I was a useful idiot for capitalism
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Conveniently the moment, large scale spyplanes confirmed the sovjet union was a messy paper tiger, not the industrial science powerhouse it propaganda made it out to be. Ever after that, it was crisis management and containement towards collapse. Before that it was panic and better-this-then-that-negotations with unions. It was a watershed moment back to the gilded age.
Haha. That's hilarious. The negligent hand waving of an enemy states collapse as a banal "realization" is the stuff of pure comedy.
Some proponents of planned economy (e.g. Cottrell) suggest that elected democracy should be replaced by sortition for just that reason. Or perhaps there are technical ways to make planning less centralized, say some kind of federated system with freely available real-time production data, where a new producer can decide what group of existing producers to join.
There are legitimate concerns surrounding the level of surveillance and automation necessary for such a system but they seem hollow from the present sociopolitical context where surveillance and automated decision making is normalized as part of the capitalist system rather than an aspirationally socialist one.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Anyone who claims that hasn't observed Soviet Union or Russia long enough. The failure was 99% due to "human element" not due to sophistication or not of some planning element.
Yet in my country, we’re healthier; longer living; and yes the average person is wealthier than ever before.
It’s physically impossible for the poor to get poorer every year without a complete societal collapse. Yet people keep repeating this line.
You are aware of the reality behind the shiny propaganda videos of skyscrapers?
The anti-meritocracy, were beeing born into party aristocracy gives you undeserved jobs, whose lack-of-skills underpaid underlings have to compensate for if you screw up? The reactionary politic changes, that always trigger if things are to late? The absence of any plan beyond keeping the status quo?
Look at the zero covid, were literally a revolution has to happen, for a unfeasable plan and the corresponding corruption to be undone? Literally all initiatives and plans result in this, a surface level placation, corruption cancer growth beneath and suffering by the citizens who made the economic miracle of china really happening - against the ccp resistance.
This is what you want to integrate into western societies? Why?
I understand the utopian, shangri-la projections of the failed western left, but please not on some labor camp..
To be more concrete one specific thing I would like to see more of in the US is some sort of change to the political process that would allow more engineers to get into positions of power. Right now it’s all lawyers, and I think this is a big reason why the US is not good at large infrastructure projects anymore (California high speed rail, building more nuclear plants etc.)
Now China doesn't represent any kind of alternative model that risks replacing the one adopted by western countries, unlike the Soviet Union. Realistically nobody is afraid of being taken over by China. So I think that any kind of impact that China might have in this regard would be quite limited.
Competition from a completely alien culture can generate mobilization, i.e. different societal strata working together for a common purpose. This is what the US is doing with China today, or did with Japan in the '80s.
What the USSR generated was different: it was the fear that the lower classes could band together, overthrow the established order, and actually succeed in running the country. It wasn't an attack from an alien culture, that the establishment feared; it was successful subversion from within. There is no fear of that when it comes to China.
To me the biggest difference between China and Japan is that China is much more likely to challenge the US among all dimensions of power, whereas my understanding of Japan in the 80s is that they simply started to be slightly competitive in an economic dimension.
So I do think that there is a higher likelihood that China’s rise opens up more debates about certain deep assumptions we have in the US than Japan’s did. And some of these may be about the primacy of private property. Private property is not a law of physics but it is a very deeply set assumption we have. The idea that housing is an investment more than it is a human necessity is something that may be worth questioning more and more. If investor owned housing in the US keeps trending up (already around 20%) then at some point it will likely be helpful to have another successful system to point at and learn from for solutions.
If it does, then you need some kind of modern society to keep them relatively happy, or they'll fight for the other side. If you can deploy killer drone robots, then you don't need to worry about what the population thinks as much.
All of this was carefully seeded and very deliberately promoted and funded immediately after WWII. The most obvious example was the Mont Pelerin Society, which was given to Hayek to organise and wasn't just ideologically anti-Marxist, but aggressively anti-Keynesian.
The fall of the Soviet Union accelerated this process by finally removing much of the organised opposition to it. But it was already up and running long before Gorbachev became President.
