The slow decay of Venezuela

[K. A. Pital]

Good question. If we just abolish the division of labour now, we go back to hunter-gatherer society or communal farming real quick. No hope of maintaining the modern living standard. Hence why I think it is a better idea to concentrate on some aspects for now. Striking at the root of this problem is very hard.

Simple question. Do you want to clean the sewers personally or do you want another person to do it for you?

As for being desirable - I personally do not belong to primitivists or luddites and only support gradually removing the division of labour on a new, advanced level with abundance. But I can damn well understand their feelings.

[Purple]

Good question. If we just abolish the division of labour now, we go back to hunter-gatherer society or communal farming real quick. No hope of maintaining the modern living standard. Hence why I think it is a better idea to concentrate on some aspects for now. Striking at the root of this problem is very hard.

Thing is, I am not sure that there is any hope for maintaining it no matter what path to equality we take. That's the point. And if there is no such way at all than is the "problem" a problem at all or just a side effect inherent to our modern quality of life that we have to accept?

Simple question. Do you want to clean the sewers personally or do you want another person to do it for you?

A good question. I get what you are aiming at. It is an icky smelly job so I probably would prefer others to do it for me. No shame in saying that. And most people will say the same thing. I simply see it as an inevitability that although no one wants to do these jobs someone has to get stuck with them for the benefit of everyone.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, a honest answer is better than hypocrisy: would most not want someone else to do this? But now we come to part two, equality. So there is this guy whose life job is literally a pile of shit. And he is being paid quite often the least of all. Society has no intent to reward him extra for doing a job nobody wants to do; instead people not only want him to work with shit for a lifetime, but also do it cheaply, lest they be burdened by the exorbitant costs or insulted by the fact a shit-digger suddenly is paid not much less than an engineer.

I rest my case.

[Purple]

That's the thing. Say that for the sake of argument we assume that this is the only possible way things can be if we, the majority do not wish to give up our standards of living. Now, personally I do not think it is. But lets just assume it is for the sake of argument. So, assuming that. Would you prefer us to lose our standard of living or to accept to sacrifice that man?

[Channel72]

I could also note that the very division of labour itself is a hideous thing (and I won't be the first to note that). The wealth and well-being of some is bought by the suffering and painful excruciating death of others. The mine owner does not die from black lung as soon as there is division of labour; his workers do. There is nothing that can compensate this: capitalism, and class society more generally, is cannibalism. With the division of labour we have invented a way to transform the lives of others: their health, their lifetime - into our own wealth, our own time. One person is consumed by another.

To me, this is the most questionable facet of your argument. Division of labor is simply a natural result of the task specialization that inevitably occurs in any technological society. I know how to program computers very well, but I don't know how to repair air conditioners, or design microprocessors. I need someone else to do that. Even hunter-gatherer, egalitarian societies had division of labor, based around gender for the most part.

But you're framing this whole thing in terms of the most undesirable or high-risk jobs. I don't want to clean septic tanks or collect garbage - (I will however, gladly work on software to instruct a robot how to do so...) - yet the fact that these jobs exist and need to be filled by somebody is not necessarily a feature of class-based societies per se - it's a feature of technologically diversified societies. Our options are to eliminate these jobs using robots/automation, or go back to being hunter gatherers where everyone just shits in the woods. A third option would be to implement some kind of mandatory public service period, where teenagers or 20-somethings would be randomly selected for these types of tasks, as a civic duty, or whatever. Perhaps you'd accept that solution?

Also, the law has evolved to recognize the dangers facing high-risk industrial jobs, to the extent that workers compensation laws and OSHA regulations mitigate the situation, although they are by no means a perfect solution.

Perhaps the real problem you're getting at is not the division of labor per se, but the archetypal Marxist complaint that the owners, or major stockholders in factories, plants and corporations, benefit disproportionately from the collective efforts of their workforce. This is really the primary reason for inequality in capitalist societies, but increased standards of living have mostly prevented this situation from becoming unstable.

Earlier, you mentioned that Bill Gates is in Elysium, while the rest of us live on the ground. Except, most studies show that increased happiness is logarithmic after a certain income/lifestyle is achieved (you know, hierarchy of needs and all that...), meaning that Bill Gates likely isn't that much happier than most people. So the problem isn't necessarily that Bill Gates is happy while the rest of us are miserable, the problem is more that market forces in capitalist societies very often encourage the exponential accumulation of capital in a few individual stockholders, who then go on to wield disproportionate influence over society - totally out of sync with how much they've actually contributed to society via any tangible measurement. (It's always bothered me, for example, that Steve Jobs was endlessly celebrated as an innovator, while the computer scientists who developed the principles behind the operating systems used at Apple remain relatively obscure.)

Anyway, the above isn't necessarily an argument against capitalism or class-based society itself, but more of an argument that capitalist societies need to be highly regulated. It's still not clear to me at all that class-based hierarchies are not a natural outcome of the need for division of labor in any technological society. The example you cited, Catalhuyuk in Anatolia, and other Paleolithic societies, clearly required some division of labor, in the sense that there must have been people who specialized in, say, roofing, while others specialized in creating figurines, or animal husbandry. There may of course have been a few polymaths who did it all. But the society was probably classless, by all appearances, because none of the major "jobs" in Catalhuyuk necessarily required something like specialists who would need to study for years in order to competently perform their tasks. Most normal human beings can learn to build mud huts, or herd sheep, or make clay pots, etc. It's telling that as soon as we fast-forward to Sumeria, with its specialized "technical" jobs such as cuneiform scribes, or irrigation experts, etc., suddenly classes appear.

The problem isn't necessarily the division of labor, or even the stratification of classes based around skilled or unskilled workers, it's the side effects of these things: the accumulation of wealth and power around the city-state Temple to Anu, or later on the accumulation of too much wealth and power around major stockholders in Apple, Microsoft or Google. This is simply a result of the law of increasing returns, whether we're talking about Apple's ability to exploit Chinese labor and ship millions of iPhones, or the Sumerian priesthood's ability to consolidate economic control over a city-state.

It's not clear the answer here is complete destruction of classes - rather the answer seems to be a combination of technological automation and economic engineering. Perhaps a total rethinking of "equity" is in order so that ownership in a corporate entity is not only a function of wealth, but also a function of work/contribution. (This is already the case, to a very limited extent, with stock options.) Picture, for example, a scenario where companies were required to provide increasingly favorable issuances of stock certificates to employees who worked in the company over a period of time, so that over time company ownership would tends toward equal ownership among all salaried employees. At first the company founders and major stakeholders would be majority shareholders - which is fair, after all, since at those early stages they've likely done most of the labor. But as time passed and they hired more employees, their percentage of ownership would decrease and tend towards equality amongst all salaried employees.

Whatever - I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good idea or not. But the point is, I don't think destruction of classes is likely the answer - the answer is probably much less revolutionary and more evolutionary - the continued tweaking of capitalism to tame its excesses.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, a honest answer is better than hypocrisy: would most not want someone else to do this? But now we come to part two, equality. So there is this guy whose life job is literally a pile of shit. And he is being paid quite often the least of all. Society has no intent to reward him extra for doing a job nobody wants to do; instead people not only want him to work with shit for a lifetime, but also do it cheaply, lest they be burdened by the exorbitant costs or insulted by the fact a shit-digger suddenly is paid not much less than an engineer.

I rest my case.

