The slow decay of Venezuela

[Simon_Jester]

I have two basic sets of replies here, one to Channel and Starglider, one to Stas Bush (I'm sorry, but I respect all the stuff you did under the old pseudonym too well to just... forget it)

"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...

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.

I don't disagree. There was an element of devil's advocacy in my attempt to represent the position. To extend that element further BEFORE stating my own actual views:

"Well, the wealth extracted by these cunning middlemen who deal in derivatives and securities and so on is certainly being pulled out of the system in some way, but you don't see people abandoning the marketplace because they think too high a proportion of their assets are being taken by the cunning middlemen, now do you? Therefore, while they may not specifically want X% of all money to be parasitically siphoned off by financiers, they clearly don't mind if that happens."

Note that there are plenty of reasons one might object to this attitude- I'm just trying to represent it in an understandable and 'sane' way so that it doesn't just get strawmanned to death. Perhaps I'm not trying hard enough; heaven knows I've got a way to go before I can be a good practicioner of steelmanning

Now, Starglider did a pretty good job of expanding on the faults- naively, we can say everyone involved in the modern financial sector consented to every individual transaction. But as he pointed out, this is a totally separate question from the question of whether, in aggregate, it makes sense to have such a large fraction of the total resources of our civilization bound up in this elaborate trading game, with the winners of the game being awarded multi-billion dollar fortunes and the losers losing those billions of dollars a few at a time. Especially since for the past couple of decades, we've mostly been losers and a handful of people keep winning over and over.

And he also does an interesting job of pointing out, and linking to Manna which further illustrates, the idea that if this trend con

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*.

Having observed Stas saying what he really thinks, this is not the case.

The problem he perceives, and it is a highly relevant one, is that transitioning from capitalism as we now know it to "Australia Project" socialism is problematic. How do we get there from here? The answer the author of Manna came up with was "have a billion people invest a thousand dollars each, and use the resulting trillion dollars of working capital to build a post-scarcity paradise on unused land in the Australian Outback." Presumably this involved an extended period of time spent on constructing the paradise,* which is why our protagonist doesn't get to go to the Australian paradise until decades have passed and the US has become a dystopia with as much of the population as possible shoved in the welfare cubes while a shrinking minority enjoy their ownership of everything.**

*I will also note that there are practical environmental issues associated with the whole idea of doing it in Australia in particular or with the idea that all this construction can be done with zero pollution by the power of recycling, but those are details.

**I have this image of the American owner class shifting into becoming something like the Solarians from Isaac Asimov's fiction- because they represent a collection of humans that have self-selected for the idea of being 'lords' of vast automated estates while excluding the many unwanted other humans from their lives so far as possible. To some extent, Asimov seems to have seen that particular issue coming, although there are lots of other things he did not consider or got wrong.
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Stas and those like him look at the "Australia Project" and say "capitalism will never do anything like this." Therefore they conclude that the only way to make such a society happen is to fundamentally alter the nature of ownership, so that the necessary trillion dollars (or ten trillion, or however much is needed) in seed capital can be extracted, and then protected, from private owners until it the paradise has matured.

This is, of course, tied into a deep revulsion at the behavior and moral character of the owner-class, which is probably why Stas keeps repeating "no gods no masters" three tiems a post.

[Simon_Jester]

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.

Okay, so where I live and the areas I've lived are not representative. In those areas, the people who clean the sewers actually are paid better than the retail clerks, considerably so.

And I continue to argue that they DO reflect a relevant phenomenon- certain types of 'menial' jobs in a fully developed society pay better than you would think. However, the cost-cutters and ownership class are always on the lookout for a way to undo this, if they can get away with it, so this is not a universal thing.

I will further note that house cleaners and sewer cleaners are not necessarily on the same level. The man who cleans sewers deals with sewage all the time, whereas the man who cleans houses deals with it only occasionally. This may explain why, even in a market system, in at least some places, the sewer cleaner gets paid more.

Cleaning offices is, again, a job you can hire anyone to do, so as long as humans are needed to do it, those humans will be paid as little as you can get away with paying a human. If you institute 20th century style communism, there will still be a need to clean the offices, even if you stop letting people have house cleaners and tell them to clean their own houses. And the people who clean the offices are unlikely to be as well-compensated or well-respected as the people who work in the office... because any fool can mop the floors, but not any fool can do what the office workers do.

This is (to the best of my ability) an empirical observation- am I wrong? Can you recount in detail why I am wrong?

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.

You have misunderstood my point.

In a capitalist system, employers only voluntarily raise the salaries they pay their employees because it is too difficult to find a replacement at the current salary- it is the fear of not being able to adequately replace the worker that drives the pay increase, NOT in any real sense 'fair' compensation for the amount of work, danger of work, or harm associated with the work.

If cleaning sewers (your example, not mine) is much much worse than being a retail clerk, then you would logically expect one of the following things to happen, assuming only natural processes of capitalism are applying to the system:

1) Sewer cleaners don't want to quit and become retail clerks. This means that either the sewer cleaners truly enjoy their work (perhaps they just like shit, I don't know), OR they are being compensated better than they can expect to be as a retail clerk.

2) Sewer cleaners DO desire to quit and become retail clerks, but cannot for some reason. Say, because no store is willing to hire someone who's worked in a sewer. In this case, you would expect sewer cleaners to be trapped at a serious disadvantage, and for their salaries to drop, or their working conditions to worsen... because the employers are mostly rats, and have them at a disadvantage. No rat ever looks up an opportunity to exploit anyone they have at a disadvantage.

3) Sewer cleaners decide to quit and succeed in doing so. Retail clerk wages go down slightly because it is now easier to find new retail clerks. Sewer cleaners' wages start rising dramatically, because the employer must find someone willing to clean sewers. The result is that the system is unstable and adjusts until a new equilibrium is found and sewer workers stop quitting- in other words, condition (1) is reached.

Either (1) or (2) is a stable equilibrium condition of the system. If sewer cleaners are getting paid the same as retail clerks where you live, it strongly suggests that (2) is in play.
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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.

What I am trying to point out is that what determines the salary for ANYONE in a capitalist economy is, almost without exception, the ease of replacing them. Owners are mostly rats, so they pay people because it is inconvenient to stop paying them. The amount of money they pay is determined by the magnitude of this inconvenience. The main inconvenience is (usually) that you would have to find a new person to do the job.

If the job is one people are very reluctant to do, then either means to coerce them are found (e.g. sex workers), or it is taken only by very desperate people (e.g. also sex workers), or it is compensated more highly than the minimum (e.g. the sewer workers where I live).

If the job is one people are not especially reluctant to do (e.g. retail clerks, whose job may not be easy but is not loathsome to most people in the sense that they would seriously consider homelessness to avoid it)... You get a different result. These jobs really ARE paid the minimum. You can't use unusual methods to coerce people into taking the job (there's no such thing as a 'crack retail clerk'), but you don't need to, because of the endless supply of people who are seeking such jobs as an alternative to homelessness.

Therefore, the jobs almost anyone can take will be paid near the minimum normal for that society, simply because that's what you can get away with paying people for a job you can hire any random person off the street to do.

Meanwhile, the jobs that take specialized training or skills to do get paid more, sometimes a little more and sometimes a lot more. IT technicians get paid a moderate amount because while not everyone can do their jobs, there is still a steady supply of people who fiddle with computers that can replace any given one of them. Lawyers get paid a large amount because it can be very inconvenient to replace your lawyer, and because the cost of hiring an inferior lawyer willing to charge less money can be "lose everything you have."

For about 95 to 99% of the population in a developed society, this is the situation, up until you get to the high end of the owner class.

That is my actual opinion. There are many complicating factors that I COULD have mentioned to explain why things will not ALWAYS run as I predict here, but my post is long enough and rambling enough, so I will simply note that such complicating factors exist.

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.

As others have mentioned, while this is the naturally occurring condition, it is also 'natural' for nomadic hunter gatherers to put one of a pair of twins to death at birth because there is no realistic way for the nursing mother to carry and nurse both of them long enough for them to grow up to eat solid food.

I don't look at pairs of twins and go "one of them should have been killed."

By analogy, it is "natural" for humans to live in conditions of equality, insofar as it is natural for us to live under conditions of subsistence where starvation is a real and imminent danger that is only avoided by our utmost efforts. And yet I don't look at the inequality that reigns in developed societies and say "it would be better if we were all in more danger of starving, so that we could all enjoy the equality experienced by the !Kung."

I will also note that hunter-gatherers and people living in small Neolithic farm villages routinely go to war with each other or murder each other as individuals... and that many of them would vastly prefer to live under conditions than the ones they now experience, and voluntarily change their way of life within a generation or two even when not being coerced.

So while they're not rebelling against the authorities that rule them (since they live in anarchy)... they are clearly rebelling against something. Or at least fighting against something. What would you call it?

Once again, you use a fancy word "atomic age" - probably to appeal to my technocratic leanings. But it does not sweeten the pill.

That is not true. I use it because I am sincerely of the opinion that technology allows us more control over our worlds than we used to have.

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...

[image of a Jakarta slum]

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

I don't know. We can interview the people of Jakarta and ask them how they are doing, we can measure the conditions of their lives.

We have far less detailed information on the standard of living in Çatalhöyük- we have SOME information, but we are nowhere near being able to come up with anything like the kind of detailed biography of the typical Çatalhöyük resident that we can construct for the typical Jakarta resident.

If we compare the slum-dwellers of Jakarta to the peoples whose lives are most similar to those of Çatalhöyük, who still live in areas where government is sparse and the world ownership-class has not found anything it desires from them... in many ways they are living in worse conditions than the slum-dwellers. Unless of course you talk about intangibles, and claim that the noble savage's life is inherently better than that of the slum-dweller, but at that point I feel like the argument is degenerating into special pleading.

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"?

As Starglider himself noted, he was taking a deliberate stance that was frankly intended to bait you.

I don't do that, and here is what I WAS saying.

You said "The wealth and well-being of some is bought by the suffering and painful excruciating death of others." You used the present tense, in the context of talking about the concept of division of labor.

This suggests that you believe this to be always true, not just true of the early 20th century, or of some particular place.

I disagree with you, and as evidence I point to the general global trend that we have many people living under conditions superior to those of their ancestors (access to clean drinking water and antibiotics, if nothing else), while some people live under conditions that are no worse, and few people live under conditions that are genuinely worse.

This trend was far less pronounced in 1850 or 1900 than it is today- back then, development had not touched most parts of the world and their sole contact with the Industrial Revolution was that it had made them the serfs of some European power. And there were large numbers even in Europe who were actively worse off than the peasant farmers of 1400 AD or for that matter 400 AD.

The nineteenth century was a period of development that led to such gross inequalities that men such as Marx and Ghandi very sensibly observed these conditions, said "this cannot go on unchecked." The twentieth century has, in relative terms, resulted in a softening of the fate of the worst-off.

