Slavery never ended people

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Land lords are still ordering WORKING people around with guns. If you think things are bad now, imagine what would happen if libertarian capitalists got their way. The roads would become private, and people bankrupt from exploding interests rates will have no option to even live on the streets. So they would either get enslaved or executed for having no money. Libertarian capitalism is really just another form of fascism.

Last edited by RushKing on 18 Nov 2012, 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

you're right. The only thing that has changed is that the whip has been replaced with the threat of the redundancy notice and that the slaves quarters have been replaced with the wage packet (which is becomingly increasingly less sufficient to fund a dignified existance).


At least the slaves could count on a place to sleep and 3 meals a day. Some modern workers do not even have that assurance.

Here in the UK, a new terminology has arrived, the 'working poor'. No longer does having a full time job guarantee to keep you above the breadline.

We need the factories, hospitals, offices, the schools, the universities, the institutions of government and means of production out of the hands of the plutocrats and in the hands of a people's collective run by the people, for the people.

What we're also seeing is the encroachment of 'Taylorism' or scientific management.. the deskilling of the workforce where specific responsibilities are broken into increasingly specific roles in order to devalue the worth of labour. Hence the abundance of low paid roles these days, call centres, fast food retailers, supermarkets, big chain retailers etc. Marx wrote about it in the manifesto when he spoke of the 'tradesman being sheared of his halo and reduced to a mere wage slave'. This is the most contemptible facet of capitalism. Wealth creation and even property ownership is not an issue, the issue arises when it is distributed to too few hands then glorified and substantiated through blindsighted libertarian economic theory.

Libertarians have the principle of not exercising force except in self defense. And why would interest rates explode?

You have created a fantasy.

ruveyn

Hunh?

1) Most landlords don't actually have guns or any real use in using those guns to order people around. If this has relevance, then it is in relationship to another nation, where the market conditions, and social rules are much weaker, in which case, the poverty of that area is a real issue.
2) What reason do we have to think that interest rates are going to make more people homeless than now?
3) Execution???? That's not a reasonable prediction. People simply won't accept that and that's going to create pushback, which is relevant in an age of CSR issues and all of the rest.
4) The conclusion actually doesn't follow at all. You didn't prove that libertarian capitalism would be structurally similar to fascism.(and they probably wouldn't be, because of the different power structures and objectives of those power structures in each case. Extreme libertarian capitalism wouldn't be able to create the military might or nationalist fury that a libertarian capitalism would have. Also.... fascism is pretty concerned with the average joe. It's a populist movement. People used to admire how the fascists were able to get things done for the common man, except if they were minorities and all.) You didn't even really prove a bad outcome would occur, or that most people would recognize a significant difference. You certainly didn't prove that the ideologies were similar.

I'm not sure people are really permitted to sleep on public streets either. Maybe that varies in different places, but I think the cops would pick them up.

Personally, I'd like to see a more Libertarian Federal government that follows the 10th Amendment so powers not delegated to them belong to the States.

Along with that I'm interested in a different approach to taxes. I think the Income Tax is an insane mess.

And.... how is this actually different than any other society to ever exist???? Are you saying that feudalism lacked threats? Are you saying that the average non-slave in most societies wasn't under some degree of threat to produce or starve? Somehow I don't see that as being true.

Also, it's hard to condemn the richest and most successful society at providing common dignity with a failure to provide dignity. And in past societies their illiteracy was a sign of nobility?


So, should we then offer indentured servitude to those who want it? I don't think most people would consider this a reasonable exchange, and I think any sane person would know it.


Probably not. The last efforts to collectivize an economy resulted in economic and political disaster. Some of these disasters were a result of the unique problems of an ideologically motivated dominant party. Many of them would result regardless of how we decided to collectivize it. The problems being incentive issues, lack of good feedback between sectors of the economy, improperly working politics as each economic problem then becomes a political problem to be settled by political means rather than more impersonal factors, etc.