Actually, as a rule, sewage and garbage workers are paid considerably more than the minimum for their society, at least in the areas I'm familiar with. If cleaning sewers didn't pay better than being a retail clerk, virtually nobody would clean sewers unless they actively enjoy shit. They would instead all take their chances with jobs as retail clerks.

Likewise, plumbers and electricians and so on... they may not get paid the most, but they get paid far from the least in a modern society. It's people who pick fruit and man cash registers and clean houses that are getting paid the least.

These are jobs that few people are content with, but that many people can be partially content with- they are not so repulsive that virtually everyone would leave them immediately given the opportunity. Moreover, they are jobs that virtually everyone can do, so they tend to be filled by people to whom other jobs are simply not available.

The retail clerk is paid nearly the least, because they are easy to replace. The sewage worker is harder to replace, mostly because it's a job very few people would willingly take at any price, and is paid more.

Now, at the same time, being a sewage worker does pay less than being a physician... but it takes many years of training on an individual of unusual academic aptitude to make a physician. The physician is likely to be even harder to replace than the sewage worker.

Let me start with history. What evidence from the history of mankind there is that equality of outcome for individuals is unnatural? Most of the history is hunter-gatherer societies... One can easily argue that capitalism and class society in general, for a wider view, are the unnatural state of things, the abberation, to which we are neither historically nor biologically predisposed.

But let's say hunter-gatherers are a bad example and say that a society with equal living conditions cannot be (1) large (2) advanced for its time. This would again contradict... Çatalhöyük.

Çatalhöyük may well represent something close to the maximum possible scale of civilization without division of labor and without some degree of division into the rewarded professionals and less-rewarded drudges.

There are plenty of examples of egalitarian farming-village societies elsewhere in the world too, Çatalhöyük is not entirely unique in this respect... but we find it more and more difficult to locate examples of people living this way if we don't restrict ourselves to Stone Age conditions. Granted that the Stone Age is the natural human condition, but it is not the desirable human condition. Living in the Stone Age with perfect equality is almost inevitably going to be worse than living in the Atomic Age with a significant amount of inequality.

There is SOME level of inequality for which living in the Atomic Age under such conditions is worse than living in the Stone Age... but that level is difficult to achieve in a plausible society.

I could also note that the very division of labour itself is a hideous thing (and I won't be the first to note that). The wealth and well-being of some is bought by the suffering and painful excruciating death of others.

The amount of suffering and painful excruciating death required has declined with technology. It used to be worse. So by the same type of argument you're advancing, evil and suffering are not inherent aspects of division of labor.

Although if we really wanted to minimize the suffering required to support an advanced lifestyle we'd have to use either better technology than we now have, or accept a lower standard of living due to reduced efficiency... because some of that efficiency is purchased at the cost of suffering in the developing world.

I am broadly comfortable with either of those outcomes.

The mine owner does not die from black lung as soon as there is division of labour; his workers do. There is nothing that can compensate this: capitalism, and class society more generally, is cannibalism. With the division of labour we have invented a way to transform the lives of others: their health, their lifetime - into our own wealth, our own time. One person is consumed by another.

Since in quite a few pre-civilized societies one person is literally consumed by another, this is hardly a new idea, although granted that the practice of cannibalism is hardly universal.

And, again, we have found that technology increases the dignity of life for all classes- the aristocrats of the Middle Ages might be powerful but had no way to escape the smell of animal manure. By contrast, modern elites live, as you say, on Elysium. At the same time, medieval peasants and Steam Age factory workers lived in far more suffering and drudgery and self-destruction than their Information Age descendants do.

The situation is far from ideal, but it appears to involve an escape from the suffering brought about by economies that consume their workers. Such an escape indicates that the suffering is not, well... not inescapable.

There were some experiments in the late USSR in the Far North which were applied to close, but large communities with a functional division of labour: mining settlements. In some, goods were offered without a price, distributed to the community directly. This means the workers directly consumed as much as each needed. In essence, this is also a fully egalitarian system. It did not lead to a collapse of labour productivity, even though a brigade leader or pump or railcar engineer clearly was more educated than the ordinary miner. One can argue that these are closed societies which are not impacted by the greater socium; in essence, people there know that they are isolated and thus behave differently. They shun misappropriation and work as they did before, regardless of the reward.

Indeed. More generally, they know they are an isolated experiment, that people outside their community have expectations about what will happen. They know there will be a tomorrow in which if they act lazy and stupid, there will be consequences, and they are occupying well defined positions that were set by an outside authority whose main requirement is that the mining community mine.

I can also challenge the sociology: if we are talking about incentives, how do you decouple pay from status? It is human's status perception that is impacting the productivity. If a human feels his status is remaining the same, productivity also remains the same; with a rise productivity (all other things equal) can rise, and it can fall if the person feels his status is lowered. This is also a class society phenomena, which is relevant in a deeply stratified world of today. However, if the perception of a person does not include pay as the sole status definition, but maybe something else (respect of other people, relationships, good communication with others, time), then the productivity may react to these factors and not to pay. It is only through the deep transformation of the entire society by capitalism that money is seen as the only motivator.

Money is far from the only motivator, but money and goods and services that can be purchased with money make up most of the motivators used by modern societies. This may be because our supply of goods has vastly increased, while our supply of social approval is no greater than it was in the Stone Age; we cannot make a person feel more loved than their ancestors of twenty thousand years ago might have.

Therefore, it is much easier to reward someone in goods, than to so configure an entire society to reward them in terms of social approval or some such.

And it would be nearly impossible to reward someone for difficult, complex jobs by giving them time, since in many cases these are jobs that require the full and highly competent attentions of a skilled person who if anything ends up working more hours than some of the common laborers do.

And if you admit that it was a social process that deformed human perceptions, creating the class hierarchy and everything connected to it, then why through a reverse process can these perceptions not be altered? Why can they not be altered in politicians?

Because altering them to the present state took ten thousand years of gradual evolution and change, NONE of which was documented or controlled.

At best, it's like an infinitely more complex version of a Rubix cube. A small number of randomizing twists create a chaotic maze that is not easily restored to the desired state.

At worst, well... personally I think it's more like that one time that as a practical joke I started switching around the colors on individual squares of a Rubix cube, so that a few of the blue squares were now yellow, and a few of the yellows were now white, and so on. It is questionable whether solving the cube was even possible after that.

So to talk about reversing

Because no one is defending the idea that a handful of people should own everything.

I am quite sure that this is basically that:

Starting from a tabula rasa of everyone holding exactly the same amount of wealth, income is determined exactly by how useful you are to society, as measured in the perfectly democratic fashion of people chosing to buy things from you.

Uh, no, unless you also maintain that Starglider believes a handful of people are infinitely useful to society while everyone else is of zero or near-zero usefulness.

Which is a proposition you would then need to prove separately.

Not to mention that this is false on several levels, this directly argues that inequality (even perfect inequality) is determined in a perfectly democratic fashion (what the hell does this even mean in this context), and the underlying argument is that income is determined by your individual usefulness. How is that possible?...

"Democratic fashion" here, to Starglider, means that the outcome is determined by people making uncoerced choices. No one is being told to give up their money at gunpoint, and no one can somehow become massively rich by doing X unless large numbers of people desire to pay them for doing X.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that if you give everyone some reasonable amount of resources, they will choose to use or spend the resources in ways they find useful, and that the resulting distribution of resources reflects what everyone finds useful, collectively.

While you may disagree with this, I hope you find it comprehensible.

The real problematic issue with this view is the assumption that the arithmetic sum of every person's individual choice is an accurate reflection of their collective choice. That may be correct in the context of a relatively simple yes/no decision like an election or a plebiscite.