In highly developed countries, almost no one is as bad off as the unfortunate factory and mine workers of the 19th century, though as always much of the owner-class are rats who would change that if they could.

In underdeveloped countries, the process is less pronounced, because resources are not available. Parts of Asia are now dragging themselves out of the mud. Other parts of Asia, and nearly all of Africa, are so far not able to do so, for a vast array of reasons that can be blamed on a vast array of different actors.

But even there, things are rarely much worse, or if they are worse they're worse in ways that are not inherently caused by division of labor being evil. African villagers may be worse off because of AIDS, but division of labor did not create AIDS. They may be worse off because of overpopulation, but the only way you could have avoided that problem would be to withhold medicine and let the infant mortality and death-in-childbirth rate go back up massively. Division of labor is arguably responsible for creating that problem by making modern medicine possible, but I'm not sure we'd care to do without it for that reason.

That is what I think.

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.

Ah, but we will not accomplish those goals without division of labor! Hence, division of labor cannot be the true evil. Or if it is, then it has created a problem that cannot be solved by going back to the way things were before (in the Stone Age) without the deaths of six billion or more people. Which would be an evil even worse than division of labor!

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.

There are plenty of reasons not to be complacent about inequality- but division of labor is not the fundamental source of the evil here, and we will not solve inequality by attacking division of labor.

And you were attacking division of labor, which is what motivated me to say all that I said.

So stop banging your head against a wall, and find something useful to do, and we will have far less grounds for argument.

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.

Not in a mining community- which would presumably exist for the purpose of mining, and which would not produce its own goods in all categories.

A Soviet iron mining town could operate under conditions of full equality for all residents in large part because all it had to do was mine iron, and in exchange for mining 'enough' iron, the community would be rewarded with a vast diversity of goods produced by the entire complex Soviet economy.

But suppose the mining community had collectively ceased to mine, and decided to take up fly fishing or table tennis instead. In that case, you may be sure the Soviet government would (sensibly) have ended the social experiment in short order.

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.

I have no objection to creating an alternative model- but the only societies I know of to reject capitalism on a large scale were the 20th century communist ones, and they did the same thing the capitalists did!

If you were a more valued class of citizen who did special things, you got rewarded materially. And by and large this was the main means of reward, as I understand it. Rather than simply having the whole community come together to express their gratitude and appreciation and love and thus make you feel better about yourself, despite the fact that you live in the same kind of house as them, eat the same foods, and take the same kind of vacation.

It is hard to imagine how anyone could organize a society that didn't work this way, no matter how committed they were to doing it. Because frankly, the human capacity for love and social support of other humans is fully exercised in a Stone Age community. That is, perhaps, the greatest single resource such a primitive society has: its mutual support and affection and care for one another.

How could we improve on that, to provide special incentives greater than the ones people normally provide each other anyway?

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.

But in that case, you must first un-warp the society, then pay the legislators less. In which case your target should be corporate executives and the stock system, in which case I wish you good hunting and will be glad to see you stop banging your head uselessly on walls.

"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.

Which is precisely why he proposed a hypothetical scenario in which this had not happened. Please reread the scenario he presented.

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.

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.

The main issue is that even if you abolish capitalism there will still be a managerial class. If not in the Marxist sense of 'class,' then in the computer programming or set theory sense. There will be a set of people working highly skilled jobs, who are currently very highly paid, and who are in the top 5% or 10%.

My point is that legislators are inevitably going to have a lot in common with this set. If they are not being compensated in a manner consistent with this set, there will be negative consequences.

So either you bring the entire set of people down to close to the median income (which creates all manner of problems) or you bring only the legislature down (which causes all manner of different problems).

OR you could focus on the real problem, which frankly is not the existence of this set of people in the first place, it is the question of individual ownership of land and property creating the problems spoken of in the book Starglider linked to:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

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?

Out of curiosity, do the legislatures of Malta and Switzerland pay their legislators full time? Do those countries require that legislators maintain two widely separated residences and occupy both of them on a regular basis?

Incidentally, if my lawyer makes twice as much a year as I do, does that mean I "serve" her when she is the one doing jobs for me? I'm curious to know what you think the answer is.

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.[/quote]Legislators do a job.

If we ranked people by their individual importance to society, in terms of the consequences to society if they do their job poorly... the legislature of any given nation would be in the top 0.01% or at the very least 0.1% of the population of that nation.

Given that this is the case, then placing them in the top 10% of the population in terms of what material compensation they get as a reward for doing their job... that doesn't seem unwarranted.

[K. A. Pital]

This is (to the best of my ability) an empirical observation- am I wrong? Can you recount in detail why I am wrong?

My argument, once again, was very specific: that hard and hazardous jobs, and this includes sewage cleaners, are not universally well-paid (as in, paid above average income).

I actually didn't mean to discover the horrible fact that some very bad jobs actually also pay minimum wage even in rich countries (top of the pyramid) - and this frankly left me depressed. I didn't want to know this, if anything, I genuinely wanted to believe in the "rich societies reward such people more" thing. If there is a town or country which has high rewards for this type of occupation, it's good. As for floor cleaners - it's a simple and non-hazardous job, but I don't see people being eager to take it. So the logic of "nobody likes the job and this will lead to higher wages" doesn't necessarily apply here either. What I am most decidedly against is the attempt to derive some universal law of the capitalist system based on a primitive economic model and then run happily with this newfound "truth". Okay, we derived the law, but what do we do when it's not conforming to reality? It reminds me of the whole "marginal product of labour" thing, where there are some societies that, were marginalism true, would simply die out because rewarding workers at the marginal product of labour means starving them to death, it's below subsistence.

My argument is that there is no rule which would reward hazardous occupations more; each and every case of wage rise is actually a result of class struggle. Miners were paid way below average for literally coin-flip probability of various types of painful death; now they are paid well above average and the chance for crippling injury or a bad death is much lower than before. All of this is struggle: the miners actually fought, literally, with weapons, the ruling class to beat concessions out of them, and given their critical role in the industry they were able to achieve a lot. Other, less specialized jobs, are a lot less fortunate because they don't wield that type of economic power that the miners, or transport workers, do.

But a minimum wage in a rich country which is an imperialistic metropole is not the worst there can be... Just google manual sewer cleaners in Indian megacities, and you will have your upbeat mood down in an instant. Industrial suffering, like I explain below.

If sewer cleaners are getting paid the same as retail clerks where you live, it strongly suggests that (2) is in play.

There is also no way for wages to drop any further than a certain minimum (see my comment on marginalism). So your whole theory rests on the free adjustment of wages. Cashiers and retail clerks already get like the bare minimum, and it could be that either law or collective argreement keeps the wage at survival levels. In which case a flood of new candidates will not drop wages but simply increase the pool of unemployed - who usually get less than minimum wage in social assistance, and the questions on whether a person can truly live on this money are always raised. So basically, your model is flawed at the very start (where there's always a wage reaction to a flood of people being released). There can be a cross-sector wage collapse once, say, all quitting sewage cleaners start looking for other jobs than retail clerks and successfully getting them, but min-wage occupations cannot be pushed further down unless you're talking fascism.

By analogy, it is "natural" for humans to live in conditions of equality, insofar as it is natural for us to live under conditions of subsistence where starvation is a real and imminent danger that is only avoided by our utmost efforts.

If starvation forces people to cooperate in a classless fashion, there may be other motivators that will make them do the same. There are other potent arguments for equality that I haven't yet even touched: namely, that a high degree of real equality helps interpersonal relations in a society: people do not look at each other as servants/masters, or as rich cash bags to be tricked into giving out cash to a poorer but more cunning person. Genuine friendships are built. Cities or towns enjoy a low level of crime because with low stratification there is also little poverty to talk of. Communities are not isolated from each other due to low or absent income stratification, so you can't get some bunch of highly-paid technology specialists going "yay technofascism" in their little echo chamber.

... murder each other as individuals... So while they're not rebelling against the authorities that rule them (since they live in anarchy)... they are clearly rebelling against something. Or at least fighting against something. What would you call it?

Nature. But I take issue with your "they often murder each other as individuals". You need to back it up with anthropologic studies that will show Neolithic murder rate is high to justify such a statement.

I use it because I am sincerely of the opinion that technology allows us more control over our worlds than we used to have.

Us as a species, as humanity whole? True enough. Us as "myself"? No. I am utterly powerless, and frankly, after the last few decades my entire class is disempowered. The Western capitalist "techno-meritocracy" looks more and more like world-spanning cyberpunk technofascism.

If we compare the slum-dwellers of Jakarta to the peoples whose lives are most similar to those of Çatalhöyük, who still live in areas where government is sparse and the world ownership-class has not found anything it desires from them... in many ways they are living in worse conditions than the slum-dwellers.

In what "many ways"? You do know that slum living gives rise to horrible epidemics, that sanitation there is much worse than in some tribal societies? At what point will you concede that the modern world has created conditions - actively created - which are worse than primal - both before and today? Would it be total war? Would it be the XIX century child mines? Would it be the concentration camps of Dora Mittelbau where lower race slaves "paved the way" into space under Nazi SS slavers, among them Werner von Braun? When will you admit that the industrial society can create a whole new phenomenon: the industrial production of extreme suffering? I am not going to say the savage's dignity is something to be easily dismissed either. Freedom from class rule and authority also has a value. People have shed blood for that, thousands of them.

I disagree with you, and as evidence I point to the general global trend that we have many people living under conditions superior to those of their ancestors (access to clean drinking water and antibiotics, if nothing else)

The industrial society forged itself in blood. The invention of antibiotics came during a bloodbath that actually plunged most of the world in such conditions that Chatalhouyuk would seem an idyllic place. You take our current position: dismiss the past and consider the future as improvement, and then get to the superiority. But by 2025 it is projected that two thirds of the world's population will live in water scarcity. You say this is a "general global trend" while humanity may very well be on the road to destroying itself by recklessly transforming the world's environment, otherwise known as "climate change". How can you use the words "general trend"?

I challenge you with this:

(From Huffington Post article based on a UN-HABITAT report)
And with this:



The life expectancy of slum dwellers is not much better than that of hunter-gatherers (slum average life expectancy ranges from 39 to 47 years, while for egalitarian agricultural and hunter-gatherer tribal societies, especially "cultured" - ones that take modern knowledge but do not transition to industrial society ranges between 40 and 50 years).

Keep defending the industrial society, but you may suddenly find that it has undone all of its achievements. You talk about a suffering minority to justify all that has happened... but what happens when its the majority who is suffering horribly? May happen within lifetime, too. Will you be still defending it then?

Ah, but we will not accomplish those goals without division of labor!

