it isn’t still a shit sandwich.
Happiness of the people, rights for minorities, salaries, education.i could go on and on how countries that have democratised have made lives better for the people who live there.
Also I’ve never compared to fascism so I don’t know why you brought that up.
If you think I’m holding society to a low bar, then perhaps you’re holding society to an unrealistic and theoretical high bar? You have to work within the geopolitical constraints that you’re presented with. Please posit an alternative country that is an example of a well run and equitable society that doesn’t have democracy or liberalism?
Perhaps I was unclear, the “they” I was referring to in my original comment was tankies and fascists, as mentioned in the OP.
Anyways, this:
is a pretty vague and meaningless. In theory? Sure, sounds nice. In practice? It’s twisted doublespeak for systems that are still fundamentally authoritarian.
Again, what is democracy, really? How are these metrics measured?
There’s so much to unpack I’m not really sure where to start. Are you coming from a perspective of " capitalism can be reformed with democracy" or “voting with your dollar is democracy manifest” or smthn else?
If you think the Western world as is is fundamentally authoritarian then I honestly don’t know what to say to you. I feel like you are using the term so loosely that it becomes meaningless.
All I’m saying is that capitalism and communism are just theories and in reality the job of a government with regards to the economy is to balance tax policy and spending.
I’m saying there is no silver bullet or magical cure to the world’s ills. The world will always be fucked as long as humans are in it so the best the government can do is try to minimise suffering without completely shitting the bed and crashing the economy/society with idealism, left or right.
Anybody who tries to change the world too radically too quickly inevitably fucks it up and makes things worse, time and time again.
We don’t live in unfettered capitalism in the West. That’s as much a theoretical construct as communism.
Yeah I’ve got no quick ‘n’ easy answer to what you’re putting on the table here, take it as a compliment, lol. As an anarchist I approach things with a certain worldview which I imagine you disagree with on a pretty fundamental level.
Overall, the system we live in is still governed by capitalist principles (and assumptions about society/humanity) even in cases like the nordic model which is considered “progressive” despite being a hybrid of social democracy and corporatism.
Even putting aside the whole discussion about the “tyranny of the majority”, democracy in practice really isn’t all that “democratic”. Between lobbying, corruption, the class system, societal biases, the manipulation of information, the education system itself… if you believe all that can still add up to the best we can achieve, at least currently, and that if any change for the better is to be made it’s through this system, and you’re firmly rooted in this belief… yeah I guess there’s not much else I can say to you.
It’s a big leap from “is this the best we can achieve?” to “let’s abandon all societal structure and law”.
You think you can get rid of power structures. I’m telling you that it’s a pipe dream. We are fundamentally constrained. That’s not the same as saying society as it is is the best we can ever do.
Anarchism isn’t about abandoning “all societal structure” though. Authority and law are not necessary for organisation.
Anarchism in praxis is largely about working towards the social change required to properly challenge/undermine the power structures that control our lives.
Of course authority and law are necessary for organisation. Its beyond crazy to think otherwise. Can you think of a single organisation that doesn’t have rules and power structures?