But it is far less obvious that it's true in the context of distribution of goods within an economy. And I think there are reasons to argue that it is not true in that context, because it appears to me to be logically equivalent to the efficient market hypothesis.

Because while it might be desirable, for ideological reasons, that politicians live an austere lifestyle... the reality is that you cannot make your own law-makers into slaves who labor on your behalf under terms of your choosing. This is not a stable condition, and it fails very un-gracefully, because there are few things uglier than a law-making body which has rebelled against the restraints on its power.

It might be desireable for other reasons that politicians live an austere (the hell is the word "austere" doing here, the life of an average worker is now "austere", eh?) life, which I explained already but you were too busy attacking my goal of complete equality (which I didn't even set at the time).

Well the problem here is that my argument is that politicans should live in a condition of relative equality with highly trained professionals- who in developed societies often make salaries in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand USD a year, which is far in excess of the median income and yet far less than that of the truly 'rich' class who own the bulk of the capital.

I felt as though my argument was contradicted by yours, but could not see how you would feel a need to contradict me, unless your target were complete equality. So I attributed this position to you. If I was wrong, I apologize... but in that case I am bewildered as to why you didn't simply agree with me in the first place.

If the politician flies the same plane as the ordinary citizens, it is less likely they will ignore the fact planes are turning into death traps due to a bad safety culture. If the politicians eat the same food as the ordinary people, they would care more about the food quality. If they drive the same cars, would they not care about their quality as opposed to not being bothered?

This is accomplished by paying politician on par with highly skilled professionals- who may be able to avoid the worst cars and the worst restaurants and so on, but are not utterly insulated from the problems experienced by the average citizen.

This is not slavery. And if you insist on calling this "law-makers into slaves", if I live the life of a slave, I expect the man who I elect to advance my interests to be the motherfucking Spartacus.

The reason I use the "making law-makers into slaves" reference is that your choice of words creates in my mind the image of a man living on a lifestyle you have chosen to tightly constrain, relative to the lifestyle that person could enjoy if they chose to be, say, a private lawyer, or a physician, or an engineer. So that in essence you are dictating to them that they cannot enjoy all these privileges and luxuries, many of which ARE enjoyed by peers of theirs who have no political power... because of the demands of Serving The People.

Since that would be an absurdity I chose the absurd phrase "make law-makers into slaves" to represent it. Because slavery is not simply the condition of being forced to labor for another, it is also the condition of being forced to live as the slavemaster desires that you live. It is in this latter sense that I feel as though you would have to enslave your law-makers to impose on them the condition "you cannot get paid as physicians and lawyers are paid."

If the absurdity of enslaved law-makers misrepresents your position I apologize... but I came by that misunderstanding honestly and in reasonably good faith.

And yes, there is nothing uglier than a corrupt government. Which is why let's just keep their privilege and pay the costs upfront, and not argue about it? Not even try to dimish that cost? Change the management culture? Why not? Because humans are irreversibly spoiled by stratified society?

I don't think that a salary comparable to eighty or a hundred thousand USD a year, in the context of developed societies, constitutes "privilege" or "corruption" in the sense of excessive wealth. Such a person is not going to be hiring private jets or living in a palace and never seeing the common folk.

[Starglider]

Except, most studies show that increased happiness is logarithmic after a certain income/lifestyle is achieved (you know, hierarchy of needs and all that...), meaning that Bill Gates likely isn't that much happier than most people.

Maximising hapiness is not sufficient for an ethical system, in the sense of a fully functional calculus for selecting outcomes and actions that would be regarded as acceptable, or even avoid horrific outcomes, by most humans. I know this kind of simple utilitarianism is a convenient logical basis for rational humanist economists and philosophers, and I guess it works well enough for a lot of non-rigorous analysis, but it just doesn't work as an idealised human goal system. For many years I thought that it was possible to fix this by complicating the logic, codifying consent and various other 'natural rights' as scaling factors on the actual utility of perceived happiness. Long story short, those are nasty hacks that don't work (don't produce desirable results under extrapolation).

I think I can explain this without a lot of technical decision theory. The mistake that David Pearce et al make is latching onto two fuzzy imagined components of human goal/decision structure, 'happiness' and 'suffering', and assuming that those are the only ethically relevant things in human experience. In actual fact both of those abstract concepts are an assortment of chemicals and neural features that deal with a range of things from physical pleasure to emotional loss; trying to assess overall 'happiness' / 'suffering' is necessarily a weighted aggregate with no clear way to assign the weighting, but that isn't the main problem. The real problem is that it assigns no weight at all to a large amount, probably the majority of our cognitive hardware for creating and prioritising goals and making decisions. Philosophers frequently try to abstract all motivation to 'because it makes me happy', but that tautology is not just bereft of predictive value, it is an observably wrong description of how the brain is implemented. It should be obvious even on a personal introspective level that a lot of actions are not taken due to any direct pleasure or gratification; they are many things that people simply feel they have to do. Pretending that is all linked to a central pleasure/pain metric is inherently broken modelling that results in a broken ethical system when you try to use it as the basis of a formalised system of (idealised) humanist ethics.

This is the basic reason why hedonistic utilitarianism extrapolates to (human-subjectively) stupid outcomes like replacing all actual humans with the maximum possible biomass of artificially cultured neurons that do nothing but experience 'pleasure' constantly at the maximum possible density (exact structure and simulation regieme determined by the arbitrary weighting function you made up earlier). On a current technological basis, it translates to fitting everyone with implanted pleasure center stimulators and stimulating them constantly and/or designer drugs to maximise pleasure and/or genetically/eugenically engineering all offspring to constantly be as happy as possible. As well as terminating all predatory wildlife etc where they are causing suffering in prey species. The protestations about 'well we would still try to respect consent... somehow' from David Pearce etc are not very convincing because, when formalised, they don't actually work. Neither trying to weight the 'pleasure' / 'suffering' metric to account for consensual vs non-consensual and other 'rights' of interest, nor trying to add that in as a disjoint supersystem of ethical rules (e.g. 'voluntaryism', more or less) produces sensible outcomes at the limit. I would like to say this is obvious but I made the latter mistake for many years; it was only some recent work on applied decision theory that finally made me realise that it's a broken paradigm.

The obvious-in-hindsight solution is to formalise, idealise and extrapolate the entire human goal system. In a sense the Singularity Institute had this idea in 2003 as 'coherent extrapolated volition' but that isn't actually the same thing; that was an admission that 'there is no chance of us getting AI goal system design right it we attack it directly, let's cheat by targetting abstracted simulation of human cognition, do a specific kind of extrapolation on it and use that to generate the actual goal system, hoping that nothing too bad happens in the interim'. Critique of that as a strategy for building transhuman AI is a separate topic, the point is that it doesn't help with the immediate question of what is a sensible formalism of ethical human behaviour that is well-behaved even in thought experiments involving omnipotence or extreme Hobson's choices. Unfortunately I don't have such a formalism and I can't usefully describe my personal attempts to find one in less than a fairly extensive paper, but I would certainly say that valuing the whole human perceptual, reflective and decision-making experience (as a time-series causal phenomenon) produces much more reasonable results.