So... We can't humanize horrible jobs which only exist because of the division of labour without division of labour? Correct. But that's also a tautology. We can't humanize the labour of miners without having mines where the labour of miners is hazardous and thus needs to be humanized. We wouldn't need to humanize miner labour if there were no mines; if there was no industry, there would not be the necessity for ore, coal and other types of mining. Coltan, for example.

"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"

You can say that technology and division of labour aren't at fault, but seriously, does it pain you so much to admit that technology can kill? And that division of labour required to produce said technology can lead to FUCKING HORRIBLE THINGS?

I am sure technology can't cause people to suffer nightmarishly now... Why do I use present tense? Because it's now. Your computer. Your smartphone. Most of world's coltan.

But suppose the mining community had collectively ceased to mine, and decided to take up fly fishing or table tennis instead. In that case, you may be sure the Soviet government would (sensibly) have ended the social experiment in short order.

That's right. But suppose the mining community was actually a large commune with access to agricultural land and good climate. They may very well have supported themselves. And if people can do that under certain conditions under self-supervision...

...but the only societies I know of to reject capitalism on a large scale were the 20th century communist ones, and they did the same thing the capitalists did! ... How could we improve on that, to provide special incentives greater than the ones people normally provide each other anyway?

The Paris Commune had the salaries of administrators set at no higher than those of the average worker. When the USSR started, there was a maximum 150% of average wage of supervised workers limit set for the party bureaucrats - called Partmaximum (secretly abolished by Stalin later). These were the desires of hundreds of thousands, of millions of ordinary people. So no, they did not just "do what the capitalists did". Not always. Not everywhere. Frankly, after the bureaucracy started getting 'privilieges' at some point they just decided it was easier to take ownership of everything and become capitalists. But many still lived the life of an ordinary citizen even under extreme circumstances of war, even in the privation of post-war restoration, even when the party has grown corrupt and its members opulent, and walked the same streets, drove the same cars, ate the same food. There were many people who, like Mujica, chose to live the same life as their countrymen. To these people, my respect. To those who chose to rise over the heads of others - and eventuall walk on the heads of others - to them I give the middle finger. There were many people whose only reward for their enormous efforts was a metal medal. You cannot even imagine...

But in that case, you must first un-warp the society, then pay the legislators less.

What destabilizes the system of class power, is good.

Which is precisely why he proposed a hypothetical scenario in which this had not happened.

I have zero interest in hypothetical scenarios of the liberals. They start with a lie - that in some abstract model people will not kill and rob to establish class power - and dismiss class, reducing their model to the Robinson Crusoe contacts Robinson Crusoe scenario, ignore the collective labour and individual appropriation - and then say that's what actually happened. Well, no, that's not what happened, and that's not what will happen. "Uncoerced" my ass. Even with bare hands people will fight, they will struggle to the end.

There will be a set of people working highly skilled jobs, who are currently very highly paid, and who are in the top 5% or 10%.

There are (or were) capitalist societies with GINI in the 0,18-0,2 range - notably, Sweden, which is perhaps social democracy at its finest. Consider that 0 represents perfect equality. So we can get close to almost full equality and it is reasonable to assume the income disparity won't exceed 150-200% even in the worst cases. And of course, the goal is to negate class differences as a whole, not just for legislators (however, a good start it is, because legislators unlike capitalists are said to "represent").

Out of curiosity, do the legislatures of Malta and Switzerland pay their legislators full time?

No idea if the legislators of Switzerland work full time (should investigate that). In Malta, they convene 3 days of every week plus extraordinary meetings and committee meetings. This is pretty much par the course for national parliaments. The US parliament has what, 130-150 days a year?

Incidentally, if my lawyer makes twice as much a year as I do, does that mean I "serve" her when she is the one doing jobs for me?

Your lawyer is a small-bourgeois self-employed. She is not your servant and not the elected representative of the people. She is someone you make a capitalist contract with. If you think that your government is just a bunch of contractors, like in a corporation, I am not even sure what's your problem with capitalism. Reconstruct the nation as a corporation, hire a CEO, and there you go. Wait... hahaha, your nation is pretty much that.

If we ranked people by their individual importance to society, in terms of the consequences to society if they do their job poorly... the legislature of any given nation would be in the top 0.01% or at the very least 0.1% of the population of that nation.

No reason to let them be detached from the general population they are supposed to rule. Officers on Russian Empire battleships had different quarters and different food than the sailors. In the end, the sailors rose up and killed them, then sailed the battleship Potemkin with a red banner. Equality matters. Even if they get the upper end of income (which should not be without reason; it should be justified, for example, that their contribution to the country's well-being actually isn't negative and that they need the extra resources to better perform their job), say 150% or 200% of average, they shouldn't get greater luxuries until they finally get detouched and it's back to the Elysium oligarchy.

Like I said, in a well-organized society with a high standard of life - hell, even with a moderate life standard - what actual reason is there to get much more than everyone else? If there are no oligarchs around them, there's no one to look up to, either. And it should be that way. There shouldn't be rich peers for the lawmakers to make friends with, create their own insulated social circle of the upper 0,01% or 0,1%. If you don't understand this, there's not much I can do.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Why are you ascribing solely to capitalism some of the problems caused by explosive population growth and density? Do you honestly think it is possible for a Neolithic society to operate with orders of magnitude increases in both size and density of the human population?

The total human population in the Neolithic era was probably around 4-6 million, with the largest single inhabited areas probably having no more than a couple of thousand people at any one time. It is hard to find exact figures on population density, but these estimations in Neolithic Germany are in the range of 0.6 people per square kilometer, and are unlikely to be a significant outlier in either direction. The average population density now is 13.7 per square kilometer, and that's without correcting for uneven distribution; many places in Earth are in the high hundreds or low thousands of people per square kilometer.

Considering that, historically, we see that as soon as the population expanded in sedentary settlements the lifestyle you hold in such high esteem came to a pretty quick end, you would have to produce some sort of evidence that it is even possible to maintain a Neolithic egalitarian society with current population figures. Unless you think the historical shift in lifestyles is purely a result of some sort of oligarchical conspiracy. Also, way to cite misleading life expectancy figures while conveniently ignoring the astronomically high child mortality rates in those societies you so adore.

[Channel72]

In what "many ways"? You do know that slum living gives rise to horrible epidemics, that sanitation there is much worse than in some tribal societies? At what point will you concede that the modern world has created conditions - actively created - which are worse than primal - both before and today? Would it be total war? Would it be the XIX century child mines? Would it be the concentration camps of Dora Mittelbau where lower race slaves "paved the way" into space under Nazi SS slavers, among them Werner von Braun? When will you admit that the industrial society can create a whole new phenomenon: the industrial production of extreme suffering? I am not going to say the savage's dignity is something to be easily dismissed either. Freedom from class rule and authority also has a value. People have shed blood for that, thousands of them.

I think most of us agree that industrial society has produced conditions which are nightmarish beyond anything the average Catalhuyuk citizen could possibly imagine. The Nazis did it, it happened in Ukraine during the Holodomor, it happened many places throughout the industrializing world. Whether slum districts in southeast Asia are better or worse than living in Catalhuyuk is difficult to say (not much is actually known about daily life in Paleolithic villages). Certainly the life of a Chinese factory worker in Henan province at least approaches levels of misery which intuitively seem probably worse than Stone Age conditions. I mean Catalhuyuk doesn't have suicide nets, as far as the archaeologists are telling us.

Perhaps it's just too easy for me to dismiss this. I am, after all, pretty much bourgeois to the core. I need my fucking iPhone 6 latest update, and I'm too busy to care about misery overseas. Apple stock just went down, what a bargain it is now! Buy it while you can.




The problem I see, from my bourgeois perspective, is that without division of labor, there is no future for us. In Paleolithic conditions we are entirely at the mercy of the next extinction event, or infectious epidemic. At least with division of labor, and industrialization, our demise will likely be our own doing, if it happens at all. If we manage to build working fusion reactors and go on to establish colonies on one of the billions of other Earth-like planets, our future will likely be infinite - limited by nothing but Universal heat death.

You can mock this optimism, but as you say, the fight towards equality in the face of industrialization has been a major struggle. But it's a struggle that has often gotten results in increased life expectancies, infant mortality rates, etc. Today mine workers in Australia can make over $100K per year, and miners throughout the first world go to work without worrying about dying anymore. Yes, it's all been a fight - there's always push back from the asset owners. Nobody is claiming this is easy.

In the developing world, things are way, way worse. The third world is still experiencing the birth pains of industrialization combined with harsh exploitation from Western powers. I have nothing positive to say about that, except a lot of these problems are not necessarily a result of capitalism per se, but more a result of explosive population growth without the necessary infrastructure to support it. Granted, capitalism tends to exacerbate these conditions by exploiting third world workers who are willing to work for basically peanuts, but even without capitalism and Western exploitation, explosive population growth and corrupt/incompetent governing would still result in a fair amount of misery throughout the third world. It's not like conditions in Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan were great either, and the Soviet/Maoist process of collectivization probably killed more people via starvation than Western capitalist exploitation of third world workers.

What I would like to hear from you, is how you think a technological, industrialized society that is capable of developing fusion reactors and launching rockets into space, should have developed - without division of labor or classes - starting from the origins of industry around mid 18th century Europe - or, if you'd like, starting back at the point where division of labor and classes first appeared, back in Sumeria - where the increased complexity of city-state life seemed to have necessitated classes. How could this have all unfolded in a fair way, that didn't involve massive inequality?

[K. A. Pital]

Guys, I have to remind you that I don't really have all the time in the universe for this...

Why are you ascribing solely to capitalism some of the problems caused by explosive population growth and density?

Is explosive population growth possible in precapitalist or even pre-class society? The answer is no. Each formation has to answer for its own problems. The colossal density of population (and thus slums) is also a product of capitalism, of the way it organizes production.

Do you honestly think it is possible for a Neolithic society to operate with orders of magnitude increases in both size and density of the human population?

No, and I said that already on the previous page. I also said I don't propose a return to the Neolithic era. Didn't you read that?

Also, way to cite misleading life expectancy figures while conveniently ignoring the astronomically high child mortality rates in those societies you so adore.

Even factoring in the astronomical infant mortality, you'd have the life expectancy at birth for hunter-gatherers somewhere between 25 to 45 years (I'm citing from memory, sorry). I'm also not sure infant mortality in slums is adequately accounted for, by the way - are you? By the way, I don't adore shit. I know life is hell, has been hell, will be hell - for the majority of humans are in fucking inferno, and I'm not trying to sweeten the picture. I've been one of the most vocal anti-luddites, ridiculing the religious, the Amish, the village retrogrades, and I get this from you? But unlike you, I admit industrial society also has its own industrial Hell and industrial Purgatory, as well as Industrial Heaven (in which you and I are). You seem to be too busy ascribing me opinions to care.