Also, this article is from 2020, but generated hardly any discussion when it was posted on HN back then.
I think today we live in a time as revolutionary as the 60's in the XX century but without the optimistic atmosphere. I'm certain people don't notice this because we don't have the cultural effervescence of that time, for example, but I'm sure that in the future historians will write about how difficult and exceptional the 20's of the XXI century were.
- Hopefully this is not a desperate attempt at staying relevant. Taking the author at his own word, that whole generation is now unreliable: they messed up and are fundamentally corrupt. Unless they have a spotless, near-sainthood track record, anybody born before the mid-70s should probably be ignored when defining the strategic horizon.
- They never seem to suggest a way forward anyway, exactly like this author. That's probably because they have little knowledge of the now, they can only analyze what came before.
The real cultural breakthrough will happen when someone "clean" will manage to elaborate an actual way forward, a democratic socialism for the digital age that actually works (or promises to work) on a mass-scale. It probably shouldn't be called that, it will use new terms so it can eschew old labels; but it should promise redistribution, respect, and creative satisfaction, for all people.
Until that happens, we are simply in damage-limitation mode. Technology has enabled capitalist excesses in an unprecedented way, most of the cyberpunk-theorized digital feudalism is already reality. What can we do? That is the question.
You could call it socialism with Scandinavian characteristics. Mind you, Scandinavian countries are actually fairly high on rankings of economic freedom; they choose to levy redistributive taxes as opposed to trying to socialize the economy with heavy regulation and central planning, as has long been the model in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West. This is in accordance with Deng Xiaoping's famous quip: "white cat, black cat, if it catches mice it's a good cat."
>I’m betting that a jobless super-automated future will arrive even sooner than experts have been predicting.
We already live in that future. If there were only one type of car, one type of trousers and shirts, a limited selection of food and standardized housing, there would be hardly any work for anybody.
The end of the article is kind of funny. It could as well be a plea for Capitalism and startup culture:
>Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities … a dream … with a sense of the possible.”
>He also wrote that the urgent national inflection-point struggle a century ago was “between those who are willing to enter upon an effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren’t. In a real sense it is an adventure.”
It comes down to taxes and investments. The masses can always vote for politics that shift spending power from corporations to politicians or to themselves. They can also pool their money and invest by themselves.
For some reasons, unprecedented efforts seem to require free capital. How else but with Capitalism can that be provided? More democratic investments like kickstarter.com look too much like etsy.com to be viable contenders.
Or maybe the time has come to let people eat that fish instead? Sure, the Western middle class may not be able to eat as much meat then, but as a whole, wouldn’t humanity be better off?
Just as any non-material concept, such as democracy, love, courage, and etc, so capitalism is a model, an abstraction of reality, which is context dependent.
So my contribution to the argument is to bring to attention that just as social-democracy can be de-facto a dictatorship, or 'love' can be a prison, or dictatorship can bring religious freedom and the end of slavery (e.g. early Persian empire) and contrast it with early America colonization governments, similarly capitalism as a concept can be approached.
Fundamentally, it is the mixture of government (power) with private enterprise (wealth) that historically is known to generate the greatest human corruption. Just like there people recognized that religion and state should be separated to avoid corruption of both, it should be followed by a divorce of private enterprise and state. [if one should summarize it in one sentence]. It has nothing to do with capitalism, socialism, nationalism, communism... the principle lies elsewhere.
Except there's a lot to gain! Don't you remember when banks were saved in 2008? Don't you remember that copyrights used to be 28 years? Don't you remember the times when you could build your own vehicle, pass an inspection and then legaly drive it on public roads?
> but you (of course) play big intellectual and pretend it is OK to ignore facts.
Grow up.
I hope you understand that we are referring to models there, right? Your point that you can't discuss ideas because model is not reality is ridiculous - with that philosophy we would never had any engineering done. It's like arguing with someone who said "I have wooden house" with an argument "No mate, your door handles are metal".
> You know very well what people refer to as capitalism, the one that exist in reality.