That was a digression from politics, but I guess the implication is pretty simple and obvious; hedonic utilitarianism* is philosophical extremism, and that is as bad as (and often closely linked to) political extremism. The formalisations of absolute libertarianism are pretty bad as well, although generally less dangerous (essentially, this is because the libertarian definition of utopia is less prescriptive than the communist/utilitarian one). Good (humanist) ethnical systems are necessarily a somewhat complicated mix of weights on experiental primitives (I refuse to say 'qualia' ) and complex causal properties, i.e. happiness and basic rights including freedom to take (some) actions that result in different economic living standards. So essentially, political moderates are being sensible and extremists are dangerous and produce bad outcomes. Practicality and expediency is another entire** layer on top of that, e.g. what systems can humans actually live by, do we make tradeoffs such as more suffering now for faster progress in living standards, but that doesn't change the basic message. That doesn't say anything about which group of moderates are correct or how to reconcile the global (total human) political spectrum with the much narrower spectrum expressed in the political life of most countries, but it does give a deep reason for why assorted online fanatics and hardliners can be comfortably dismissed.

* As usual I would take care to distinguish between hedonic utilitarianism as implemented by economists and philosophers, and basic utilitarianism in decision theory. As far as I can tell the assumption that ethical humanist morality can be implemented by a transitive global action and event preference function using real weightings, i.e. basic utilitarianism, is still valid; in fact it seems significantly more valid once you drop the restriction of trying to force everything through a hedonic model; you no longer need transfinites and similar dubious hacks to deal with limit situations.

** Formally it is the goal-system-independent part of decision theory that converts abstract goals plus data into recommendations for action.

[TimothyC]

I am not sure if that's true - I wanted to pick an here example that would be closer to you than to me, but:
<snip image>
It seems Minnesota legislators get around the average wage or something. And it's not the worst state, or the worst-governed state, in the US... at least from first impressions.

Stas, what you fail to work with is that in the US, it is not uncommon for state legislators to both have other jobs, and to only be part time legislators. In your example, the Minnesota Legislature is only open for a maximum of 120 days every two years. This is far from uncommon in the 99 state legislative bodies.

[Simon_Jester]

In fairness, it must be pointed out that this is another way of achieving Stas' intended goal. If the legislators only work part-time as legislators for two months out of the year, and for the other ten months they have to step out of the phone booth, put their glasses on, and walk around as mild-mannered Clark Kent like the rest of us...

...It serves the purpose of preventing the legislators from getting insulated from the public rather nicely.

The problem is that those are provincial legislatures. A national legislature has many urgent and pressing matters that might arise on short notice. I'm not sure they can spend the great majority of the year being disbanded.

[K. A. Pital]

Whoa... It will take me some time to reply to all of you. Simply said though, "codifying natural rights" into utilitarianism is an exercise in futility because there are no "natural" rights. Natural rights is just a social rule that we have developed, much like walking on the green light when cars come.

There's one thing on which I and Starglider will probably agree, that utilitarianism isn't the perfect end system for moral evaluation - no matter how you modify it. I tend to remove the "pleasure" bit alltogether, which leaves utilitarianism only with more or less objective suffering, but I don't even want to start formalizing happiness - clear from the start that it's nothing but a waste of time.

My view on legislators is that they can very well work part-time if the nation in question can live without the national government for half a year. Something like that happened in Belgium recently.

[His Divine Shadow]

Simple question. Do you want to clean the sewers personally or do you want another person to do it for you?

I want a robot to do it.

[Channel72]

"Democratic fashion" here, to Starglider, means that the outcome is determined by people making uncoerced choices. No one is being told to give up their money at gunpoint, and no one can somehow become massively rich by doing X unless large numbers of people desire to pay them for doing X.

But that's somewhat of a naive, simplified view of the way modern capitalism actually works. It's not like a simple bazaar where tangible goods or services are exchanged for money. You can become massively rich without providing any sort of value or service that large numbers of people desire to pay for. Hedge funds do it quite often. You can benefit from the exchange of securities, which in theory, is supposed to represent the exchange of your money (a product of your labor) with something of abstract value, like a percentage of ownership of a corporate entity (ultimately deriving value from the product of other people's labor, or some tangible asset like equipment). But in practice, you can generate wealth by cleverly exchanging securities without actually producing anything that anybody wants, or even really benefitting the corporate entities which those securities represent. And the already-rich are immediately advantaged in two ways: (1) they have more capital upfront to purchase equities in larger quantities, (2) they can afford services that provide advanced computerized tools that monitor markets and make sub-microsecond algorithmic trades (because they can afford $2,000 per month for something like a Bloomberg terminal) which would be impossible for the average amateur day-trader to do, thus accumulating more wealth while generating nothing of value. And with derivatives, you're not even necessarily trading actual equities that at least in theory represent a valuable slice of some company - you're now at a level of abstraction where you're basically trading contracts, meaning you can generate massive wealth by essentially just speculating about the performance of something like crop yields or oil prices or whatever. Again, the already wealthy are advantaged for the same reasons.

A lot of this seems like a bug in capitalism. I mean, to a certain extent a lot of it isn't different in theory from a clever 16th century merchant who buys some valuable product that people want for a low price, and then tries to sell it elsewhere for a higher price in order to make a profit. Except in the 21st century the level of abstraction and indirection has become so convoluted, that you basically can generate wealth ex nihilo in a few microseconds by rapidly buying and selling abstractions which sort of, kind of, ultimately derive their "worth" from some underlying source of value, or potential value - and indeed, some derivatives actually derive their value from the performance of other derivatives or exchanges. At a certain point it's like we're basically just playing around here and nothing valuable is being produced but yet somehow wealth keeps accumulating around the same group of people... this definitely seems like a major bug in the system.

[Channel72]

Maximising hapiness is not sufficient for an ethical system, in the sense of a fully functional calculus for selecting outcomes and actions that would be regarded as acceptable, or even avoid horrific outcomes, by most humans. I know this kind of simple utilitarianism is a convenient logical basis for rational humanist economists and philosophers, and I guess it works well enough for a lot of non-rigorous analysis, but it just doesn't work as an idealised human goal system. For many years I thought that it was possible to fix this by complicating the logic, codifying consent and various other 'natural rights' as scaling factors on the actual utility of perceived happiness. Long story short, those are nasty hacks that don't work (don't produce desirable results under extrapolation).

Well, yeah... but any idealized human goal system would probably place much less weight than is biologically imperative on the value of the "self node", and more value on propagating happiness outward throughout the social graph. I guess we can avoid the hedonistic outcome of "turn all human experience into a 24 hour orgasm" by placing value on self-enhancement/self-improvement or discovery/curiosity, which is actually part of the (non-idealized) human goal system anyway. Although apparently this guy Pearce argues that "dopamine overdrive" will actually increase our interest in self-improvement and discovery, which doesn't seem very intuitive, at least.

[Starglider]

I put 'natural rights' in quotes because yes, of course there are no rights granted by nature itself. There is no objective morality. There is however evolved behaviour found across the human species which when codified in a society tends to produce similar basic rules about how to treat people; the rules we are interested in ethically are the ones that a majority would vote for rather than the ones that get imposed by naturally advantaged groups. Rules such as no one except the government should hurt or imprison people, the concept of private property etc. There are outliers and exceptions in every case, but that doesn't matter for the purpose of finding a common humanist morality. This is the source of basic human rights which you cannot ignore when constructing ethical systems; as I said even attempts to make purely happiness based systems had to try to hack in a 'right of consent' to remain plausible. However that is not to say we should limit legally granted rights to these principles; were you to derrive a legal system from first principles, most of the content would be a pragmatic attempt to increase ethical behaviour and quality of life rather than directly reflecting the basic utility function. For example, limited liability companies are a purely pragmatic legal creation, which has arguably gone too far and become counterproductive (corporate personhood etc).

