liberal is not left
(midwest.social)
lumpenproletariat
Memes of ProductionThe next line should read
Liberals: "You're not who I'm trying to convince."
Followed by
Leftists: “We’re trying to convince you”
Proper leftist argument that glitches liberals’ material conditions:
Don't force poverty on the incapable to overperform you.
Liberals; no one working 40 hours a week should live in poverty, bit what are you gonna do?
Either would be an upgrade at this point.
The left used to be a labor movement. It no longer is.
It still is, there just aren't more than a handful of left wing politicians in this country.
Neoliberals are NOT the left. These are the corporate Democrats that tsk at Trump's speech and actions, but ultimately agree with what he is doing because the same donors are making money.
Everyone conscious has the ability to preform some type of labor so…. Let’s just skip this stupid argument and just say UBI.
UBI keeps capitalism and thus inequality. It’s a zero sum game where people’s wealth will flow towards the rich, enabling them in future to amass power to undo UBI and repeat the mistakes we have now.
Better solution is to ditch currency and focus on meeting people’s wellbeing needs directly.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Order of operations matters.
There's always a better perfect solution. If you're not willing to work for something achievable because your special vision for how things should be is the only thing you care about, well, that's why leftists fight each other instead of fighting the fascists that have taken over the usa and are in the process of taking over the rest of the world.
You have 1,000 slaves. Do you accept freeing 500 instead of fighting for all to be free?
Fight for what’s right, fuck compromise that perpetuates suffering. That’s what centrists do.
The mechanism of markets is that the price of goods follows the law of supply and demand. Prices are a universal signal to producers that they should produce more/less of a good.
Without currency you need a mechanism to replace this. Given your previous posts in favour of anarchism, I’m guessing you don’t favour central planning. So what mechanism for determining how much and of what kinds of goods should be produced, do you prefer?
Given I’m an anarchist, I value a gift economy where we stop assigning value to goods and focus on providing for wellbeing.
How much a person should have is as much as they need.
Everybody is not equal. Sorry to break it to ya. We can lessen the disparity between highest and lowest income, but there will always be a rift. Some people just don't output at much value as others.
Okay, we’ll go take your shit take elsewhere bud. If you don’t believe people are equal you might enjoy stormfront or something.
"output as much value" value according to what? To who? To you? Well I don't listen to music or look at paintings so anybody calling themselves an "artist" isn't outputting my definition of value so they should be worse off.
Do you see how quickly that line of thinking can be thrown off? Why can't we just give people food, water, and shelter? We're more than capable.
Nah. It's not thrown off at all. Measure of output is, measure of output. Output of "what", relies on consensus of necessity or interest from the population for what the goal is.
And this will always be the case.
One interest, is food production. If one person busts their ass and sows more seed or harvests more crops than another, they are outputting more. It's simple
And this would be true for any other system whether it be a system of necessity or recreation or art, as long as it's in the consensus of being a goal to achieve.
There is no world where everyone gets EXACTLY the same benefits, that's just an ideological extreme. It goes against natural law. It de-incentivizes any extra effort or discovery.
Plus, it's just fucking boring.
Drawing down disparity is the actual goal. Sure CEOs should not make [insert your multiple here] more money/credit/possibility than the worker.
People round here seem to immediately dismiss the CEO. But the (some) CEO may actually have worked harder, been blessed with more intelligence and organizational skills, and contributed more to, say, maximizing food production so that ALL can be fed more for even less effort.
That should be rewarded in society.
Just not to the ridiculously disproportionate extent it is now.
You can’t ditch currency. Currency isn’t some grand invention of the state. It’s the direct result of beings valuing things at different amounts at different times. Technically current is using any stand in to ease the trade barrier but colloquially some people use love as a currency. Many kinds of social animals trade and what they trade could be deemed currency.
You can absolutely do away with currency if the current mode of production got abolished. Currency itself is a necessity in a society that produces commodities for exchange, which creates rise for social constructs such as value, value forms like money, the possibility for an innate crisis and so on.
The first 2 chapters of Capital explains this, the commodity production system was a historical development rather than something coming out of nature (no chemist was able to find value through microscope), and we can certainly produce things to satisfy needs rather than exchange, with a much lower amount of work hours needed to do so.
You can 100% ditch currency, you don’t not need a trade or barter based system. Humans have been operating on a gift economy model for hundreds of thousands of years, currency and trading is a blip in our history.
People are capable of supporting each other without profit incentives.
You shouldn't state this as fact. It's not, archaeologists have been arguing between the formalist and substantavist theories of economic models for decades now. You seem to be favoring the formalist view, but there is a strong arguement to be made that market principles such as supply and demand existed deeper in the past as well.
While there may not have been currency, the historic economics of humanity were certainly greater than a gift economy model.
So let's say I really want to investigate superconducting magnets, because I really like that field and want to do research. I need processed rare earth products that only exist on the other side of the globe.
In your gift economy, how would I proceed to acquire those?
I suspect these policies often assume that either we live in startrek or we’re back to the woods and have no need for superconducting magnets :-/
surely no other people have any benefit or incentive to find those superconductors and so no one would be willing to aid you in your research, including people who could get those minerals, right?
Is being flippant part of the economic model or an extra? Doesn't get me closer to those hard to extract materials that are in very short supply.
I'm confident that if you waved a magic wand and removed currency, an hour later it would be reinvented via "hey, will you do me this favor? I'll owe you one" -> "You already owe me one. But I guess you'll owe me two? Let me write this down"
Yup. Gets even easier once all the emancipatory technology innovations cease being classified, suppressed and secreted to maintain the corporate monopolisation rigged game of kleptarchy. When that stops, obsoleting currency/money becomes a greater viable potential, if not just removes some areas from profiteering. Such things are not cosmic fundamentals. Greedy eyes are on water, air, sunlight.
