Notices by Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net), page 44
-
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Thursday, 28-Sep-2023 10:48:55 EDT 
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
https://gnusocial.net/conversation/8773526 -> https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital is a useful intro to technofeudalism, a term that you didn't appear to be familiar with -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Thursday, 28-Sep-2023 07:14:11 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
I'm attached to concepts, not to implementations, especially to implementations that didn't achieve the goal. I learn from them and move on, instead of getting stuck in the past like your propaganda does. Attaching strawman labels like you do is no more than sophistry to avoid debating the concepts. I'm not interested in the sort of "command economy" you speak of, don't waste your time criticizing that to me. to me, that's a bug of capitalist thinking projected onto what they (you?) don't get and fear. capitalist companies organize into central command structures, which oppresses everyone but the top, and capitalists are terrified of seeing what they do unto others done unto them. I call you on that bullshit. I propose radically democratic small-scale controls. truly democratic, rather than the illusion of democracy we live in today. I fight for freedom, I fight for democracy, I fight for human rights, I believe in collective action. I'm still waiting for your feeble attempt at explaining how accumulation of capital, the primary element of capitalism, doesn't entail exponential growth. and the reason I responded with "social democracy", because you seem to have missed the subtlety, is that though the US perceives that as some radical left wing, it's no more than center-right-wing. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:31:45 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
what do you expect me to say? social democracy? ;-P nah, not interested in playing this game. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:29:51 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
yeah, I guess it does like socialism to you. typical. then you add in "command economy" and got your strawman. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:26:59 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
oh, I see, you're again trying to paint china as socialist, while denying that nordic social democracy is a combination of socialism with capitalism, rather than contradicting yourself.
anyway, we talked about socialism just because you brought it up. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:22:34 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
I don't understand why you keep going back to socialism. I'm not proposing socialism. it's not even in my radar. I'm not socialist. what's wrong with you? is this some kind of obsession of yours? -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:21:19 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
as shown in this very conversation -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:20:38 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
profit is how capital accumulation is realized, so it's indeed fundamental. how do you get around infinite growth? how does accumulation work, if not exponentially like compounded interest rates as ROI? would capitalists settle for quadratic growth of their capital rather than exponential? linear? logarithmic? -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:10:07 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
why do economists of all alignments study the books in which marx describes these fundaments of capitalism, if they were as wrong as you say? -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:08:56 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
where do you imagine the term 'capitalism' come from then?
what do you imagine capitalists strive for?
how do they eat, and what do they reproduce? ;-) -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:06:24 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
> Demanding the impossible impedes the actual.
I feel the same way reciprocally. I see you insisting on a discredited and impossible system, while acknowledging its flaws and wishfully hoping for fixes for its unfixable misfeatures. meanwhile, you dismiss preemptively any alternatives, for no good reason. I don't buy that package any more than you buy the potential existence of alternatives, so I suggest we agree to disagree on it. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 19:00:22 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
so how do you imagine the logic of accumulation of capital work, if not by hoping for infinite growth and concentration? please don't spare me of details. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 18:45:38 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
you know one reason, you even wrote about it, but you dismiss it as if it were some form of made-up conspiracy rather than a real one, even while acknowledging that the incentives to prevent alternatives are not only there, you are an active participant in it. they also started before we achieved abundance, and they have been largely kept out of abundance through unjust force.
we're not going to converge on this specific point, are we? or on your fixation that the alternative to a fundamentally broken system must be spotless before it can be even tried, or your dismissal of the unsustainability, so essential and fundamental to the system that, if we fixed it, it would no longer be capitalism. why do you insist on something broken as if it was viable, as if we should be happy with it and stop seeking alternatives to enable us to keep on inhabiting this planet? -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 18:37:31 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
with or without regulations, capitalism is unsustainable to begin with. its raison d'être is reinvestment for accumulation, with compounded interest that leads to exponential growth, which is incompatible with a finite anything (world, solar system, galaxy, universe, whatever). so it's not reasonable to stay put to begin with, we're not at a stable or desirable place no matter how much you wish it were so. that it requires regulation to function for a bit, confronted with the reality of corporations having grown big enough to control the national states into deregulation, only aggravates the impossibility of the present situation.