Considering that, historically, we see that as soon as the population expanded in sedentary settlements the lifestyle you hold in such high esteem came to a pretty quick end, you would have to produce some sort of evidence that it is even possible to maintain a Neolithic egalitarian society with current population figures.

Once again, I don't argue that a return is even possible. Shove your strawmen back where they belong. But hey, let's say you've definetely proven I have to submit to capitalism simply because it's impossible to return to prehistoric communism (a fact I'm already aware of, a fact everyone's aware of and a fact clearly stated as such by the leaders of industrial socialist thought).

How does this impact my narrow argument? It doesn't. Equality is natural. Sure, so is horrible infant mortality. All these things are natural. So the usual liberal argument "from human nature" (i.e. equality contradicts human nature) doesn't fly. That's all.

You may get up on your high horse again. I didn't even expect you to actually consider the argument instead of making a strawman out of it by saying I am actually advocating a reconstruction of the Neolithic society instead of making observations on what conditions are natural for humans.

What I would like to hear from you, is how you think a technological, industrialized society that is capable of developing fusion reactors and launching rockets into space, should have developed - without division of labor or classes - starting from the origins of industry around mid 18th century Europe - or, if you'd like, starting back at the point where division of labor and classes first appeared, back in Sumeria - where the increased complexity of city-state life seemed to have necessitated classes. How could this have all unfolded in a fair way, that didn't involve massive inequality?

I didn't say that society could have developed to its current point without the class society - hey, nobody did. But to excuse every milestone in a vulgar consequentialist manner is simply all too easy; how the fuck does your iPhone 6 benefit a person who died in the XIX century? Does it matter for someone who died from black lung getting a penny in the child mines that now Australian miners get over $100 000 and operate from the safety of robotic mechanized capsules? You are dismissing the fight against the class society, as far as I see, as something that is fruitful only for the future generations. But what about those living now? What about them, huh? How does your vision benefit them?

Granted, capitalism tends to exacerbate these conditions by exploiting third world workers who are willing to work for basically peanuts, but even without capitalism and Western exploitation, explosive population growth and corrupt/incompetent governing would still result in a fair amount of misery throughout the third world.

Without capitalism it is quite likely the explosive population growth would've never happened (no industry - no industrial chemistry - no mass-produced antibiotics), and even if it did (I presume that this would've been socialism then, the only other technology-based production mode we know), the consequences would have been more or less born equitably by all in the society, instead of being just a problem for the poor. This flows from the way goods are distributed under socialism: the distributive system at least tries to allocate more or less equal resources for each living human, unlike capitalism which is social darwinism manifested.

Forgot to mention one thing: you people all look to the developed societies as if the working class in them was constantly getting richer and richer. I'm sorry, but this doesn't seem to be the case:

If incomes rose simply with inflation, the relative buying power of the median wage (by proxy: of all worker class wages) would not actually massively diminish, making the working class relatively poorer, even if not poorer in an absolute sense. This relative poverty continues to increase, perhaps with the notable exception of food prices - but these low food prices are paid by the misery of the Third World as we all know already.

So why am I so hostile? Maybe because the separation of humans into rich demigods and the poor biomass for which they even devised the words "human resources" is deeply unnatural and wrong, and even if, even when suffering comes for reasons beyong our control (natural disasters, etc.), I support equal distribution of both: suffering and achievement. Basically, I wish the rich to suffer just like the poor are suffering now. To feel what they feel, to see with their eyes and walk in their shoes. The rich have no greater right to a suffering-free life, in fact no right whatsoever. If the lives of the workers improve, so shall the lives of everyone. But not before. Not several times better while some are still struggling, no. Only together with everyone.

That is it. I really see no point in arguing this further.

[Channel72]

So why am I so hostile? Maybe because the separation of humans into rich demigods and the poor biomass for which they even devised the words "human resources" is deeply unnatural and wrong, and even if, even when suffering comes for reasons beyong our control (natural disasters, etc.), I support equal distribution of both: suffering and achievement. Basically, I wish the rich to suffer just like the poor are suffering now. To feel what they feel, to see with their eyes and walk in their shoes. The rich have no greater right to a suffering-free life, in fact no right whatsoever. If the lives of the workers improve, so shall the lives of everyone. But not before. Not several times better while some are still struggling, no. Only together with everyone.

That is it. I really see no point in arguing this further.

Okay - but why do you think anyone here disagrees with this? I don't disagree, at least. I think people jumped on you in this thread mostly because of a few, specific controversial claims you made: (1) specialists who study for years, like scientists and engineers, should receive equal pay/living conditions as unskilled laborers, (2) Paleolithic society represents some sort of "natural" state for humanity, so a class system is not necessarily "natural".

It seems (1) may have been something of a strawman of your position, and as for (2), I think bringing up Catalhuyuk has mostly distracted from the more serious problem you're trying to point out, about inequality in a modern, technological metropolis - and worse, it's led people here to misunderstand your position as advocating some kind of return to Stone Age conditions.

But I think everyone, at least most people on a board like this, would probably agree with you that a phenomenon like Bill Gates should not exist, that Wall Street is counter-productive, and that capitalist exploitation of 3rd world nations is horrific and we should fight against it. I think we all agree that Marx was right at least to the extent that it's definitely very harmful to society when ownership of assets is concentrated among a few thousand rich oligarchs/shareholders/whatever you want to call them.

There are other potent arguments for equality that I haven't yet even touched: namely, that a high degree of real equality helps interpersonal relations in a society: people do not look at each other as servants/masters, or as rich cash bags to be tricked into giving out cash to a poorer but more cunning person. Genuine friendships are built. Cities or towns enjoy a low level of crime because with low stratification there is also little poverty to talk of.

Yes, that's true. Class definitely creates very explicit social segregation. At corporations where I've worked, there would usually be different kitchens or break areas for different "classes" of workers. The "menial" workers who prepared food and coffee or mopped the floor would congregate in a shitty looking small break-room with a soda machine, while the office workers had a nice chic lounge with beautiful views of Central Park. Class definitely leads to this embarassing segregation, I agree. The only place I know of where people of all classes congregate together is on the subway - and nobody really talks to one another anyway.

Not really sure what else to say - I pretty much agree with your overall point, even if I find a problem with some of the details.

[K. A. Pital]

For what it's worth...

I come from a place where primary, seconary and tertiary education was free for all; despite the nation being relatively poorer compared to the West, its GINI index was hovering between 1,7 and 2,5; where apartments were not bought with a massive pile of debt to some rich fucker that stretched up to the end of your working lifetime, but distributed directly to you within 3-7 years of work. I come from a place and a tradition of thought where the majority of people not only lived more or less equally, but tried several times to have even the administrators and bosses living an average life and sharing in the fortunes and misfortunes of the working class...

It was built directly on the blood of our ancestors, as we always were taught in school; built on so much blood shed in struggle even the banner itself became red.

Perhaps we are just coming from different directions. I don't look for excuses not to be equal when there is equality possible (as shown by my examples of parliamentarians who do get not much more than 120-150% of the average income), and even my own society I criticize from the left.

I said: it's possible for politicians to get an income close to the average. It is possible, and it doesn't mean society will stop to function. A capitalist society may, because of its unnatural warping and its oligarchs who are now "chosen peers" of the people who - what a fucking joke! - say they are representing my class, me!

I said: the argument that inequality is somehow natural is full of shit, and history shows a very brutal and almost total equality is most of human history, while inequality is a short-term abberation for now. The sense of injustice when people are in deep inequality is probably our evolutionary heritage, even.

It doesn't mean we should return to the Neolithic way of life or something, but we should seek to create a society as equal as possible, taking all the technology, all the knowledge and everything that has ever been created as legacy upon which to build it.

And lastly, we should not turn a blind eye to the arguments against inequality and class society simply because of its achievements.

That would be like the Egyptian slaves being blinded by the sight of the Pyramids at the same time as the slave master's whip lands on our bloodied shoulders.

One last thing. About the engineers. If the society is well-off, and the engineer makes great structures, helping society to advance, his life conditions will quickly improve with the rest of the people. He may be entitled to greater recognition of his feats (medals, special awards for completing structure or project X), but - if the education he received is completely free, paid in full by society, and I had this in mind - it was his choice and his desire to get it. I see no need to massively inflate his daily living standard outside direct compensation for non-average achievements - spaceflight, etc. A bit more than the ordinary factory worker? Sure, more complex tasks. But several times more and a wholly different standard of life, a "separate canteen", maybe separate closed district "just for us intellectuals" etc? No. The engineer is likewise not entitled to have his life improved much more quickly than the rest of society. Enough that his life is free of suffering, he has a place to live like the rest of us and he has full access to all the libraries, all the knowledge he needs for his job. He should be free to devote his mind to his job - and if there are some factors in society that still preclude it for the average person, then the engineer should get more. But in a rich and egalitarian country (and by rich I mean no hunger or undernourishment, everyone has apartments/houses, and there is no poverty) I see no reason for a vastly greater remuneration.

[Simon_Jester]

This is (to the best of my ability) an empirical observation- am I wrong? Can you recount in detail why I am wrong?

My argument, once again, was very specific: that hard and hazardous jobs, and this includes sewage cleaners, are not universally well-paid (as in, paid above average income).

My reply to this is, this is obviously true, because owners are rats and will seek to minimize compensation paid regardless of who they're paying it to. I will note that my metric for whether a hard and hazardous job is 'well-paid' would be to compare it to other jobs that have similar qualifications, though.

For example, consider "test pilot:" a dangerous job that requires a college education and several years of post-graduate education and experience. Such a job would, we fondly hope, be well-compensated in terms of prestige and material things compared to other jobs with similar barriers to entry that are not as dangerous or difficult.

Cleaning sewers has low barriers to entry in that almost anyone could take the job if they chose to. If you're going to compare it on equal terms (regardless of whether the results are disappointing), you would sensibly compare it to other jobs that nearly anyone could fill.

...If there is a town or country which has high rewards for this type of occupation, it's good. As for floor cleaners - it's a simple and non-hazardous job, but I don't see people being eager to take it. So the logic of "nobody likes the job and this will lead to higher wages" doesn't necessarily apply here either...

That wasn't quite what I was getting at.

Cleaning floors is unpleasant drudge work, but it is not loathesome. Almost everyone would choose to clean floors if the alternative were being a homeless beggar in the streets, for instance.

By contrast, quite a few people would seriously consider homelessness as an alternative to working in the filth of a sewer.

Unless the owners have the usual rat-like means to coerce workers (i.e. very high overall unemployment, the risk of actual starvation if you lose your job, etc.), one would normally expect unusually dangerous or loathesome jobs to pay noticeably more than other jobs requiring comparable qualifications.

This expectation is not always met, because there are complications.