And that is exactly what I'm fighting against - total confusion, calling capitalism system where Tax Freedom Day is in August (talking about some European countries) - you want to blame capitalism where there system is far from the idea of capitalism. Like I explained before: you disassemble wheels from a car and wonder why it is not working - here, you are removing the very reason why capitalism works (by restraining economic freedom, expanding welfare) and you are surprised that it isn't working.
> Grow up.
I was just referring to your comment about things being obvious where you have clearly some problems explaining your thoughts.
Please explain how that works.
IMO this is an issue for which the scale and impact is far greater than what seems to be the issues of concern for most of the people working in big tech.
Wage inequality is a problem, but the entire economic system is built on underpaying workers, i.e. extracting "surplus value" aka "profit" and paying it out to the owners for merely owning the company. Likewise rent-seeking extracts rent from individuals for using something the rentier merely owns, on top of any cost of maintenance, improvement, or loans, which themselves pay interest on top of the actual value of the money provided.
The foundation of the system is to make money from nothing by enforcing and thus manifesting the fiction of "property rights" and withholding the hoarded dead weight of "stuff" (or in intellectual property even just "ideas") from the society that could benefit from it unless allowed to leech on its actual productive effort in the form of rent, wage or interest. Societal progress in the past hundreds of years (especially in Europe) has been primarily defined by expanding this fiction (even the concept of land as such property is fairly new, see Enclosure). In essence even modern states live off this fiction except the property is the ability to exist within their sphere of influence and the rent is taxes, though the state's function is more of a tool to enable this system by providing a framework of violence to enforce it than as a beneficiary (although its higher officials often benefit immensely from it, they function more like the highly-paid C-level executives than the owners of a firm).
So yes, wage inequality is an issue but the problem is less that some tech workers get paid too much but rather that most of the surplus value workers generate doesn't end up on their paychecks and this problem is essentially unsolvable under the economic system, at least within a traditional corporate structure (less so in a co-operative).
Also your claim is actually wrong. Wage transparency (i.e. the right to talk to coworkers about each other's salary to help them better negotiate) is a big topic, although mostly framed as a solution to discrimination. And unionization is the easiest way to tackle wage inequality because it gives power to those unable to bargain for better wages on their own.
It becomes exploitative when their talents are owned by rentier investors, whose sole contribution to a project is financial.
Of course the money doesn't exist physically. The investment is really a political endorsement of the project and the individuals. This unlocks resources and creates social credibility. Sometimes this comes with an explicit personal message from the investor, sometimes it's just numbers.
The problem is that stock markets support casual rent-seeking which disconnects investors from the projects they throw money at. Casual investors have zero interest in the long-term health of a company. All they want is the highest possible short-term return. And this culture is what forces corporations to aggressively devalue wages and worker comp, right from the initial seed round all the way through to the other side of IPO.
The typical HN reader is somewhat insulated from this, because their skills are needed to make projects happen. But casual labour is considered a fungible expense that needs to be minimised.
Politically this leaves most of the population disenfranchised. Some token electoral democracy doesn't change the fact that most people have almost no political power in their work environment, and have to accept top-down orders that undermine their own prosperity and welfare.
A founder may be an active contributor to the company but they fulfill a dual role of owner and worker that is unique to them and alienates them from other workers in their company. This is most evident as companies grow and founders retreat into C-level roles isolating them from the day-to-day work via multiple layers of management or eventually phase out entirely, either retaining a seat on the board, transitioning to fully passive ownership of their shares or selling their stake entirely to cash out, at which point they will likely want to reinvest most of their money in ways that generate "passive income" (i.e. rent-seeking).
I'm not a big fan of Marxist theory, especially in its Marxist-Leninist interpretations, but even from a capitalist lens I think what I said holds true even if one may disagree with the framing or the moral implications (capitalist theorists famously prefer framing the system is natural, innate and thus amoral and inevitable, despite the recency of its more recognizable modern iterations).
