Big Tech are the new Soviets | Hacker News Reader

Big Tech are the new Soviets

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54 pointssaubeidl131 comments

The problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world.

For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.

With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.

Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.

It's certainly the case with energy. Many people can barely afford their electricity expenses and yet big tech wants to build data centres which will gobble up energy like no one's business. In fact it runs completely counter to the environmental rhetoric.

Electricity is like 30 euros per month. What are you even talking about?

Much more expensive in the US. Especially in areas that use resistive heating in the winter.

How bad it is exactly? Resistive heating sounds cursed, when the houses are (I guess) not the fancy European newbuild.

I'm looking at something like 1000 kWh on a heat pump a year in a mild weather, where kWh is around 0.30 eurocents. I don't however own the pump, energy company leases it to me, so I pay about 150 a month the whole year (cold months are about 4 GJ, but it totals to 18-ish in a year). Then there is another 10-30 a month for normal in-house electricity consumption.

When I had actual district heating (powered by gas, when the gas was expensive af) and the house was "leakier", I looked at something like 50ish GJ a year and paid close to 350.

I live in Scotland. It costs me a lot more than the equivalent of thirty Euros. Nearly double that. I couldn't reduce my electricity bill much more if I tried. I don't watch TV, use my oven and don't heat my home most of the year (I haven't once this winter so far, even though I am cold some of the time.)

It costs a lot more than that where I live. They keep sending me info on how to save energy. I have a small home and use about as little as I can, and most of my bill consists of tax and standing charges! It is NOT cheap.

Gas is even more expensive. I had to have mine cut off.

Yes, it used to be common wisdom that you cannot have markets being run by private companies, that if such a situation develops it needs to be nationalized immediately. However, the last thing that happened to was the electricity grid.

It is happening again with a few rail networks. We'll see.

So it's the same as big oil (for oil-poor countries).

Let's say, for argument's sake, that Uber takes 25% of the fare. But let's say that the alternative is old-style taxi companies, and they were protected from competition by the medallion system. They were not exactly lean-and-mean companies. What percent did they lose by inefficiency? Less than 25%, or more? And is losing it to inefficiency better than losing it to Uber, or worse?

Note well: I do not have answers for these questions. But I think the questions are interesting.

Define inefficiency, I'd much rather pay for local inefficiency which is still money changing hands in my local economy rather than paying a bit less for my money to be siphoned out of my local economy with increased efficiency.

Losing to Uber means my money is not being used in my economy, it goes away, it pays a few devs/local staff while it's stashed away in other financialised assets that do not help my neighbours (well, perhaps it helps the richest ones).

What if you get a much better service from Uber?

Most local produce initatives fail because they're not actually better than the global/international variants, especially considered from a price/quality pov.

Uber is generally more expensive than yellow cabs in NYC these days.

Yanis Varoufakis is a curious character, endlessly promoted across mainstream media including the BBC. His wife is said to be the basis of Pulp's song "Common People" about a rich girl at St. Martin's College trying to slum it. That's debatable, but her father was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. Yanis Varoufakis went to a private school in Athens and has taught at Cambridge... Seems like he has a pretty elite background.

How is that relevant here? Did anyone claim anything to the contrary?

It skews his view of the entire situation in ways he isn't even aware of. In this case, he talks about feudalism, and it's arguable if that's where we're headed at all. Feudalism requires the peasantry to provide something useful to the overlords, which will not be the case when low paid jobs are automated.

Marx married into minor mobility and was himself descended from prosperous Jews. Lenin's father was ennobled. Aristocrats turning against capitalism is as old as communism.

Yanis, wasn’t an aristocrat. However, these were all from upper-class or elite backgrounds too: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito.

There are tonnes of people like that in Marxism. The irony is that they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it. Guevara especially came from a wealthy background.

YV was born into a monied family and married into one. He also went to private school as a child. As far as I know he has spent most of his life in an ivory tower.

How dare people use their privilege for good instead of for self-enrichment!

He is a World Economic Forum stooge, mate. There are only two ways into that. You either pay hundreds of thousands to attend each day, or you get invited from the inside as he did.

The WEF includes the top 100 companies in the world, along with the leaders and opposition leaders of every country. He's part of it.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

You seem to be on some sort of vendetta against the messenger instead of addressing the message at all.

We have heard plenty from this particular messenger. He is/was never off the BBC at some stage. I always ask why someone is pushed on the public so hard, whether it is him or even someone like Jordan Peterson. I have the same basic issue with him as I do with the Guardian... He is completely out of touch with what is happening at ground level because of his current life and his origins.