1) Taylorism is separate from distribution. One is an issue of the use of labor, and the other is the allocation of resources.
2) What's the alternative? Unscientific management? Unbending traditionalism at the expense of economic efficiency? At this point, generations have lived and died only seeing an economy managed through scientific management techniques. There is nothing for most people to revert to, and most ideas would be outright regression to an idealized past.
3) Why would a governmental agency NOT use these scientific management methods? I mean, the first step a bureaucracy is going to take, is it's going to use experts to organize its approach. Most of these experts have been trained in scientific management, so if we assume they're going to go use college professors, they're going to very likely to pulling from the professors who have the relevant understandings, like supply chains, organizational behavior, management, perhaps even finance, etc, to try to steal as many of the working ideas and frameworks from the past as possible. In fact, "rationalizing" things is a central part of how Western societies have operated since before ANYBODY alive was ever born. So, a rationalizing government and a rationalizing private sector should both be expected to try to make these methods rational in as much as they can, with very similar results.

Any talk about socialism today is nonsense. We haven't seen a working model of it that could handle the massive demands of a modern economy. The models we have seen have been abject failures. We don't even have a THEORY on how to make it work AND distinct from the problems many people have with capitalism. And many of the theories we DO HAVE suggest it will have it's own unique and often worse problems than capitalism.

You're missing the point. I'm not saying that feudalism was better, I am saying that capitalism has failed to sufficiently mature and progress.

The merit of 'Richer society' is based on an abstraction, money and inherited privelege.


Not at all, merely illustrating how capitalism has failed to improve the lives of ordinary people in a significant way.. no, failed is the wrong word because fail would imply some level of attempt.

The reality is, modern economists, politicians and business leaders want no significant improvement in average life standard for reasons of political expediency.



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ps5vJrIxM[/youtube]

or check out http://www.eoslife.eu/vision

Last edited by thomas81 on 18 Nov 2012, 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The land isn't the self. Land ownership is theft.

That's because the state is doing the coercion for them.

Corporate greed of course.

Yes it is, landlords love to execute trespassers.

Yes I did, fascists are concerned with protecting and supplying the wealthy with slaves. Work for a boss or die, zero democracy.

I'm not missing the point. By pointing to a comparison, I'm grounding any notion of criticism in terms of what has actually existed, not some idiotic abstraction. Fantasy doesn't have a good ground to criticize reality, and all that a good non-capitalist system is at this point is simply a fantasy. We can modify our system, provide more welfare supports.

Also "failed to sufficiently mature and progress"??? A system that has existed for only 300 years has utterly revolutionized the world, and done what past societies could have only dreamed to do, and yet it's not going FAST ENOUGH?? Most societies changed very gradually at best. No, that's not a reasonable criticism or a good analytical system. That's outright nonsense and malarkey. While we're at it, why not demand some unicorns. Genetics hasn't sufficiently matured and progressed to give us unicorns.


No, it's based upon air conditioning, public education, and a thousand other luxuries that moderns enjoy that were really WERE luxury goods back in the older days.


And yet they were living in the lap of luxury in earlier ages? Nonsense. Heck, most people today enjoy luxuries that their ancestors never got to see. Even the poverty limit is richer than many instances of past poverty.

You mean past societies actually GAVE A DAMN??? That one's a big shocker to me, because I was under the impression that all of these class systems really weren't primarily about benefiting the bottom of the rung.


The reality??? You know this because you've talked to these people, right?? You know this because you've become an expert in business, politics, and all of the rest, correct??? I ask because I've met and talked to a number of economists. Either they're putting up a VERY GOOD facade including fake ideological debates which they seem to actually be really passionate and wonky about, or they really really ARE being honest when they express their views on reality. They don't typically express a hatred of humanity. So, my feeling is that if you can so blithely say "the reality is modern economists.... want no significant improvement in average life standard...", you are utterly disconnected from reality and have no idea what you are talking about.


I'm not getting sucked into having to read about another neo-socialist economic framework. I've had to deal with too many to this date, where everybody has their own pet project on how the new socialism is going to work and they all disagree with each other, and most of the time they are subject to the exact same(or at least very similar) criticisms to each other and their predecessors, along with no real ability for them to ever get off the ground because nobody agrees to one project, nobody ever will agree to just implementing one massive project like this, and they rarely have any interaction with actual intellectuals. They may as well be modern utopians, or the political equivalent of pseudoscience or something akin to conspiracy theories in terms of how they capture minds to produce no good.