But if you want to go into the political implications, the ability to generate income from property (whether it is a stake in a company, housing or just literal heaps of money) necessarily enables the unequal accumulation of wealth and in a capitalist system that wealth beyond a certain point directly translates into political power as this wealth represents an exclusive claim on resources (production, housing, finance) that can be withheld from society with state violence if necessary. This directly contradicts the abstract idea of a democracy by amending "every vote is equal" with "but you vote with your wallet" (and some wallets are bigger than others).
I'm not proposing a solution. I think cooperatives are an interesting model though they are hard to bootstrap in this system as even without institutional biases (e.g. cooperatives allegedly find it harder to take out loans because banks prefer having a central individual representing the debtor) the incentives align against them: if you have the capital to start your own company, why pick a structure giving you less power by empowering those who can only bring in their labor? But cooperatives can't change this system and thus have to operate within the same system, feeding into and benefiting from the same exploitative system.
Then that cartoon should be reversed, because most of national income (GDP) is wages - profits and rents are a much smaller fraction. Wage inequality driven by skill differentials and technical change explains the bulk of income inequality since the 1980s. The literature is fairly unambiguous on that point.
In fact, those market sectors where labor costs are pushed uniformly higher by distortionary policies without compensating gains in efficiency (such as education, healthcare and general administration) are the ones that exert the highest burden on the rest of the economy, leading to inflation and pushing real incomes down; this is what Baumol's cost disease is all about.
You are arguing a different point AND entirely wrong.
"The top 0.01% richest individuals now hold 11% of the world's wealth." https://fortune.com/2021/12/07/worlds-richest-inequality-ric... "the bottom 80% owning 7%"
Can you provide sources for your belief?
Average workers are worse off today since more and more money is going to relatively small (in terms of employment) high value companies like hospitals, tech companies etc. So it isn't that low skill workers are giving up more and more to capitalists, it is that more and more money is going to other parts in the economy and never even going to the company the low skill worker is working for.
and within that, income to the top 0.1% is rising faster than the bottom half. The rich are getting richer, faster and faster. See also Pikketys capital in the 21st Century. (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674430006)
The original cartoon emphasised the fat cat factory own "hoarding a huge pile of cash". As I referenced: "the bottom 80% owning 7%" in the US.
But have you tried investing in shares? If you have then maybe you’ve realized the fact that they don’t always go up.
Higher taxes on higher earners are there because of pragmatism and a sense of fairness: higher earners have more disposable income to be taxed on.
These kind of statements always confuse me: does anyone think anyone is motivated in this way? Do people think Buffett and Soros are sitting down in a room with Trump and Biden plotting how to keep the club of "truly wealthy" exclusive?
So yeah they totally do.
At the same time we have some of the wealthiest people in the world here, real oligarch style.
Do you think governments have had "more and more power" in the last fifty years? What is your reasoning?
To me, it seems like capital has far more power compared to fifty years ago.
> let's give the government more power in the name of social justice and expect that no one in the system is corrupted
Spoken like a true ideologue. Does this argument not work in reverse? Money == power. If you concentrate more and more wealth in fewer hands, then you can also expect corruption.
> it simply ignores the fact that people have no reason to work hard when they see someone who's chilling gets the same outcome
The thing about capitalism is that capital generates capital. Someone who is already wealthy can "chill" and get a better outcome than someone who works much harder.
If opposite was true then there would be never debate about helping bankers after crisis few years back, government shouldn't have power to "help" private investors with taxpayers' money.
> If you concentrate more and more wealth in fewer hands, then you can also expect corruption.
Why should I care about corruption inside companies? Corrupted companies are less effective, they will eventually die. What I care about is corruption inside government - you have no solution for corrupted officials - I have: just don't give them too much power, then even if they are corrupted they won't make much damage.
> The thing about capitalism is that capital generates capital. Someone who is already wealthy can "chill" and get a better outcome than someone who works much harder.
That's not the feature of capitalism, that's feature of corrupted government with too much power - in free market, if you have capital and don't create any goods, but only spend it eventually you have less capital - it's simple math.