What I am most decidedly against is the attempt to derive some universal law of the capitalist system based on a primitive economic model and then run happily with this newfound "truth". Okay, we derived the law, but what do we do when it's not conforming to reality?

Revise the model. I mean, we can back up and try to figure out what we were talking about before we got sidetracked.

And it was about division of labor. Essentially, you were calling division of labor an evil. And people have been disputing that strongly, because practically every good thing we now have, including the few meager good things that are desperately clung to by the immiserated overpopulated masses of Third World slums, is a product of a technological civilization created by division of labor.

We can't go back to the way we were. Absent mechanized agriculture (supported by division of labor) the Earth supports something like one billion humans- the other six billion would die. Indeed, allowing for environmental degradation in the past ten thousand years, and for the fact that even Iron Age farming often was built on a certain level of division of labor... Abolishing division of labor might well result in population dying back to only a few million- the level it occupied in the Paleolithic.

We can't go back, even if we wanted to.

And moreover, it's questionable whether we WOULD want to.

Because it's questionable whether even the people living in Third World slums are worse off than they would be living in tiny farming villages or nomadic tribes under pre-civilized conditions. This question is illustrated by the fact that people are, even now, choosing to leave those tribes and villages and move to the cities those slums occupy. If it were obviously better in their minds to live in the Stone Age, more of them would continue to do so.

Moreover, we have many reasons to hope that IF development of the world continues, and is not interrupted by mass war or chaos, THEN the plight of those Third World slums will become much less bad than it is now.

So to drop this whole question of what theoretical models predict, we return to the question of "is division of labor evil?"

And I would argue that it is not. Or insofar as there is evil associated with division of labor, it is evil associated with, well... frankly, with private ownership of the means of production. Our debate has come full circle back to 1848, I guess, only you seem to have forgotten some things.

My argument is that there is no rule which would reward hazardous occupations more; each and every case of wage rise is actually a result of class struggle. Miners were paid way below average for literally coin-flip probability of various types of painful death; now they are paid well above average and the chance for crippling injury or a bad death is much lower than before. All of this is struggle: the miners actually fought, literally, with weapons, the ruling class to beat concessions out of them, and given their critical role in the industry they were able to achieve a lot. Other, less specialized jobs, are a lot less fortunate because they don't wield that type of economic power that the miners, or transport workers, do.

Yes. Because owners are rats, and it is a fundamental flaw of ownership-based societies that you can't accomplish any useful social change without a thousand very powerful men screaming "who is going to pay for it," as though a 2% loss to their pocketbook or whatever would actually cause them any real harm.

But this does not make division of labor, in itself, an evil that can or should be attacked. As I outline above, I would argue that it is both incredibly unwise to attack (in the same sense that one should not blow up the bridge one is standing on), and undesirable to attack (in the sense that one should not blow up the bridge by which vital relief supplies are reaching a billion famine victims)

But a minimum wage in a rich country which is an imperialistic metropole is not the worst there can be... Just google manual sewer cleaners in Indian megacities, and you will have your upbeat mood down in an instant. Industrial suffering, like I explain below.

I am aware. The situation was comparably terrible in my own country once upon a time. Many important things had to change to improve the situation. But what did not change was the division of labor. It was not abolished, no one tried to abolish it. Things improved anyway.

There is also no way for wages to drop any further than a certain minimum (see my comment on marginalism). So your whole theory rests on the free adjustment of wages. Cashiers and retail clerks already get like the bare minimum, and it could be that either law or collective argreement keeps the wage at survival levels. In which case a flood of new candidates will not drop wages but simply increase the pool of unemployed - who usually get less than minimum wage in social assistance, and the questions on whether a person can truly live on this money are always raised. So basically, your model is flawed at the very start (where there's always a wage reaction to a flood of people being released).

That is a fair point- my model would be less flawed were there not a legally imposed minimum on what you can pay people. But there is such a limit, and it's a good thing there is for obvious reasons.

By analogy, it is "natural" for humans to live in conditions of equality, insofar as it is natural for us to live under conditions of subsistence where starvation is a real and imminent danger that is only avoided by our utmost efforts.

If starvation forces people to cooperate in a classless fashion, there may be other motivators that will make them do the same.

Yes, and I would suggest researching until you find one. I don't know of any.

There are plenty of advantages to relative equality among citizens, they do not need to be justified to me. It is simply that, unless total equality is forcibly imposed, there will be inequality. Even in classless tribal societies there is inequality. There are individuals at a disadvantage (e.g. widows and orphans), There are individuals with physical disabilities that the tribe struggles to care for, and will abandon if it becomes too difficult for them to keep up. There are individuals who are socially outcast from the community, or simply unpopular and as a result more vulnerable.

Now, these inequalities may be better or worse than the inequalities of class. And those inequalities vary. The inequalities of class are more toxic in some places, less so in others. A feudal society in which a knight is legally entitled to stab a peasant to death just to test how sharp his sword is... That has a much more toxic sort of inequality than in a social-democratic country where, say, the CEO of a large corporation has ten times the salary of a production worker.

(examples are hypothetical)

... murder each other as individuals... So while they're not rebelling against the authorities that rule them (since they live in anarchy)... they are clearly rebelling against something. Or at least fighting against something. What would you call it?

Nature. But I take issue with your "they often murder each other as individuals". You need to back it up with anthropologic studies that will show Neolithic murder rate is high to justify such a statement.

Well, I'm just going to reach to the bookshelf by my computer, hang on here...

I am currently reading Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, which is based in large part on Diamond's extensive personal experience studying and living among the tribesmen of New Guinea, and also from other anthropological studies around the world. I would refer you to the book itself as it is good reading and is an interesting comparative exercise in looking at advantages and disadvantages of traditional human lifestyles versus technological-society human lifestyles.

If you want more detailed summaries of some specific texts from this book, I can provide them.

But to summarize, the mortality rates, measured in terms of deaths related to warfare or one-on-one violent killings, for traditional societies tend to be something like 1% per year or more, and those are time averages over periods of decades. By contrast, very few if any developed nations experience such a death rate over a comparable period of time- even in nations that experienced horrific slaughter such as Russia and China.

Likewise, if we measure by the percentage of the population that dies by violence... For example, in 20th century Russia, the average is 0.15% of the population dying by violence per year. Integrate over 100 years and you have a death toll of several tens of millions- I don't know exactly, it depends on how many Russians lived between 1900 and 2000. But the number is broadly consistent with the death tolls of the World Wars (deaths caused by Stalin-era purges may or may not have been counted, I don't know).

Whereas in a traditional society like the Dani tribesmen of New Guinea, the average is more like 1% of the population dying per year to interpersonal violence. Integrate over 100 years and... put this way, if there were as many Dani as there were Russians throughout the twentieth century, then the number of Dani who would have died by violence would be six times the combined war deaths of both World Wars.

The reason this is the case is based on several things.

For one, Russians are usually not at war with anybody- or if they are at war, it is with some remote society that has no meaningful ability to do something horrible like kill 5% of all living Russians. Examples of such 'safe' wars would be the wars in Afghanistan or now in the Ukraine. If we only count active wars against enemies who could kill a significant percentage of the Russian population, Russia spent only about ten years out of the past hundred in such a war, and that's including the Russian Civil War.

Whereas Dani tribal villagers are very often at war, in chronic cycles of feuding and counter-feuding and revenge killings, such that in a real sense their society is always at war, with people who live nearby and can easily just walk over to your village and murder one of your people, and then people from your village walk over to theirs and kill one of yours, and every few months during a 'serious' war there will be a pitched battle in which two or three people are killed, and every several years an entire village is slaughtered in a massacre or ambush... it adds up.

And while the Dani are more warlike than average, based on the statistics in this book, which are in turn based on other studies and which are being presented by a man who in general admires New Guinean natives... they are not unusual.

I use it because I am sincerely of the opinion that technology allows us more control over our worlds than we used to have.

Us as a species, as humanity whole? True enough. Us as "myself"? No. I am utterly powerless, and frankly, after the last few decades my entire class is disempowered. The Western capitalist "techno-meritocracy" looks more and more like world-spanning cyberpunk technofascism.

Honestly, I am not sure that your class, or you personally, are more disempowered than your counterparts of 1915 were.

I mean, imagine the horror of watching the entire technologically developed world spiral into open warfare, with the working class of all the advanced nations, the ones that were supposed to be close enough to socialism that it might even happen in a generation or two... all slaughtering each other, over absurd, trifling nationalist reasons, over the pride and anger of emperors and the jingoism of propagandized crowds.

Would you feel MORE empowered as an individual or as a class to be living in those days, with the elites manipulating the working class to do THAT? I beg permission to doubt it.

If we compare the slum-dwellers of Jakarta to the peoples whose lives are most similar to those of Çatalhöyük, who still live in areas where government is sparse and the world ownership-class has not found anything it desires from them... in many ways they are living in worse conditions than the slum-dwellers.

In what "many ways"? You do know that slum living gives rise to horrible epidemics, that sanitation there is much worse than in some tribal societies? At what point will you concede that the modern world has created conditions - actively created - which are worse than primal - both before and today? Would it be total war? Would it be the XIX century child mines? Would it be the concentration camps of Dora Mittelbau where lower race slaves "paved the way" into space under Nazi SS slavers, among them Werner von Braun? When will you admit that the industrial society can create a whole new phenomenon: the industrial production of extreme suffering? I am not going to say the savage's dignity is something to be easily dismissed either. Freedom from class rule and authority also has a value. People have shed blood for that, thousands of them.

Will you kindly stop tirading at me and pay attention to whether I'm using the past tense or the present tense? Whether I am comparing the present or the past, whether I am averaging over a given society or comparing the worst of one to the worst of another?

You keep shrieking at me to 'admit' things I've never denied, apparently because I do not abjectly crumble and admit to you that you are right in all things.

And you keep moving the goalposts, in that one minute you're using modern slums as your reference point for 'bad,' then another minute you're using WWII concentration camps. And one minute you're attacking all division of labor, then you're remaining silent about your previous claims that division of labor being an evil and pretending that I am a villain for speaking about the advantages of it.

I honestly feel that part of the problem here is that while you have a strong appreciation for the kinds of suffering that exist in even the worst urban slums of today, you do NOT seem to be even aware of the kinds of problems that exist for Neolithic tribesmen. Try reading the book by Diamond, or perhaps I can suggest others for you if that one is not to your liking.

It is all getting very tiresome, because I feel as though you are not actually engaging me in this debate, you are engaging some sort of generic strawman version that exists in your mind, and screaming angrily at this imaginary person, and no longer really listening to me.

The industrial society forged itself in blood. The invention of antibiotics came during a bloodbath that actually plunged most of the world in such conditions that Chatalhouyuk would seem an idyllic place.