I imagine quality would improve and enshitification would cease, without corrupt fiat currency driving churn. And [as we currently are, it's an] accelerating churn at that, in a desperate race to the bottom. Unsustainable. Essential vital necessity to move beyond it.
UBI may be a stepping stone, perhaps a step away from reducing currency/money to mere resource accounting, on to greater things yet. But yes, not if left in the hands of the current oligarchs, nor in any such system that so readily gives oligarchs absolute power.
Sublimation out of their rigged game trap may come fast [, or not at all, only piecemeal placatium fakery].
No. Currency is convenience and convenience wins 99% of the time.
Yeah I’ll pass thanks, currency and capitalism is killing the planet and us along with it.
Nothing easier than being dead tho I guess.
Can you explain your non- currency economy for those of us without that much imagination?
Does trade still exist?
If so what is the medium of exchange?
How is value evaluated?
Unfortunately it seems that proponents of these systems fail to deliver when we get to practical issues - I'm open-minded enough to consider the thought, but I too have a bunch of questions that seem will go unaddressed.
From this side of life, seems true. Can't say the dead agree, but they're not complaining much.
Bring on the convenience of the emancipation by technology, provisioning each and all free energy and energy-to-matter transfer, effectively "star trek replicators".
Star Trek however needed most governments to collapse as a result of WW3 and Vulcans showing up to help rebuild afterwards.
We got WW3 almost covered, just not that sure about those Vulcans ...
Oh, and there is nothing zero sum about it. That’s kind of the point of a good teade
That’s exactly zero sum, one person gains from one persons losses. I pay/you profit, loss/win.
That’s how currency works unless you’re suggesting we just print money off any time we need to make a purchase.
I can make good shoes. I make bad pastries.
You make good pastries. You make bad shoes.
I make you shoes. You make me pastries. Now I have good shoes and pastries. You also have good shoes and pastries. Everyone wins.
That’s bartering not currency.
An even better system is, you can make shoes so you make people shoes. I can make pastries so I make people pastries. There’s no requirement to exchange, we can just make stuff for people and they can likewise do the same.
That’s a gift economy, people cooperating together for the benefit of everyone.
Currency is an abstraction for all the goods and services you might barter. I can sell you a pair of shoes for 1 currency unit, then buy your pastries for 1 currency unit. The result is the same.
UBI will just cause inflation, it increases aggregate demand without increasing aggregate supply. More dollars chasing the same amount of goods leads to inflation.
It also doesn't really address inequality, anyone's relative position on the income hierarchy doesn't change, if I make $500 more than another guy before UBI, I'll still make $500 more than them after UBI, and your position on the income hierarchy determines your standard of living, not your absolute income. Eg. If you get a raise that matches inflation your absolute income may have gone up, but your relative income stayed the same and thus so did your standard of living.
We need to stop focusing on money and focus on the systems of production and hierarchy that actually determine our living standards. Money is just an expression of those structures, it's downstream, and changing that won't change the actual structures.
Wouldn't inflation be a good immediate signal on which systems of production need to be fixed first? E.g. housing prices spike = need more housing
Also, if someone earns 1000 and you earn 500 before an UBI of 500, they earn 2x as much as you before and 1.5x after.
Maybe but we already know we need more housing, no need to spend a bunch of money to find that out, especially if that money can be spent on actually building housing. There are plenty of other stats and signals we can use to determine what to produce which don't require bringing inflation into the mix that can cut into peoples savings.
Also, if someone earns 1000 and you earn 500 before an UBI of 500, they earn 2x as much as you before and 1.5x after.
Yes but your ability to outbid that other person stays the same. In a market system your access to limited goods and services is determined by your ability to outbid others to gain those goods and services.
Take housing for example, say I can spend $500 on housing for a shitty apartment and another person can spend $1,000 on housing for a good apartment, and there's another unhoused person who can't afford any housing.
Now give each of these people $500, like you said the relative gap has shrinked but the place in the hierarchy stays the same. The person with the good apartment will bid up prices to keep me from moving into their unit, and I'd be forced to bid up for my unit to make sure the unhoused person doesn't get it. The distribution of housing would stay the same, assuming no new housing gets built, and all the money just goes to the landlord.
and both are de-attached from reality, so they have something in common
Why don’t you just stick to your shitty commiememes comm if you hate the left and anarchists so much? You contribute nothing of use to this community and only complain about everything. It’s pretty tiring having your presence here.
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Not my comm, it's also dead. All I do is rarely post some good posts I accumulated over time rather than 10 posts daily like it's a job
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Don't hate leftists, they often come with good intentions but lack understanding of what they're talking about, and you yourself underestimate how broad of a camp leftism is. An average leftist is a socdem reformist who believes in electorialism, servile belief in the state and such, with anarchist and ML tendencies being niche in comparison. You yourself ban leftists who believe in electorialism and harm reduction.
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I admit I can be a bit of an ass about it like with my original comment and I can certainly be kinder, but all I'm doing is calling out the occasional nonsense that gets posted that you yourself would likely not agree with if you gave it 5 minutes of thought.
Like for instance, the fact that the liberal 40 hour of wage labor under capitalist system position gets directly compared to "unemployed shouldn't starve" alludes to a welfare state position, not a new mode of production that produces to satisfy needs rather than exchange. You yourself argued against UBI, one of the more radical positions of such view in this very post.
Not to mention how my critique alludes to leftist tendency to just wish good things into existence regardless of how this mode of production and it's interests work, like the Boogeyman of tendency for rate of profit to fall that completely kills both positions
But alright, if you want to build an echo chamber where nothing gets questioned and there's absolutely 0 dissent, then you do you.
Reality is when we give help out to megapastors because "God told them to not pay taxes this year."