I'm with saubeidl—while I, too, am deeply suspicious of anyone who comes from that level of privilege, and I've heard some shady stuff about Varoufakis in the past, you are refusing to present a) any meaningful criticism of his actual arguments, or b) any specific causal link between aspects of his background and reasons to doubt his work.

You just keep pounding on the fact that he is from privilege, but that alone is not enough to be suspicious.

At the very best, you are arguing guilt by association.

Guilt by association? Yes, he's associated with the WEF, a group of elite politicians and wealthy tycoons who meet away from the prying eyes of the public to discuss policies, and then tells us he's on our side.

They say you can know someone by the company they keep. The company he keeps are the Cambridge University students (who come disproportionately from private schools), mainstream media pundits and the billionaires of the WEF.

He doesn't just come from privilege... He never really left it.

But one can come from privilege, and choose to use that privilege to, effectively, infiltrate the ranks of the moneyed elite, seeking to make things better for the average person.

Some people have claimed that this is what he is doing. You have provided zero evidence that it is not. You merely keep repeating the same statements about his origins and his affiliation with the WEF.

I am not saying you are wrong. I am saying you have not supported your position in any meaningful way.

What are his words? What are his actions?

Where is the harm?

Where is the evidence?

irony: the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite

> they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it

that is not irony.

Do you believe only working class people can improve the situation for working class people? That seems counter-intuitive to me, as people outside the working class usually have more time and education to think about changes and advocate for them.

Oh it's irony alright. I've encountered many such folk. They claim to mean well but barely know what to deal with a real live proletarian when they encounter one.

What was it the Who once sang, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"? I don't think he has ever been much out of privileged circles.

The way ordinary people's lives can improve is self-advocacy and self-determination. You're not going to find that from Cambridge University where he teaches (one of the snobbiest and class ridden institutions in the UK which often resembles Hogwarts more than a modern university), the World Economic Forum (which prefers closed meetings to public ones and is furtive about its aims), or anything like that.

In this article he is right to voice concern about Big Tech oligarchy. But his analysis is off and he is not aware of what it really means to millions of people.

Rose Dugdale springs to mind, also.

I don't think that's abnormal. That's the norm for political leaders in western countries. There are very, very, few people that rise to leadership positions from a purely working class background. Even Jeremy Corbyn grew up middle class. It's almost tautological that leaders are going to be above average in some respect and this talent will be recognized early and the way it works in western countries, the elite institutions try to recruit all the talented folk from non-elite backgrounds into their ranks.

I think it's overall a good thing that not all people from elite backgrounds with above average IQ/skills end up being purely upper class aligned.

Yanis Varoufakis is a rich kid as is his wife, and their relatives. That's my point. He is part of the very thing he claims to be fighting.

You say he is talented. I say he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has been promoted by some powerful institutions such as mainstream media and elite universities. He did not get up there on his own. He isn't some street kid from Athens who clawed his way up by his own intellect.

By the way, I don't have a big problem with Corbyn as an individual. I think he is personally honest. I do have concerns that a decent man like him (or Bernie Sanders) may be used by individuals who are less honest. That has happened in the British Labour Party many times.

I'm not disputing the facts. I'm just pointing out that it's the norm.

I'm not sure what you're implying though. I don't think he is being platformed by current mainstream institutions if that's what you're saying.

He is being platformed by them. He was never off the BBC at one point and he writes for broadsheet papers on a frequent basis.

The inverse of elite isn’t working class background.

It approximately is, imho. Wealth follows a power law distribution. People put the dividing line at different points, but it doesn't matter so much. The elite are a tiny fraction. The middle class are also a relatively small faction of the population and for the most part, the middle class tend to be lumped in with the elite, because they tend to be in complementary political factions.

Now I know that in the US, people group everyone with a job in the middle class, but that's just semantics.

The middle class in western Europe and the USA does run into the millions according to most definitions.

However, class is also about your origins not just your wallet and YV is in no way a horny-handed son of toil.

What they mean is that there are plenty of people with organizational skills that come from a working class background, and essentially all of the smartest people in science come from working class, even immigrant backgrounds. Why? Simple: it takes a lot of long, concerted effort, with few results, and people are not very likely to do that if they have it too easy in childhood.

It's birth, not brains or organizational skills that make "leaders" in Europe. Hell, the highest European politician gets criticized for exactly that a great many times. Very lucky to be born where she was born, not much at all in terms of accomplishments, and zero spectacular achievements.

Which parts of the article do you disagree with?

I discuss that elsewhere. The feudal tag is inaccurate. The USA is not feudal minded, at least not yet. Europe is far more feudal in its deference to the authorities. (I live in Europe by the way.)

Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.

> Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.

Do machines drive your Uber ride? Deliver your food? No. They assign jobs to gig workers. Those are the serfs. Your goods and services are by people managed by AI.