And yet in one of the two worst-hit countries of that war (yours), the death rate during the 20th century due to violence still managed to be lower than it was among a bunch of slightly more warlike-than-average Stone Age tribesmen. Several times lower.

I challenge you with this...

Well, frankly, here is my answer to your challenge.

There are four possibile outcomes of the trends you cite.

1) We might develop our way out of this trap. Those over four billion slum-dwellers scheduled to exist in 2050 may end up richer than we thought, rich enough to afford real buildings to live in.

2) We might try to develop our way out of this trap, and fail- but otherwise, the world would proceed unchanged. Then there will be four billion people living in slums, along with three billion living in decent buildings, and two billion in rural areas.

3) We might try to develop our way out of this trap, and trigger ecological collapses. The carrying capacity of the world would diminish, plagues would sweep the world. Billions would die. Perhaps of those nine billion, only seven billion will survive. Or six, or even more horribly, only five.

4) Things might be even worse than in (3). Perhaps there will be mass nuclear war, or a series of virgin field epidemics sweeping the world. In which case we might end up with, out of those nine billion people who 'should' be alive in 2050 only one or two or three billion surviving.

5) We might abandon division of labor, the basic underpinning of ALL the industries that produce ALL the necessities of life for literally 90 or perhaps even 95 or 99 percent of those nine billion people. In which case it is assuredly the case that at most a few hundred million of those nine billion people will survive.

Now, my point here is that each of these options is worse than the one before it. But ANY of options 1-4 is vastly, overwhelmingly less bad than option 5. And we can't even hope to get Option 4, hellish though it is, if we abandon or attack division of labor.

And if we are somehow able to get Option 1, and I am not saying it is possible... Frankly, we will only get that through a massive production. Through division of labor, among other things. If there is any solution to the problem of four billion slum-dwellers in 2050... it will occur because a society with division of labor (hundreds of such societies) produced the means for a decent life for those four billion people. Or because organized societies limited population and expanded their access to drinkable water and so forth (e.g. China, which would be infinitely worse off, a miserable hellhole, today if not for the One Child policy)

No society lacking such division of labor could possibly accomplish that, no matter how badly it wanted to.

And even if this endeavour fails, and four billion people are living in slums... I would turn to them and ask them to tell you, would they rather not be alive at all?

Because the industrialized world may somehow produce nine billion people, four or five billion of them living in utter abject poverty of the worst sort...

But if we then took that industrialized world and tried to go back to the way we were, we would instead have four or five hundred million alive, at most, and 8.5 billion corpses. And I think most of those slum-dwellers will still be looking at their lives, and not wishing they were dead, or that they had never been born.

So... We can't humanize horrible jobs which only exist because of the division of labour without division of labour? Correct. But that's also a tautology.

Yes, and yet it is true, and no purpose is served by you banging your head against the wall and raging about how unjust it is that seven or nine billion humans cannot all be Stone Age farmers in an idyllic imaginary paradise that never existed.

You can say that technology and division of labour aren't at fault, but seriously, does it pain you so much to admit that technology can kill? And that division of labour required to produce said technology can lead to FUCKING HORRIBLE THINGS?

I have considered this such an obvious proposition that I cannot recall having once denied it since I was a ten year old child.

Why is it so important to you to extract a 'concession' from me on this matter?

That's right. But suppose the mining community was actually a large commune with access to agricultural land and good climate. They may very well have supported themselves. And if people can do that under certain conditions under self-supervision...

Then you would have an experiment that was performed in nature many, many times throughout the prehistory and early history of the human race. People living together, with no obvious class hierarchy and minimum differences in the available supply of goods between individuals, with little division of labor, and with few men having any real means of coercing any other men beyond their own personal physical brawn.

This is exactly what the whole world looked like at the end of the last Ice Age.

The result is the world we have today, with all its horrors and glories.

So if you want a better result, a better world, then you need to either start engaging in mature, sane, delusion-free exercises in engineering on the world we have, or you need to find a better plan than to recreate conditions that already existed in the past and led to the very same mess we're in now.

Idealizing primitive communism will accomplish nothing. We can't go back there, and even when we were there it wasn't nearly as pleasant as you believe.

The problem is not division of labor. The problem is that the means to create a better world are controlled by those who have no incentive to do so, and are unwilling to do so or even allow others to do so unmolested out of their own altruism.

...but the only societies I know of to reject capitalism on a large scale were the 20th century communist ones, and they did the same thing the capitalists did! ... How could we improve on that, to provide special incentives greater than the ones people normally provide each other anyway?

The Paris Commune had the salaries of administrators set at no higher than those of the average worker. When the USSR started, there was a maximum 150% of average wage of supervised workers limit set for the party bureaucrats - called Partmaximum (secretly abolished by Stalin later)...

The Paris Commune was destroyed by outside force before we could find out what would happen. And as you note, Stalin arose and abolished the Partmaximum within a decade or two of the founding of the USSR.

So again, the experiment has been tried, and failed, and if you do not yet have an actual plan for how to do better, then I suggest you stop wasting energy screaming at me for trying to tell you that such a plan is necessary.

But in that case, you must first un-warp the society, then pay the legislators less.

What destabilizes the system of class power, is good.

Paying legislators less, in our present warped society, will not destabilize the system of class power, and will not be good. Do you not even try to predict the consequences of your own proposed policy changes anymore? Do you just randomly shout out demands and ideas based on pure loathing of the status quo?

I have zero interest in hypothetical scenarios of the liberals. They start with a lie - that in some abstract model people will not kill and rob to establish class power - and dismiss class, reducing their model to the Robinson Crusoe contacts Robinson Crusoe scenario, ignore the collective labour and individual appropriation - and then say that's what actually happened. Well, no, that's not what happened, and that's not what will happen. "Uncoerced" my ass. Even with bare hands people will fight, they will struggle to the end.

Very well- and yet you wonder how it is that primitive tribesmen can manage to kill each other at percentage rates as great as, or even greater than, the rates at which industrialized nations do the same.

Incidentally, if my lawyer makes twice as much a year as I do, does that mean I "serve" her when she is the one doing jobs for me?

Your lawyer is a small-bourgeois self-employed. She is not your servant and not the elected representative of the people. She is someone you make a capitalist contract with. If you think that your government is just a bunch of contractors, like in a corporation, I am not even sure what's your problem with capitalism. Reconstruct the nation as a corporation, hire a CEO, and there you go. Wait... hahaha, your nation is pretty much that.

Honestly no, our corporations are mostly better organized than our government, at least in terms of being able to accomplish their own stated purposes. The average corporation today does a much more reliable job of increasing shareholders' money than our government does of:

"forming a more perfect Union, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defence, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,"

...which is our government's mission statement and has been since 1787.

It is simply that if someone performs a task on your behalf, the fact that they get paid more than you do does not mean that you are their servant. I was simply seeking to establish this point. In and of itself, the fact that A is more highly compensated than B does not make A into B's master.

Officers on Russian Empire battleships had different quarters and different food than the sailors. In the end, the sailors rose up and killed them, then sailed the battleship Potemkin with a red banner. Equality matters. Even if they get the upper end of income (which should not be without reason; it should be justified, for example, that their contribution to the country's well-being actually isn't negative and that they need the extra resources to better perform their job), say 150% or 200% of average, they shouldn't get greater luxuries until they finally get detouched and it's back to the Elysium oligarchy.

Since that was more or less my argument all along (just with some of the clauses switched around), I accept your concession on the matter of how much to pay parliamentarians.

[Simon_Jester]

Since I can no longer edit my last post I will add this addendum to Stas (K.A.Pital, for anyone who didn't know him before the name change)

EDIT: What I wrote, I wrote in direct reply to your reply to me.

I will observe that virtually everything said above is an honest response to your attack on the division of labor as this massively evil thing. Given that you launched such an attack, the response is predictable. As is the repetition of "we can't go back." Because we can't. If you were aware of that, as you now claim to be, then it is hard to understand why you ever cited division of labor as the root of evil, when in fact it is blindingly obvious that the problem has far more to do with the way control of the means of production is handled.

And you grew up in a society where you presumably taught this in grade school, and presumably were taught this in later times in far more depth than my own poor forays into the subject have taught me. So you have no excuse for blaming the wrong thing for the problem you dislike.

[K. A. Pital]

Let's be quick now because you seem to have completely strawmanned my argument into something that it's not.

I accept your concession on the matter of how much to pay parliamentarians.

Even if (meaning, better NOT) they get the upper end of income ~ 150% or 200% of average, they shouldn't get greater luxuries. Where is the concession?

...no purpose is served by you banging your head against the wall and raging about how unjust it is that seven or nine billion humans cannot all be Stone Age farmers in an idyllic imaginary paradise that never existed.

Where have I described the Stone Age as a paradise? Where have I said we need to return to the conditions of the Neolithic farming settlements?

Why is it so important to you to extract a 'concession' from me on this matter?

It doesn't matter.

I am not sure that your class, or you personally, are more disempowered than your counterparts of 1915 were. I mean, imagine the horror of watching the entire technologically developed world spiral into open warfare, with the working class of all the advanced nations, the ones that were supposed to be close enough to socialism that it might even happen in a generation or two... all slaughtering each other, over absurd, trifling nationalist reasons, over the pride and anger of emperors and the jingoism of propagandized crowds.

Your opinion - about me. Yep. Yet, some of these empires bite the dust in mere four years; crowns lying in the mud with nobody to pick them up. Uprisings rock the world, and even the core countries like Britain are not immune; they lose colonies, and basically a whole century of struggle begins. The world is not a monolithic capitalist thing ruled by US-based MNCs. This was not the end of history. It was the start of history. But today? Maybe I'm just too pessimistic, but it does look like the end. In a non-positive sense of the word "end".

But to summarize, the mortality rates, measured in terms of deaths related to warfare or one-on-one violent killings, for traditional societies tend to be something like 1% per year or more

Okay, in that case your statement was justified, no doubt. In any case, thanks for providing this information. I had a general impression of the Stone Age as violent, but not based on actual studies of violence of the period. Once again - I did not suggest to reconstruct the Neolithic society. You misinterpreted my attacks on the division of labour - which are made from the standpoint of justice, namely, that in a society without division of labour suffering is distributed more or less evenly, whereas with division of labour suffering and risk are distributed unevenly, and with inequality of incomes (and outcomes) it means in such societies some people live a sheltered life while others risk and die to either construct this sheltered life or protect it. This is wrong.

And yet in one of the two worst-hit countries of that war (yours), the death rate during the 20th century due to violence still managed to be lower than it was among a bunch of slightly more warlike-than-average Stone Age tribesmen. Several times lower.

During the whole century? Yes. It was mostly peaceful, after all. During the large wars themselves, however, people died in percentages greater than the hunter-gatherer violent death rate you quoted.