Rejecting human-derrived morals because you just don't like humans is a seperate issue, but again not very relevant because the people who hate humans outright don't tend to do so in a consistent, aggregatable (and thus statistically meaningful) fashion.

"Democratic fashion" here, to Starglider, means that the outcome is determined by people making uncoerced choices. No one is being told to give up their money at gunpoint, and no one can somehow become massively rich by doing X unless large numbers of people desire to pay them for doing X.

But that's somewhat of a naive, simplified view of the way modern capitalism actually works.

Well of course, I explicitly said that it's only a starting point for modelling. The point I was making is that libertarianism starts with a lot of simple models, that translate to simple everyday situations, that most humans would agree with. This is why libertarianism has a following; as with communism, it promises an easy packaged answer to everything by taking some solutions to simple moral dilemmas and then blindly scaling them up to world economy / civilisation level. Implementation difficulties and emergent effects that totally wreck the intended outcome are (ineffectively) patched, rationalised or simply ignored, because the extremist has made an emotional commitment to the purity (simplicity) of their utopian social archetype.

Examining a hypothetical tabula rasa state of capitalism confirms basic assumptions such as decentralising decisions about the relative value of goods is obviously a good idea (ethically and practically), that the ability to have savings is good etc. We then work forward from those assumptions to the point that the implied system breaks down and produces unethical outcomes, but the fact that this happens does not invalidate the fact that an important positive principle has been established. It means that we make the least harmful compromises to mitigate the bad outcomes. Obviously you have to combine a lot of these thought experiments together to get a complete economic philosophy. It tends to work better for the capitalist/libertarian starting points because with communism you immediately run into almost insurmountable implementation difficulties (massive corruption and discontent), which you have to awkwardly and inefficiently compromise towards market machinery to fix (as in China). In my admittedly limited experience, a capitalist starting point can be more incrementally and sensibly fixed.

You can become massively rich without providing any sort of value or service that large numbers of people desire to pay for. Hedge funds do it quite often.

You can become rich without doing work but hedge funds are a bad example. Hedge funds provide a service to their investors, and on a transaction basis they provide a service to all their counterparties; every time they make a trade, the other party thinks they will benefit from doing the trade. In theory, financial actors efficiently allocate capital according to preferences of both the investors, the borrowers (private, corporate and state) and ultimately consumers and voters (who generate the demand for investment projects). Reality doesn't match theory for various reasons to do with game theory and regulatory capture.

But in practice, you can generate wealth by cleverly exchanging securities without actually producing anything that anybody wants, or even really benefitting the corporate entities which those securities represent.

Secondary market share transactions are not supposed to benefit the issuing companies; rather, the companies are supposed to benefit the shareholders, who are trading shares amongst each other based on their investment vs consumption preferences. The reason you can generate wealth through trading is that all the actors involved agree to play a game and some entities play the game better than others. The financial sector invented 'gamification' centuries before it became a sillicon valley buzzword. Humans like playing games and this can be harnessed for positive effects, but whether it makes sense for so much of the economy to be based on such a complicated game with such limited access is a separate debate (short answer, no, not in its current form). I personally used to work on algorithmic pricing which had minimal possibly negative net ethical value due to virtual arbitrage effects overwhelming the (desirable) reduction in spreads. Currently I work on real-time systemic risk analysis which I think has positive value, in making crashes less likely and less damaging (to savers and ultimately voters).

A lot of this seems like a bug in capitalism.

It's an emergent behaviour which is almost certainly counterproductive for improving mean human living standards yes. There are lots of these, the difficult question (for each) is whether practical methods to suppress the behaviour does more harm than good. For global capitalism the question is different because countries don't (usually) work in tandem, so you are asking 'what can I do to maximise benefits for my country' more often than 'what legal changes would benefit humanity as a whole'. Obviously quite a lot of humans don't value improving the living standards of people other than themselves, their family, or their immediate social group anyway, but these views aren't relevant for a generalised human morality and in theory should be averaged out by the political process as well (again, reality rarely matches this).

Most practical means of getting rich do in fact require work, just work that is disproportionately compensated. e.g. Building up a buy-to-let property empire of existing housing stock does require work (often a lot) to arrange funding, do all the transactions, arrange rennovation and maintenance etc. The actual social value delivered is dubious; obviously there is value in a naive sense, otherwise it wouldn't work; giving people the ability to rent instead of purchase. But when considered at an aggregate society level it is not delivering value v.s. social housing or letting those people just own their homes. Conversely investing in the new build of a private block of appartments does have social value, in that you are forgoing personal consumption to enable creation of a durable good that would not otherwise have existed.

I've mentioned this before, but one thing I am still having trouble with is whether ethical value should be assigned to groups of humans, independent of the aggregate of their individual value. My intuition and western philosophical convention says no, but for most of human history the extended family unit has been treated as a moral actor and this obviously has a strong genetic basis. The really broad forms of discrimination are pretty much automatically bad (in an aggregation of symmetric traits). Recent concepts of 'social justice' to do with medium sized groups e.g. autonomy of tribal peoples are an interesting case though where it looks like direct ethical value is being applied to a social group beyond the individual ethical value of its members in a possibly defensible way.

[Starglider]

I guess we can avoid the hedonistic outcome of "turn all human experience into a 24 hour orgasm" by placing value on self-enhancement/self-improvement or discovery/curiosity, which is actually part of the (non-idealized) human goal system anyway.

Yes, and once you go down this path you realise (or at least I realise) that you have to holistically value most of the human experience, minus just the really nasty bits that (most people agree that) no-one should have to experience.

Although apparently this guy Pearce argues that "dopamine overdrive" will actually increase our interest in self-improvement and discovery, which doesn't seem very intuitive, at least.

Yes it's a highly dubious reading of the relevant studies. It might look like I am picking on Pearce but actually he did everyone a favour by laying out the hedonistic case in so much detail and extrapolating to the logical consequences, so that it can be convincingly rejected.

I know this is a bit meta for SDN, usually I constrain myself to mocking obvious inconsistencies in other people's political platforms or taking an exaggerated devils advocate position. Although I have done this on libertarian forums from the socialist side, I confess it is more entertaining to adopt a hypercapitalist personna, essentially because hardline communists are a rather dour, violent, humourless and unimaginative bunch. Wheras the shear variety of corporate doublespeak and 'ethical' rationalisations that contemporary hypercapitalists produce is endless entertaining.

[Starglider]

I confess it is more entertaining to adopt a hypercapitalist personna, essentially because hardline communists are a rather dour, violent, humourless and unimaginative bunch.

To expand on this a little bit, here is an excellent defence of socialism : Manna, by Marshall Brain. It's a short online novel that I highly recommend; if you haven't read it here is the summary. It examines the fairly inevitable future of automation removing initiative from and then ultimately devaluing the labour of the majority humans to the point where participatory capitalism simply isn't possible. It then examines two social models, one in which capitalism is maintained for a small elite (who retain either capital or skills that can't be automated) and everyone else gets the lowest cost prison-camp implementation of socialism possible. The other model is a transhumanist equailtarian socialist paradise with a high basic income, but still the freedom to engage in private production as a hobby (it isn't explicitly stated, but I assume a few people engage in wealth accumulation games to a limited extent that doesn't significantly impact society). The formalisation of idealised human morality that I mention above is essentially what you need to design the (non-sentient) control software the author talks about.