Assuming that's true, "eventually die" doesn't sound great for the vulnerable workers of the company, who have lost out on wages due to said corruption and are now unemployed.
> you have no solution for corrupted officials
Sure I do. There's the media, the judicial system, and the ballot box.
> in free market, if you have capital and don't create any goods, but only spend it eventually you have less capital
That's not a rebuttal of what I said, and it's not necessarily correct either. You can, for example, buy land and rent it out.
Why would they be unemployed? Why wouldn't they work for someone else or even start their own business? You assume people are helpless, I hope it's not the projection of your own experience.
> Sure I do. There's the media, the judicial system, and the ballot box.
How they (except the last one) are doing so far?
> You can, for example, buy land and rent it out.
That's already investment, that's already doing something with a risk involved. You can buy a land that no one would rent out.
Besides the things above: you still don't propose any explanation why socialism will work this time, when it happened to lead to tragedy so many times before (I assume you agree with my proof of why the system USA lean towards socialism since you haven't argued with that proof).
Maybe it's not that the government doesn't have power, but more like the government's power has become a tool for the rich and their corporations due to their larger influence.
> Corrupted companies are less effective, they will eventually die.
Why is this true? Anyone could state the opposite without proof: that corrupted companies are more effective and thrive.
> in free market, if you have capital and don't create any goods, but only spend it eventually you have less capital - it's simple math.
It's not like capitalists just sit on their cash and burn it; their capital is in wealth-producing assets. They don't need to create any goods themselves. Their outsized wealth owns things that does that for them.
That's why you need to reduce government power. Socialism do the opposite.
> Why is this true? Anyone could state the opposite without proof: that corrupted companies are more effective and thrive.
It's the definition of corruption: you gain personal benefits in cost of organization you work in. Why would I prove the definition?
> Their outsized wealth owns things that does that for them.
Yeah... everything just happens on its own. Surely no one ever bankrupted by investing in stocks.
It did. It does. Just not in the United States. In the Netherlands socialism worked just fine and provided many great benefits to all, except the super wealthy.
In the 80s we got a whole new set of capitalism: financial capitalism and neoliberalism. The breakdown of collective action, breakdown of solidarity between workers and a more hyper individualistic world.
This is exposed in the article, even though it focus on USA's changes, those changes have rippled through the globe.
Neoliberalism and hyper-financial capitalism begins in the 80s, that's what was introduced.
Did you read the article?
It's like having a car, disassemble wheels and call all cars useless.
It seems like USA is surprised that concentrating more and more power in few hands leads to corruption and as a cure they want to concentrate more power into hands of few (government) in the name of social justice expecting different outcome than before.
I thought it was clear I meant the system has changed by using "the rules of capitalism" as a literary device. I don't know if it really was unclear but that's exactly what I meant...
Seriously, this is the right attitude. We need to find a regulatory framework for capitalism that works with this mindset.
The OP seems to advocate a more “Swedish system” where (almost) everybody is unionized and that mental framework is applied to all work (except e.g. sports and literature where everybody understands it’s impossible). As a Swede I’d like to caution against this in the strongest possible way. It is the road to serfdom for every talented and ambitious individual, regardless of background. It just perpetuates the class society.
The same can be said about a non-unionised workforce, so what's the solution?
For more creative work where talent is very unevenly distributed my impression is that the US doing pretty well actually. A Swedish engineer can only dream of the opportunities for being “exploited” that are available to their American colleagues.
Also, if you feel exploited by capitalism you should consider what it feels like to be exploited by capitalism, the unions and the state working together. That’s essentially the situation you’ll end up in if you walk the Swedish path. Some people don’t mind trading their freedom for “safety”, but for those who do it feels terrible.
To improve on the US model for creative work I think regulation should focus on strengthening the creative destruction side of capitalism. This might seem counterintuitive, since people like stability. But I think the fairness of a capitalist system depends on it. I don’t mind if rich people have more power in society, as long as they have to risk that power in order to exercise it. What’s unfair to me is that a class of people get to call the shots and reap all the rewards, but get bailed out in various ways when things go sour.