It is simply that if someone performs a task on your behalf, the fact that they get paid more than you do does not mean that you are their servant. I was simply seeking to establish this point. In and of itself, the fact that A is more highly compensated than B does not make A into B's master.

In time, it does. Inequality is the foundation of class division. The settelements had special people enjoying a greater standard of life by giving them more than others. Eventually, these people formed a ruling class. Your point is invalid. At a snapshot, in a given moment, A and B's unequal incomes do not mean one is part of the ruling class and the other is not. In time, it does.

The problem is not division of labor. The problem is that the means to create a better world are controlled by those who have no incentive to do so, and are unwilling to do so or even allow others to do so unmolested out of their own altruism.

Class originates with the division of labour, which is at first driven by necessity, but later - driven by class power, by the tasks set through the will of the ruling class. We can think of workarounds, sure - we overthrow the ruling class, we devise rules that combat the ruling class' power, we create our own alternative systems. But realizing that problem is the first step. Once again, at no point is this a talk about returning to the Stone Age.

That is a fair point- my model would be less flawed were there not a legally imposed minimum on what you can pay people. But there is such a limit, and it's a good thing there is for obvious reasons.

Still flawed. Even if there is no legally mandated minimum it doesn't mean the wages can freely adjust to below-subsistence levels - unless, once again, we are talking authoritarian rule, actually imposing such a downward adjustment by force (with people dying). This means the idea of perfect labour mobility and wage adjustment in the minimum-paid jobs doesn't fly. In developed societies it doesn't fly because of the legal limits, in poor nations - because cannot pay below subsistence. If the limits on downward adjustment were abolished in developed nations, some people would simply get "subsistence wages" (much like in the Third World) and that's it - but that's for nations where minimum wage isn't a subsistence wage but greater than that.

Because the industrialized world may somehow produce nine billion people, four or five billion of them living in utter abject poverty of the worst sort...

You are saying that as if people were some sort of "tick" achievement in a strategy game to be produced. But they're not. And not being born is what China did to its children. You just hailed this solution, but in the next paragraph you state that people would not prefer not to be born. All industrialized societies practice birth control. That's millions of unborn for the welfare of the living. So I kind of... lost your point. The production of people is an industrial achievement or should we curtail the production of people?

And one minute you're attacking all division of labor

And I keep attacking it from the chosen angle. Who said that you get the right to enjoy a sheltered life with cheap clothes and cheap food while the textile workers die in droves and farmers suffer from First World dumping in the Third World? You get no such right - nobody does, and I don't think I have a right to even live.

You can say that your ancestors took this right by violence; by a kind of natural selection among nations, etc. That's all social darwinism recast. Means you get the right to something just because you punched the other guy in the face and stole his things. Division of labour produces inequality which you defend. I attack it solely because the separation of sufffering between people is injust. Why are some suffering, but not all? Why is one suffering, but another is enjoying better conditions because of the first one's suffering?

You don't have a good answer to that. Nobody here does.

And like I expected, it did fell on deaf ears. You've done well - first saying that equality is unnatural and flies in the face of anthropology and history, to which I correctly replied with the Paleo- and Neolithic classless society (indeed, what could be "natural" - 1% of human history or 99%?)... and then attacking me as if I wished to reconstruct the Neolithic society. Perfect!

I don't even know why I am discussing this. It's important, no doubt, but no amount of telling you that I put a very narrow argument (equality is not unnatural - equality is natural and classlessness is more natural than class inequality) makes you stop attacking an argument I did not make. My argument about the possibility of equal rewards likewise; instead of concentrating on the facts - that it is possible, even if for a short time, to reduce the gap between the rulers and the working class, and that it can exist even in capitalist societies with low inequality, where MPs get a wage close to the average (1,2-1,5)... you chose to attack this as if I was suggesting something crazy when in fact the gap between working class and its supposed representatives is increasing, and many nations have less than stellar values there...

What is the end point of these arguments? The end point of mine is to attempt an equitable reconstruction of society. Even if it fails (hell, fuck, even very well-designed machines fail and break down - why do we expect a complex social model to work at the first attempt?!), there will be a time when people will feel equals.

Nothing is more insulting than inequality. Death is fearsome; suffering is painful. But inequality - that thing is insulting to the mind, and hateful, hateful beyond measure. Nothing will stop me from hating the rich with every breath. NOTHING since I discovered that even with the average wage of the First World I can literally buy people in the former colonies; I can pay people to mutilate themselves - or to kill others... And to think that by the standars of this society I am not even rich... The horrific disparity is the abyss; staring down into it is not helped by the fact we have a lower death rate than the Stone Age humans. This is beyond anything I have ever seen. All Stone Age tribes, violent as they were, had pretty similar chances to die or kill; to perish or survive. Today this is not so, and even though it is comforting to excuse this with nukes, spaceflight, antibiotics, calories... I cannot. I just can't.

I will never stop saying equality is the goal. Even if total equality is unattainable that is the axis which the function should ever strive to reach.

[BabelHuber]

So again, the experiment has been tried, and failed, and if you do not yet have an actual plan for how to do better, then I suggest you stop wasting energy screaming at me for trying to tell you that such a plan is necessary.

Interesting disussion. I think this is the main point: How do you convert a capitalistic society to a real communistic one (in the sense of Marx, not Lenin/ Stalin).

I have read an article some years ago which claimed that this is impossible (I don't want to take credit for this thought, but I forgot who wrote it, IIRC it was an essay in Der Spiegel). The argument is as following:

Imagine you have a successfull communist revolution in an industrialized nation. Let's assume we are at the point of victory.

Now the revolution has to take an 180 degree turn, from destructive work to constructive work: Yesterday the revolutionists fought the enemy, against their police, their army, they wanted to bring their factories to a halt etc.

Now they have won, they own the country now. So it's not the enemy's police anymore, it's your police, your factories, your cities etc.

So now the ex-revolutionists need to actually govern this country. This means they need a mayor in every city, as well as the boss of the police etc. They need to form some kind of government, make sure the people have something to eat, that water and electricity works, if it's winter they must make sure that the population doesn't freeze to death etcetc.

So they have lots and lots of positions to staff now.

And who is able to take over this positions? Of course these people must be communists, they must support the revolution. Of course they cannot be members of the old classes which were in power before.

So the victorious communists now have to create a list (or lists) of trustworthy people who are able to take over these positions. And voilá, they just have created the new ruling class - the people on this list are the people who will rule the country from now on. Such a list with names on it is called a nomenclature, so we have our good old communist nomenclatura now, like in the Soviet Union of old.

And as all organizations, this nomenclatura will start to have a live on its own. Organizations tend to preserve themselves, if you want to destroy or fundamentally change an organization, it will fight back from within..

Over time, it gets only worse. Of course the new communistic government can try to remove all those empty suits and all those opportunistic careerist from their jobs.

But they cannot make sure that such people aren't born in the future, or that there already are children/ teens existing which will behave this way as adults. Even worse for them is when such people are already part of their revolution, paying lip service to the communist ideal and seeking their advantage.

So these people will still exist, and since they live in this "communistic" society now, the only chance they have is to make a career in the communist party.

So at the end, you will get some Soviet Union 2.0. Only if you think you can change human nature you'll be able to establish this class-less society, with real humans it hardly can work.

[K. A. Pital]

Only if you think you can change human nature you'll be able to establish this class-less society, with real humans it hardly can work.

So 99% of human history was actually non-humans? Or non-natural humans? Unreal humans? Elaborate.

And voilá, they just have created the new ruling class - the people on this list are the people who will rule the country from now on.

To keep these people from turning into a class, they need to be very close to people they govern and live an equal life with them, preferrably there should be also a recall option (the ability to immediately relieve the person from the list of power). In the end they will desire to take full control and convert everything into their own property - and that will come sooner than later once you start making them into a separate, divided group that lives a different, better life from the rest of the working class. You will basically replay the forming of the class society on a grander scale.

[Ralin]

So 99% of human history was actually non-humans? Or non-natural humans? Unreal humans? Elaborate.

99% of human history consisted of humans who didn't have any wealth worth speaking of. In the time since agriculture and all have been developed enough to make it possible for anyone to accumulate wealth and for class divisions to exist we've seen that this is apparently the natural tendency of human beings to act when they have the opportunity.

So in that sense you could say that classless society runs contrary to human nature when it is materially possible to have classes. We just weren't in a position to act on that part of our nature for most of our species' history. Sort of like how it turns out that our bodies are set up to give us widespread obesity problems when it's possible for lots of people to be sedentary and eat a lot of calories.

[K. A. Pital]

Sort of like how it turns out that our bodies are set up to give us widespread obesity problems when it's possible for lots of people to be sedentary and eat a lot of calories.

Which is why it's good not to be sedentary and not to exceed your daily calorie burn-out with calorie consumption, no? It's unnatural to be obese, yes, obesity runs against human nature just like inequality does. Yes that's why people choose to combat obesity if they have a bit of brains (I am making an exemption for people with genetic disorders that cause obesity). And many succeed through proper diets.

99% of human history consisted of humans who didn't have any wealth worth speaking of.

I said that excessive surplus production gave the rise to class divisions somewhere close to page one [limited surplus, as in Neolithic, still existed, but was shared equally and quickly consumed, so could not create a stable class division]. What makes you think this is a new argument? Is surplus production itself even natural, eh?

[BabelHuber]

So 99% of human history was actually non-humans? Or non-natural humans? Unreal humans? Elaborate.

In pre-neolithic times, when people where hunter-gatherer, they were nomads living in small tribes.

This means your "society" consist of your tribe, with a few dozen individuals. Also, wealth accumulation is impossible because you cannot own more than you can carry around from one location to another.

I'd say when you visit a bigger town for a weekend today, you most probably see more individuals than a hunter-gatherer in his/her whole life.

So the people were the same than today, but due to a totally different environment it's hardly comparable. Also, this is something completely different than shoehorning an already-existing modern society into a "classless" one.

To keep these people from turning into a class, they need to be very close to people they govern and live an equal life with them, preferrably there should be also a recall option (the ability to immediately relieve the person from the list of power). In the end they will desire to take full control and convert everything into their own property - and that will come sooner than later once you start making them into a separate, divided group that lives a different, better life from the rest of the working class. You will basically replay the forming of the class society on a grander scale.

So your first nomenclatura has to consist of highly moralic people, otherwise you get the same result than back then in the Soviet Union. I can fully agree with this.

My point is that it is impossible to get so far: After all, you have to deal with the people who took part in your revolution. You'll have all sort of people there, from philantropic communists to average people who are simply unsatisfied, sociopaths, criminals and even people who joined your cause simply because they thought you will win at the end end they prefered not to be on the losing side.

With these people, you have to start ruling your country after you won. While being in quite a hurry. You have to literally make millions of decisions, bigger ones and smaller ones.