It is telling that Stas Bush and his commrades concentrate on imprisoning and murdering privilidged groups and idealises solidarity in a tyranically enforced uniform state of misery, rather than looking at how we can move forward from the current situation to a cornucopian vision. Essentially he wants the 'Future USA' vision of people imprisoned in standardised housing blocks with state provided food, bland state provided TV and minimum state provided healthcare to keep people alive, but without any high standard of living elite (arguably even worse as the oppression becomes completely pointless). I always argue for the later, Australia Project model of how and when socialism becomes the best model*.

* I don't actually think it will work as a social model because it assumes advanced AI and cybernetics but doesn't deal with the inevitable emergence transhuman intelligence, but that's a debate that I try to keep separate from normal politics. To be fair Marshall himself goes into this in his other novels.

[K. A. Pital]

Actually, as a rule, sewage and garbage workers are paid considerably more than the minimum for their society, at least in the areas I'm familiar with.

This is not a rule. It is your observation, which is incorrect.

Sewage and garbage cleaners in Britain, for example, were paid basically the minimum wage (in fact, a retail clerk got 16k on the average, industrial cleaner 16k for a job that is incomparably more unpleasant and hazardous). House cleaners are being paid the minimum wage as well. Same for window cleaners, and many other very hard jobs are being paid near this figure as well, within the 15k-20k bracket where sewage cleaners are together with other cleaners, The guy who cleans the places for Fat Cat Get Togethers gets the minimum.

My wife is an unpacker and storage mover, she comes with work bruises every week and she is paid the minimum - and before the minimum wage was instituted, she would have been paid below minimum. Hard work doesn't always pay - that is the rule, not what you said.

So sorry, but if counter clerks get the same wage as cleaners, and there are still people who clean, you are clearly wrong and I expect you to concede the point. Besides, your idea that there is a limitless supply of counter clerk jobs which people can freely "prefer" and that the capitalist system will not find wage slaves in the form of immigrants or minorities who struggle at school or with languages to be cleaners is insulting... Becaus this is what happens in real life, and counter clerk jobs, which aren't also the easiest type of job out there, are not limitless.

See? In just one paragraph you made me angry again because of your statement that it is only people who pick fruit and counter clerks who are paid low, but not cleaners.

Çatalhöyük may well represent something close to the maximum possible scale of civilization without division of labor and without some degree of division into the rewarded professionals and less-rewarded drudges.

That very well may be, but it is not relevant to my point - that equality is natural, it is 99% of mankind's history and is natural, while inequality is unnatural, even if we call it fancy words like "Atomic Age" or, to tone down the pathos, class society - if not a caste system. That because of the impact of inequality and alienation of humans from the product of their collective labour and each other, they rebel - often violently. If the current order would have been "natural", there would not be rebellion. The classless society and "flat hierarchy", on the other hand, are natural and by definition cannot produce a rebellion against authority... There being no authority to rebel against.

Granted that the Stone Age is the natural human condition, but it is not the desirable human condition. Living in the Stone Age with perfect equality is almost inevitably going to be worse than living in the Atomic Age with a significant amount of inequality. There is SOME level of inequality for which living in the Atomic Age under such conditions is worse than living in the Stone Age... but that level is difficult to achieve in a plausible society.

Once again, you use a fancy word "atomic age" - probably to appeal to my technocratic leanings. But it does not sweeten the pill. You say this as if horrible things in the Atomic Age are implausible. But you are wrong again. Is a stone age life in Çatalhöyük worse than this? This is now, it is the "atomic age", and it is in a large city where there is plenty of glass and concrete...

You said this is not a plausible society. I say this is a real society, not just a plausible one.

The amount of suffering and painful excruciating death required has declined with technology. It used to be worse. So by the same type of argument you're advancing, evil and suffering are not inherent aspects of division of labor.

I never said there is no potential to humanize the system; but there are so far limits to this humanization as well and technology is not always making suffering decline. At the time miners were dying horribly, the introduction of technology, namely machine hammers, has actually increased deaths of miners from pulmonology to a level where 20-30 percent were affected because these tools raised particles into the air in far greater volumes than hand tools. And at that time (early XX century) miners' income was quite below average wage in a society. Capitalist society basically had the price of painful death set at lower than the average. This is your and Starglider's "freedom"?

I am broadly comfortable with either of those outcomes.

I never argued against further humanization of labour, protection or elimination of hazardous occupations and stopping the exploitation of the Third World.

And, again, we have found that technology increases the dignity of life for all classes- the aristocrats of the Middle Ages might be powerful but had no way to escape the smell of animal manure. By contrast, modern elites live, as you say, on Elysium. At the same time, medieval peasants and Steam Age factory workers lived in far more suffering and drudgery and self-destruction than their Information Age descendants do.

Which is why there is no reason to be complacent about the gap just because we live better than medieval farmers. The overlords just throw the underclass a bigger bone from their vast posessions in the hope it will make them complacent and never think about the roots of hierarchy and class domination.

Indeed. More generally, they know they are an isolated experiment, that people outside their community have expectations about what will happen. They know there will be a tomorrow in which if they act lazy and stupid, there will be consequences, and they are occupying well defined positions that were set by an outside authority whose main requirement is that the mining community mine.

The authority may come from the community itself, if it is sufficiently active and people participate in governing the labour process. As a cooperative.

Therefore, it is much easier to reward someone in goods, than to so configure an entire society to reward them in terms of social approval or some such.

Maybe it is easier. Making peace with the status quo is always easier. Besides, what capital tells people is status, becomes status. By now it is pointless to discuss how people would perform with different incentives in the future because right now, they are the product of multigenerational warping by capitalism. I have seen examples of different motivation, but capitalism quickly destroys every other form of exchange, reward and motivation in societies.

Because altering them to the present state took ten thousand years of gradual evolution and change, NONE of which was documented or controlled.

But I have given examples of both high-ranking and competent leaders living on less than average income, and of entire parliaments having incomes close to average. If this is possible even in our current, deeply warped and horrible society, it surely can be possible in a better society with a more flat hierarchy.

"Democratic fashion" here, to Starglider, means that the outcome is determined by people making uncoerced choices. No one is being told to give up their money at gunpoint, and no one can somehow become massively rich by doing X unless large numbers of people desire to pay them for doing X.

All of it is simply wrong; one, original accumulation of capital was done at gunpoint with murder and robbery of every non-market society out there. Two, as soon as something is produced collectively, it is no longer a product you can exclusively claim ownership of. Three, if someone's buying power is too low, there is absolutely no "voluntary choice" he can make that will help him escape suffering at the hands of someone with greater buying power - as exemplified by the biofuel boom that caused food inflation spikes and malnourishment in several regions. What the fuck is democratic here and what the fuck is voluntary? That would be all.

Highly trained professionals- who in developed societies often make salaries in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand USD a year, which is far in excess of the median income and yet far less than that of the truly 'rich' class who own the bulk of the capital.

Banksters, mid-level corporate suits and very, very rare IT guys earn 100k and upwards. They are not the 1% of the oligarchy, but (as Starglider aptly demonstrated) they are part of, say, the upper 5% and thus bourgeois to the core. Do I want the oligarch lapdogs and puppets to rule me? No.

So that in essence you are dictating to them that they cannot enjoy all these privileges and luxuries, many of which ARE enjoyed by peers of theirs who have no political power... because of the demands of Serving The People. Since that would be an absurdity I chose the absurd phrase "make law-makers into slaves" to represent it.