I'm not bothering with going through another website for a class of ideas I respect this little, and which I KNOW has no grounds within policy intellectuals. Either respond to my criticisms, or don't respond at all.

People are still slaves to human ideas.

Not when unowned unoccupied land is cleared or plowed. Without land ownership there would be no agriculture and humans would have to hunt and eat wild berries and nuts.

ruveyn

Some human ideas are more enslaving than others.

@ awesome

Im too tired and need to go to bed now but hold that thought, this debate is not finished. I'll gladly pick through your rant with the benefit of rest.

Corporate greed is constant and corporations aren't just going to get greedier. I mean, how do you even explain interest rate variations then???? "Oh, I guess the corporations aren't as greedy this month" Seriously???? The idea is absurd. Interest rates will not "massively rise", and your theory doesn't explain how they work today AT ALL. It's so fundamentally wrong that you may as well be critiquing capitalism through astrology. I mean, people complain about 6 day creationism being an anti-intellectual movement and an intellectual crime against humanity, how is this not the same phenomenon???


Right....... Because executions involve NO forms of investigation or concern or problem. The most common way to handle trespassing is to ask the trespasser to leave, unless it looks like the guy has actually broken in or something.


No, you didn't. You do know how to construct an argument? You do know what kinds of criticisms I am making?

Also, NO fascists were concerned with national glory!! !! Do you have NO CONCEPTION OF ITALIAN FASCISM??????????????? The idea was a construction to build off of the middle class's fears, and to restore the middle class dignity that it had lost during the Great Depression, partially through the promotion of the glories of the state and totalitarian controls. In Germany, this was also particularly a desire to push against the Treaty of Versailles and the losses of WW2. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini were primarily business leaders or even primarily concerned with being business leaders.

Now, fascism DID concern itself with maintaining many aspects of the original system, which allowed for business leaders. However, they were also concerned with the welfare of their base, and so for instance the Nazis were National Socialists, and desired to promote the wages and welfare of the people. I mean, the movements were very much middle class, nationalistic, militaristic, and populist. That's how they kept popular support. They even partially just lucked into power, and the Nazis were themselves particularly radical in that they attempted a coup. Now MAYBE this would eventually result in "everybody is enslaved", but these systems never lasted long enough, and for a large part of their lives, their concern was warfare, which was also an expression of national glory. However, my feeling is that somewhere somebody has made fascism into "something rightwing that I happen to dislike" rather than anything approaching reasonable or disciplined.

Also, your conception of democracy is ridiculous. If the idea is considered serious, then democracy has really never existed. It's absurd. It has no grounding in any historical reality. It shouldn't be taken seriously.

Not necessarily, we can have a distribution system. People can't take or damage the crops you grow and plan to eat yourself because that would fall under personal property. Because you don't own the land doesn't necessarily mean you can't own crops on the land.

Right, and capitalism which came into power along with ideas like human rights, self-determination, and all of the rest, is the worst of all slavery, while that old idea of rigid classes, divinely sanctioned authorities and the rest was really liberating??? Look, I'm fine with efforts to improve, and I'm cynical that we currently know of a better system, but painting the best and most dignified system that mankind has created as if it's the blackest of the bunch is just disturbing.

Look if we're going to meaningfully talk about post-capitalism, then here's what we need to understand:
1) How does the current system work and provide the good that it does?
2) How can these functions be replaced, offset, accommodated, or fixed in order to work better?
3) What are the risks? What areas are we less sure about in our social science?

Also, I am going to provide a book recommendation on a post-capitalist idea that does better at these functions: Socialism After Hayek by Theodore Burczak

Burczak is a post-marxist economist who decided to really look at questions 1 and 2, by looking at one of the major capitalism defenders Friedrich Hayek's work. His writings end up being a form of market socialism with a great amount of syndicalism involved in that he believes will create a good incentive structure for the capital market, and production. I'm skeptical because the idea is still fringe, and I think it could involve problems involving capital markets and labor markets. (The latter particularly because worker ownership is going to involve some increased review of hiring decisions for fear of putting a bad set of owners in place.)

This whole discussion, which fails to even reasonable consider question 1, is just ABSURD!