So your nomenclatura will in the end act as every other top-class bureacracy in history.

[Channel72]

Nothing is more insulting than inequality. Death is fearsome; suffering is painful. But inequality - that thing is insulting to the mind, and hateful, hateful beyond measure. Nothing will stop me from hating the rich with every breath. NOTHING since I discovered that even with the average wage of the First World I can literally buy people in the former colonies; I can pay people to mutilate themselves - or to kill others... And to think that by the standars of this society I am not even rich... The horrific disparity is the abyss; staring down into it is not helped by the fact we have a lower death rate than the Stone Age humans. This is beyond anything I have ever seen. All Stone Age tribes, violent as they were, had pretty similar chances to die or kill; to perish or survive. Today this is not so, and even though it is comforting to excuse this with nukes, spaceflight, antibiotics, calories... I cannot. I just can't.

I find your attitude interesting, because it's so contrary to the attitude of the average American. Americans are so used to living with inequality, nobody really cares or is particularly insulted by it - it's just a fact of life. Your boss drives a nicer car than you? Fact of life. Your boss has a larger house than you? Fact of life ... probably one day you'll get a promotion and then you can have the nicer car/bigger house, etc. That's sort of the mentality here. I've seen the way people react when a billionaire wants something done... they literally jump to do it ASAP. People will only get insulted by unequal treatment (in terms of salary/lifestyle) when it is among peers - i.e. people within their own income bracket/class. That's probably why it's actually sort of taboo to even discuss salary, even among peers.

[Ralin]

I said that excessive surplus production gave the rise to class divisions somewhere close to page one [limited surplus, as in Neolithic, still existed, but was shared equally and quickly consumed, so could not create a stable class division]. What makes you think this is a new argument? Is surplus production itself even natural, eh?

No it's not new. The point is that it's apparently human nature to act this way when possible even if we didn't know it for most of human history. That's just an observation

[K. A. Pital]

How can you talk about human nature after the formation of class society and the splitting of humanity into slaves and masters? Any kind of "nature" that arose in that society is inevitably going to be warped already. So the argument from "human nature" still fails.

In pre-neolithic times, when people where hunter-gatherer, they were nomads living in small tribes.

Leaving aside the fact that [to the best of our modern knowledge] classless societies existed in some large neolithic settlements (1 to 10 000 inhabitants), this does not make hunter-gatherers inhuman or unnatural. It only means the argument from human nature doesn't fly.

My point is that it is impossible to get so far

At some point slavery was universal; it took ages to get rid of that vice, and even then it was restored in some societies (CSA, looking their way). Does it matter if the moral goal is fully attainable within a lifetime, within a century, within many centuries? Achieve or die trying - either way is good.

To breathe the air of equality for some years may be worth more than a lifetime of looking up to The Masters.

[Purple]

I think that both of you are missing the point. We should NOT care if something is natural. We should care if it is good. If something is good than fuck nature, we should want it because it is good. Equally so if something is bad than again, fuck nature we don't want it.

[K. A. Pital]

Nothing is more insulting than inequality. Death is fearsome; suffering is painful. But inequality - that thing is insulting to the mind, and hateful, hateful beyond measure. Nothing will stop me from hating the rich with every breath. NOTHING since I discovered that even with the average wage of the First World I can literally buy people in the former colonies; I can pay people to mutilate themselves - or to kill others... And to think that by the standars of this society I am not even rich... The horrific disparity is the abyss; staring down into it is not helped by the fact we have a lower death rate than the Stone Age humans. This is beyond anything I have ever seen. All Stone Age tribes, violent as they were, had pretty similar chances to die or kill; to perish or survive. Today this is not so, and even though it is comforting to excuse this with nukes, spaceflight, antibiotics, calories... I cannot. I just can't.

I find your attitude interesting, because it's so contrary to the attitude of the average American. Americans are so used to living with inequality, nobody really cares or is particularly insulted by it - it's just a fact of life. Your boss drives a nicer car than you? Fact of life. Your boss has a larger house than you? Fact of life ... probably one day you'll get a promotion and then you can have the nicer car/bigger house, etc. That's sort of the mentality here. I've seen the way people react when a billionaire wants something done... they literally jump to do it ASAP. People will only get insulted by unequal treatment (in terms of salary/lifestyle) when it is among peers - i.e. people within their own income bracket/class. That's probably why it's actually sort of taboo to even discuss salary, even among peers.

Thanks.

I hope this will make someone think... I don't know. For me it's not some sort of joke, some sort of intellectual game, as it is for some... It's easy to flamebait me here, I admit. I feel strongly about it. American attitudes, and pretty much their whole system of values is alien to me.

I hope there will be more people like me in the future.

[Guardsman Bass]

Nothing is more insulting than inequality. Death is fearsome; suffering is painful. But inequality - that thing is insulting to the mind, and hateful, hateful beyond measure. Nothing will stop me from hating the rich with every breath. NOTHING since I discovered that even with the average wage of the First World I can literally buy people in the former colonies; I can pay people to mutilate themselves - or to kill others... And to think that by the standars of this society I am not even rich... The horrific disparity is the abyss; staring down into it is not helped by the fact we have a lower death rate than the Stone Age humans. This is beyond anything I have ever seen. All Stone Age tribes, violent as they were, had pretty similar chances to die or kill; to perish or survive. Today this is not so, and even though it is comforting to excuse this with nukes, spaceflight, antibiotics, calories... I cannot. I just can't.

I find your attitude interesting, because it's so contrary to the attitude of the average American. Americans are so used to living with inequality, nobody really cares or is particularly insulted by it - it's just a fact of life. Your boss drives a nicer car than you? Fact of life. Your boss has a larger house than you? Fact of life ... probably one day you'll get a promotion and then you can have the nicer car/bigger house, etc. That's sort of the mentality here. I've seen the way people react when a billionaire wants something done... they literally jump to do it ASAP. People will only get insulted by unequal treatment (in terms of salary/lifestyle) when it is among peers - i.e. people within their own income bracket/class. That's probably why it's actually sort of taboo to even discuss salary, even among peers.

The social inequality side of it bothers me, with expectations of deference and so forth (the "bowing and scraping"). But the rest of the economic inequality just doesn't bother me that much, not as long as I've got some socially satisfactory standard of living (access to medical treatment, a home, money to pay expenses and enjoy discretionary expenditures). And it kind of nice knowing that it's just money separating these things, not political power or social status - a rich guy might be able to charter a private jet flight for $5000/day with ease, but I could probably save up for that if I really wanted it even at my income. I don't have to pull favors with somebody to get it.

[Ralin]

Anyone else remember something Wong once said about how after many years of involvement in his kids' schools' PTA he's noticed that the wealthy parents always act like they're entitled to more of a say in planning activities and policies and such? And that honestly, he wouldn't even mind much if they were contributing more money to fund all that, but that they apparently consider it their due just for being rich?

[BabelHuber]

Leaving aside the fact that [to the best of our modern knowledge] classless societies existed in some large neolithic settlements (1 to 10 000 inhabitants), this does not make hunter-gatherers inhuman or unnatural. It only means the argument from human nature doesn't fly.

No, it just means that while hunter-gatherer had some sort of classless system by default, the same isn't true for later settlements. There may have been some classless societies in neolithic times after mankind has moved on to farming, but these societies didn't become the rule.

At some point slavery was universal; it took ages to get rid of that vice, and even then it was restored in some societies (CSA, looking their way). Does it matter if the moral goal is fully attainable within a lifetime, within a century, within many centuries? Achieve or die trying - either way is good.

To breathe the air of equality for some years may be worth more than a lifetime of looking up to The Masters.

This is a noble thought, but I think it simply won't work in real life:

There are some general problems with bureaucracies, see Parkinson's law for an example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law).

In a capitalistic society, "only" the bureaucracy of the state itself is kind of everlasting, companies are not. This means that if the bureaucracy of a company becomes defunct, the company goes bankrupt.

This leads to "creative destruction", which is a net positive for the society.

A good example are the typewriter manufacturers of the 70ies: Companies like Olivetti and Triumph Adler were doing good back then, but after the PC was inventend, they were in deep troubles and had to close their factories.

The reason for this is trite: They thought that they produce typewriters, but in reality they produced business machines. Had these morons in charge realized this, they could have switched to producing PCs. but instead they tried to tune their typewriters with floppy discs, displays etc. Of course this was destined to fall.

In a classless society, how would this have worked?

I realize that capitalism has its weaknesses, and I also realize that lots of things are going awfully wrong nowadays, but I haven't seen a better concept yet. So I think the best approach is to enhance our already-existing system than trying something completely new.

[Alyrium Denryle]

With respect to the argument regarding human nature

You are all...sadly wrong. Mostly because you are all only really getting half of it right.

Any time an individual pays a fitness cost of any kind to benefit a group as a whole, there is a selective pressure to try to avoid paying the cost. It is a free-rider problem. Everyone wants the benefit of living in a cooperative group (which increases fitness), without paying the cost of living in that group (the cost decreases fitness). This decreases the benefit of staying in the group over time. Evolution is not forward looking, so a tendency to not pay but still benefit will be selected for and the group will eventually dissolve once all the individuals are simply better off on their own.

As a result, the minds of social animals want inequality. So long as they are on top.

In order for groups to survive, groups must be in direct competition or the external environment must require cooperation for that species so that leaving is *never* beneficial and there is always selective pressure to increase group cohesion and cooperation as well as a selective pressure to leave.

When this happens, you get systems by which members of the group can detect and deter free-riding in others (while themselves trying to free-ride). This leads to, in primates for example, an impulse toward fairness and equality. We tend to reject unfairness when we get the shaft as a result thereof, or when people we like get the shaft. We take action to mitigate unfairness when we get the shaft.

The ability to concentrate resources, how we end up organizing our social groups, and what systems we come up with to divide the labor of detecting and deterring free-riders (while also trying to free-ride) largely determines what actually happens in a given society.

From there you can enter into equilibrium states, feedback loops, fun little epicycles etc.

In a paleolithic society for example, resource margins are thin and everyone is policing everyone else. As a result, society tends to be more egalitarian. This is pretty stable.

In industrial societies the power dynamic changes due to the personal ownership of capital investments and free-riders (who own the capital) can alienate others from their labor, because the peons need the capital and the meager income derived from it much more than the master needs the individual workers. The only way to fix that is to alter the system of division of labor with respect to free-rider deterrence. This can be done through through the operational rules (regulations and the ways and means by which conflicts are adjudicated etc) or through the division of labor itself (massive personnel changes). But care must be taken to avoid a repeat of the same problem at a later date. We are only recently at this point, but it looks prone to epicycles and is unstable over time.

The take-home message is that both equality and inequality exist as a part of natural human desire, and they largely exist in tension with eachother.