When the supposed servant, an elected representative, gets several times more than the people he "serves", the word to serve becomes a joke. There is nothing impossible about politicians being paid 1 to 1,5 the average income even now. You chose not to talk about Malta and Switzerland. Why?

And yes, there is nothing uglier than a corrupt government. Which is why let's just keep their privilege and pay the costs upfront, and not argue about it? Not even try to dimish that cost? Change the management culture? Why not? Because humans are irreversibly spoiled by stratified society?

I don't think that a salary comparable to eighty or a hundred thousand USD a year, in the context of developed societies, constitutes "privilege" or "corruption" in the sense of excessive wealth. Such a person is not going to be hiring private jets or living in a palace and never seeing the common folk.

So you do not think that being in the upper 5% of people constitutes one hell of a privilege? Well... Here we will agree to disagree forever.


I will deal with Starglider's self-serving screeds in a separate post. I love how he calls me violent. He should totally add "council housed" and engage in some more social racism and darwinism.

[K. A. Pital]

Now... going on to Channel72's commentary.

To me, this is the most questionable facet of your argument. Division of labor is simply a natural result of the task specialization that inevitably occurs in any technological society. I know how to program computers very well, but I don't know how to repair air conditioners, or design microprocessors. I need someone else to do that. Even hunter-gatherer, egalitarian societies had division of labor, based around gender for the most part.

The division of labour itself started that way, but it is in no way natural now, where people are made into living tools on conveyor belts. Is it natural for you to dedicate 100% of your time to a single operation, the result of which you do not even own? Division of labour is at the root of the class society. It raises our productive capabilities - brings the relations of production to a new level - and it is also at the root of inequality and injustice. Well, that and ownership, but one flows from the other. Without division of labour capitalism itself would not have been possible.

Our options are to eliminate these jobs using robots/automation, or go back to being hunter gatherers where everyone just shits in the woods. A third option would be to implement some kind of mandatory public service period, where teenagers or 20-somethings would be randomly selected for these types of tasks, as a civic duty, or whatever. Perhaps you'd accept that solution?

Yes, I would be glad to have privileged people experience for a bit the suffering of the less fortunate. Not sure what else to add here.

Perhaps the real problem you're getting at is not the division of labor per se, but the archetypal Marxist complaint that the owners, or major stockholders in factories, plants and corporations, benefit disproportionately from the collective efforts of their workforce. This is really the primary reason for inequality in capitalist societies, but increased standards of living have mostly prevented this situation from becoming unstable.

You are right: that is also a problem for me and millions around the world, but it is the second level, the result of a class society arising after the division of labour and hierarchy rising with it, and then the ruling classes create "legal systems" that forever enshrine their right to everything made by the collective effort of mankind. I don't understand why you say "have mostly prevented this situation from becoming unstable" when the only thing that can end it is if it becomes unstable. A stable class hierarchy is in the danger of becoming permanent. After which it is looking like a caste system, and there are yet more reasons to destroy it. I will give word to Oscar Wilde:

...They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it...

Earlier, you mentioned that Bill Gates is in Elysium, while the rest of us live on the ground. Except, most studies show that increased happiness is logarithmic after a certain income/lifestyle is achieved (you know, hierarchy of needs and all that...), meaning that Bill Gates likely isn't that much happier than most people.

I think the problem is that Bill Gates has full freedom while most people have none, as they have to work. Can Bill Gates not work for a single second of his life? Yes, he can. Can he freely chose any occupation and pursue it? Yes, he can. Can he appropriate or use anything created by man? Yes, with the exception of nuclear weapons. He can even use rockets if he'd want, just cash out. All this while people assembling the goods cannot afford them, all this while 95% of the world is suffering "austere" life.

Let's be blunt, I think that this shouldn't be. Simple as that. If you want to live in Heaven while the majority of humanity crawls in the mud and blood of essentially pre-true history, of suffering, strife, privation - of Inferno - sorry, but why should you? Should you have enough means to live and not suffer privation? Yes. Should you be given tools and education to advance science for mankind, should you be allowed to develop your mental facilities to the fullest extent? Yes. But that does not translate into Bill Gates or any other ultra-rich. In a good world, Bill Gates would've simply been an ordinary - well, maybe an extraordinary, huh - software engineer.

It's still not clear to me at all that class-based hierarchies are not a natural outcome of the need for division of labor in any technological society.

I already said they are a natural outcome of the technological society - but I don't think the technological society is itself "natural". Just as all the dead miners and textile workers lie there at the foundation of prosperity of this society. Their blood lies at the foundation, while whole dynasties of rich fucks enjoy all the wonders this modern world has given us.

It's not clear the answer here is complete destruction of classes - rather the answer seems to be a combination of technological automation and economic engineering.

I merely explained my feelings on this, because I got the feeling people were pushing the argument that the classless and equitable society is "unnatural". I'd like to have socialism as an intermediate solution: the ownership of means of production by the workers, in that way they at least sacrifice themselves for something they own. But the ruling class will never allow it to pass. They will do everything in their power to annihilate anything that challenges the market order, which is the source of their wealth. I guess that's my view.

But the point is, I don't think destruction of classes is likely the answer - the answer is probably much less revolutionary and more evolutionary - the continued tweaking of capitalism to tame its excesses.

The end result will be full submission to the capitalist class. There was a whole plethora of reformers in 1960s who built the foundations of the "welfare state" in Europe. First the capitalist elite forced their way into the Second and Third World to exploit cheaper labour, then used the full might of their capitals to stage a successful assault on the welfare state, dismantling and utterly wrecking it. The system built in the 1970s was massive and robust, so it takes decades to tear it down, but the end result is well upon us. So pardon me for doubting that this is a good choice.

[K. A. Pital]

And now...

There is however evolved behaviour found across the human species which when codified in a society tends to produce similar basic rules about how to treat people; the rules we are interested in ethically are the ones that a majority would vote for rather than the ones that get imposed by naturally advantaged groups.

In this case welcome to prehistoric Neolithic communism. That was when there was no class division and no "advantage groups" who set the 'basic rules'. Most rules today are rules of the ruling class. Sometimes the absurdity rises from the Abyss like that monstrous Cthulhu thing: say, a person gets sentenced lightly for misappropriating millions or having ties to the mafia, while millions rot in jail for growing some weed. Then we have a feeling something is wrong, but quickly slip back into "normality" of the sheltered life most of us lead.

In my admittedly limited experience, a capitalist starting point can be more incrementally and sensibly fixed.

Your experience of what? You've only ever experienced a sheltered life of the top what, 10% of humanity? You are sitting at the top of a bloody pyramid talking about how you will now decided for those little humans what's "sensible".

You can become rich without doing work

Damn right. All it takes is owning capital. Enough. Once you own some capital, you can choose not to work. End of story. All work after that point is purely voluntary. You can become rich by individually approriating the collective product of people. This is not related to your personal work, but to the work of your underlings. Being thrown into a Robinson Crusoe situation, you will never become filthy rich unless you use hired labour in a capitalist society. Like I said, there are very hard limits to individual accomplishments - Kropotkin and Proudhon gave ownership a solid beating even back in their day.

Although I have done this on libertarian forums from the socialist side, I confess it is more entertaining to adopt a hypercapitalist personna, essentially because hardline communists are a rather dour, violent, humourless and unimaginative bunch.

This is the main difference between us. To you, this is a game. You are simply putting on some masks and trolling. Communists have plenty of humor and self-irony. But it's reserved for me and my comrades. For the rich and privileged we have no jokes. We have nothing to joke about when talking to the enemy. Your positions are just a fun time for you. Mine are not fun because they are a part of my personality and they have been fused with it by experience. Entertain youself - while I will live.