I do worry that you seem to prefer to *prevent* others from even trying different arrangements, because *you* don't believe it could work, than giving them a fair chance. that's scarily authoritarian to me. not surprising, coming from someone who supports capitalism with all its horrors, but still... maybe the mistake is trying to start with socialism. marx himself criticized socialism and alerted to its dangers. it's not an end goal, but maybe it doesn't even have to be an intermediate stop. maybe we don't know the destination. all I know is that with the current system we're all screwed very soon, so we'd better try different arrangements quickly before it's too late, and maybe it already is. the reality of techno-feudalism is not a distraction, it's real, dangerous, but maybe also a potential path onto something better. -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 16:30:26 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
also, failed attempts at socialism and the rare anarcho-communism ones were, to the best of my knowledge, before the age of abundance. without abundance, economic problems are indeed tougher and little different between different systems. but with abundance, communist arrangements can focus on maintaining it and distributing abundance fairly, whereas capitalism and feudalism have to deal with maintaining the inequality they rely on by force, and only insane and unjust reasons (like monkeys piling up enough bananas for a million lifetimes) to justify them. so maybe now (or after it crumbles further) could be a good time to give them another try, or at least one try for real? are you so scared of a possibility that it might work that you'd rather suppress it? would you rather bet on a known-failing, known-unsustainable, and known-self-destructive system instead? -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 16:24:57 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
it's also a feature of pre-corporate-takeover capitalist governments as well, if you think about it. they're just a little more hands off in terms of allowing exploitation, but the power to regulate is there just the same. it allows private profit-seeking, as opposed to wages and bonuses, as an economic overhead/motivator. and that fits what I'm suggesting too, so it's no use for you to paint one specific strawman. but we know this (regulated capitalism) has been tried and is crumbling now, along with unregulated capitalism, for the same reason that a toxic presence doesn't enable the full development of others around it. if you said the US isn't sabotaging Cuba, you wouldn't be honest, come on. if you said megacorporations that are turning most countries into plutocracies and about to make the planet inhabitable for us are willing to make room for other systems that would distribute wealth more fairly, you'd be lying outrageously. of course they wouldn't allow that, it would be against their nature.
and yet, capitalism is crumbling, being replaced by technofeudalism, with all the enshittification that this brings with it. it had a strong run, it took the rentists a couple of centuries to reorganize, but here they are. if we survive, we may have another shot, as the exploited "enterpreneurs" and their delivery bikes may choose to unite with other exploited workers instead of going their own way.
it's a bit like the asteroid that gave mammals a chance to grow -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 14:28:23 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
now, you seem fixated on this notion of command economy, and it has indeed been a feature of all centralized government systems so far. giving up power happens to be very very hard. in order for this to work, ISTM we have to take the opposite path, starting from decentralized democratic power, with local autonomous radically-democratic communities joining forces in pursuit of common interests. but what are the odds of any existing established powers enabling such communities to as much as hatch? -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 14:18:48 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
well, not mine. I do all my web browsing with Tor.
when Tor is not welcome, I generally take the hint.
but since you insisted, I tried again, and with the aid of the Internet Archive, I could give it a look. I'm unimpressed. it's not even good capitalism propaganda. the hard problems of economy are aggravated by capitalism because it (by design) promotes concentration AKA inequality. though we now have abundance, capitalism needs to and does make sure that this abundance doesn't reach the people in need. that wouldn't serve the interests of the capital. and that's exactly Leonardo's initial point in the thread. capitalism is not the solution, it's the biggest part of the problem, because it's a cruel and unsustainable arrangement. is radical democracy (as in, workers AKA the people collectively controlling the government, the state, the economy and the means of production) the solution? possibly. there's no reason for central planning to be the rule, or for it to curtail freedoms, including economic freedoms. you have a cool idea that would improve life for the people, produce more efficiently, whatever? share it, convince the people to invest in it, to give it a try. companies enable internal competition, despite central planning for a shareholders' benefit, why couldn't a radical democracy realize that this could work too? yeah, it hasn't been tried, it hasn't been done, we don't know how to get there, and we know who places the roadblocks -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 13:57:42 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
as for why I didn't read your blog post: all it showed me was "your IP is banned". I didn't find that very interesting, but I assume you meant me to read something else -
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp) (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Sep-2023 13:55:19 EDT
Alexandre Oliva (moved to @lxo@gnusocial.jp)
you're comparing apples and sesame seeds.
when a big market sets rules for multinational giants, they may tolerate them
when a small market does, they just go exploit someone else harder
anyway, I still get a distinct notion that you equate socialism and communist. those are not the same. communism was never tried. socialism has. it failed at some places, and it appears to be holding up at others despite sabotage. whereas capitalism... well, not really working well anywhere, is it? exponential accumulation of capital can't possibly work in finite settings.
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the