... idealises solidarity in a tyranically enforced uniform state of misery...

Tyrannic authority in pre-class society? You are truly ridiculous.

Essentially he wants the 'Future USA' vision of people imprisoned in standardised housing blocks with state provided food, bland state provided TV and minimum state provided healthcare to keep people alive, but without any high standard of living elite...

No, you're wrong, I simply want to destroy your city and build an experimental anthropological reactor where Hadza tribes will live in FULL COMMUNISM on its ruins and there shall be NO GODS NO MASTERS. That way at least I won't have to listen to your stupid ideas of a sheltered First World urbanite who hasn't seen shit being ascribed to myself. But here's a joke for you:

[madd0ct0r]

Dammit Stas, every one of those photos I think it's a city I lived in.

[Channel72]

The division of labour itself started that way, but it is in no way natural now, where people are made into living tools on conveyor belts. Is it natural for you to dedicate 100% of your time to a single operation, the result of which you do not even own? Division of labour is at the root of the class society. It raises our productive capabilities - brings the relations of production to a new level - and it is also at the root of inequality and injustice. Well, that and ownership, but one flows from the other. Without division of labour capitalism itself would not have been possible.

I'm not going to respond too extensively, as I imagine you're going to have your allocated SD.net time filled mostly responding to others.

Believe it or not, I agree with a lot of your general thesis. The quoted argument above, however, really isn't valid. What the hell do you even mean by natural? That sounds like one of those fad-diet arguments - the "paleo-diet" or whatever, where the argument is basically: humans did X for 100,000 years before the Neolithic period, therefore for some reason we should emulate it because it's "natural!"™. Who cares what humans always did? For most of our natural history H. sapiens has been a bunch of miserable bi-pedal primates who were lucky to make it out of the Pleistocene alive.

The conditions in Catalhuyuk or any other Paleolithic society do not reflect some kind of good argument for large-scale communism for a technological society where more and more of our general infrastructure requires microprocessors to even operate. And I don't think you can convince anyone, yourself included, that abolishing class is worth returning to Stone Age conditions, especially now when such a move would result in the catastrophic death of billions via starvation, as agricultural yields declined to basically nothing.

The best argument for the abolition of capital is the same, plain old Marxist argument put forth 120 years ago in Das Kapital : capitalism leads to unfair conditions because ownership of assets (equity) is highly concentrated in the hands of a couple of thousand rich shareholders, and that furthermore, workers employed by the asset owners continuously exert effort without obtaining any shares themselves - rather they are salaried, meaning they are essentially on a corporate treadmill - their work does not advance them, and they do not own the fruit of their work.

That's the argument. No need to bring in Paleolithic villages or whatever.

The only thing I'll add is that the classic Marxist argument is slightly diluted in practice, because it's not always the case that workers are unable to share in ownership of assets (see stock options, publicly traded companies, etc.) (I could also go off on a long tangent about how for the first time in modern history, the Internet and open source software essentially places the "means of production" into anyone's hands for free, which I think is something you should at least consider to be of interest, even if it obviously doesn't even approach some kind of solution to the overall problem of inequality.) The basic problem remains that despite things like the ability to purchase stock, workers are starting off at a point of such an extreme disadvantage compared with the asset-owners. Workers don't start out with enormous capital to begin with, so they'll never be anything close to equal shareholders with their employers.

So, I'd propose advocating some solution for this specific problem, rather than talking about the general abolition of class or capital in general, which is much more radical and idealistic. I already put forth my proposed solution: perhaps some governing body should expand things like the Fair Labor Standards Act to set requirements not only for work hours and wages, but also for equity and ownership of capital. This way, large corporations would tend toward equal ownership among all salaried employees. Of course, I realize this is never going to happen, but I still think it's a more practical kind of solution to the problem Marx wrote about. If this kind of corporate restructuring existed alongside general socialist reforms throughout the first world, it would go a long way towards removing a lot of the inequality that's festered over the past few centuries - all without having to remove class or remove the "concept" of ownership/capital itself.

Of course, I know the above solution is just dreaming, which is why I personally favor technological-based solutions to this. The Internet and open source software was an interesting case where the "means of production" in a major market sector somehow became available to everyone. (Thanks Richard Stallman!) Perhaps 3D printers will eventually enable something similar for non-digital forms of production.

[K. A. Pital]

Channel72, if you note on the other page I said that I pretty much agree the division of labour can't be abolished by rolling back to the Stone Age. I'm not a paleo-anarchist, no matter how deeply I feel the injustice of the current order. Kinda like Wilde said, empathy moves towards the wrong actions, a cold head is better. Though it's hard to imagine a good non-cyberpunk future without a rough equality in living conditions. I say rough because it won't be a complete equality of the Neolithic kind - but by our standards, certainly it will be like complete equality.

But since people here got so pround of their "Atomic Age" (make no mistake, I like the space age, I like the concept of man conquering power of the atom, et cetera) to an extent they're basically sticking to "equality of living conditions is bullshit" up to a point where even the idea that politicians are not entitled to more than the average income of the society they govern because that removes the incentive to improve the lives of their subjects is ridiculed; and there is an attempt to put a fleur of "fairness" over the brutal inequality of our lives. The only thing that's lacking is a huge "CLASS RULE FOREVER" banner: how deeply the propaganda of inequality must be ingrained in people's heads that people are speaking in favor of bourgeois henchmen with 100k wages...

Seeing this, I simply decided to piss in the celebratory GLORY TO MODERN WORLD champagne. The Neolithic villages (well, more like towns, really) and hunter-gatherers only relate to a very specific part of my argument: that equality is not "unnatural" for humans and the "human nature" argument belongs to the trash can. We can take pride in our unnatural civilization - we abolished mortality for infants who'd be otherwise surely dead, we are reshaping the ecology of the whole Earth (can ruin it in the process, but hey...) - but the argument of something being natural because it's historic is completely false. Instead one should've said the typical liberal stuff: yeah, unnatural, yeah, misery for some, but so what LOOK AT HENRY FORD ATLAS BRAGGED LOOK AT LIFE EXPECTANCY CAPITALISM YAY.

And madd0ct0r, I live to serve (clickable):

(Place with the longest working hours in the world. Hard work!!! )

[Purple]

I do not think it is propaganda. It's simply the fact that most of the population wealthy enough to have access to the internet but poor enough to care about social issues will be of the kind who are living a relatively pleasant middle class existence. Or at the very least people who are not very poor, starving etc. Sure we aren't rich and life is horrifically unjust. But things could be so much worse.
And of course this same group is constantly faced with the existence of the poor, the starving and the ones suffering most from social injustice. We see just how worse things can be. So the first, and frankly only impulse is NOT to seek justice for one self, let alone that other group but to suppress without mercy or hesitation anyone who would drag us down. And what ever anger we have toward those exploiting us to get rich is by far outweighed by the fear we have of becoming poor.

[madd0ct0r]

History argues against you Purple. We are steadily leaving serfdom behind as a species. Tyranny is being out competed as an organisational system.

[Purple]

Is it? Is the wage serfdom of the present any different than the one of the past? Does the average man really have any more power over the things that concern him? The difference is only that the living standard of the workers have risen massively and that at least in the richer countries the government and nobles can't murder you at their whim any more. But is the power of the corporate leader any lesser than that of a feudal lord?