Yes, I know, FSD is just around the corner rendering truck and taxi drivers obsolete. /s

I have boycotted Uber and dodgy food delivery companies from the beginning because of their zero hours contracts... I've never used Uber in my entire life.

Imagine you're in London. How you pick a restaurant for dinner? Do you simply walk into a restaurant or do you use Google too feed you a list of 'curated' venues? Because in the latter case both you and the restaurants (along with their owners, employees) are subject to FAANG's central planning. And that's exactly how people end up in tourist traps.

https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al...

For some reason you seem to believe that the old-school solution of just walking into the neighborhood and picking something that looks good has completely disappeared. It is not the case and, I would argue, is still restaurants primary business.

People also consistently share advice/tips on restaurants to try, and that largely escapes tech control. And even a well-reviewed/noted restaurant isn't immune to people's choices. As someone who has restaurant owner friends, I can assure you that tech companies have very little impact on the restaurant's success/survival.

How dare he use his privilege for any ends other than selfishly defending the rights of the privileged!

Well, he is. He has a cooshy number entertaining the chattering classes and educating their offspring.

He has no experience or understanding of poverty from the inside. Like a lot of his ilk, most of his understanding is second hand and theoretical. He wouldn't last five minutes on a factory floor.

I'm not advocating for him specifically, but it doesn't seem reasonable that one would need a lived experience of poverty and deprivation to be able to meaningfully understand its causes and effects or to have some inclination to prevent it. Compassion is not a vice nor is making a career of advocating for change.

He's never off mainstream media, has his own page on the World Economic Forum website, works for a posh university. He is in the elite and never left it.

If he was compassionate, he would condemn the WEF, instead of enabling it. It is an antidemocratic organisation, is partnered with big business and does not allow free press coverage of its events.

It does seem reasonable that people should have experienced poverty to understand it. The world has been full of people who came from privileged backgrounds who claim to speak for the working class and don't understand them. Maxim Gorky talks about this with Lenin and Lunacharsky.

p.s. Also please don't use that word "change". It is meaningless. Change is something which happens anyway. "Progress" and "improvement" are better.

Strong disagree. As someone who has dropped down multiple social classes, I had zero ACTUAL idea about what people were going through, nor about ACTUAL solutions to their problems. But I had lots of solutions to hypothetical problems in my head because I was smart and good hearted.

Having been through the result of implemented hypothetical solutions, they suck. They not only suck, but the suck all of the oxygen up, so that real, better solutions can't replace them.

Yep, you have to suffer the various effects of the system to understand it. Which is why there are actually hardly any people of the lower class that are actually socialist. They know firsthand that the only thing you are doing is replacing a dependency relation with a power imbalance that allows some abuse with another one that actually increases both dependency and actually institutionalizes abuse.

In my opinion, the modern-day socialists are the equivalent of priests who spend all day convincing people to give some of their money because they are going to make a “better community” and help the poor. In practice, anyone who knows the other side of this trade would rather have a solution that doesn't involve them…

I just finished reading this NYT article about Elke Kahr, mayor of the year 2023, and avowed communist.

She comes from a really poor background and its informed her views and made her into the great leader she is today. I'd recommend giving it a read!

https://archive.ph/liqSA

This counts as ad hominem. Attacking the person and saying nothing of the argument.

It affects his outlook and analysis of this subject at levels you can't even imagine. Simple as that.

Why wouldn’t I be able to imagine

Even if he genuinely supported the working class and struggles against power, he would not be in the World Economic Forum today. He was born into privilege, and now belongs to an organisation which bans proper press coverage... Even though it is where top politicians and business men meet to decide what to do with us. That door opens from the inside. You either pay vast sums to join the WEF or they invite you.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

Yes, the insiders wanted to let him in, but he refused:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/03/yanis-varoufak...

He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

They did let him in. He was never off the BBC at one point.

Also part of the elite WEF. https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

The difference between what some call the upper-upper-class and upper-middle-class is bigger than the difference between middle-class and lower-class.

Or, the 1% and the 0.01%.

The superrich are perhaps more alien than most aliens would be to us. (I'm assuming you are not a billionaire).

Well, that's basically the template for your average socialist. They are so privileged that they argue for things that make no sense to your average commoner. It is some sort of signaling for the wealthy “intellectual” class. They gain status by pretending to care about the poor even though they'll have to pay zero cost for the implementation of their arguments.

The cynic in me thinks it's because they stand to gain even more power/privilege this way. I think those people are disgusted by the fact that filthy capitalists can gain money and thus power while largely escaping their own power/control.

So-called elite education is fucked up in a bizarre way. They all end up with an ideology that could be summarized by anything that isn't government controlled is necessarily bad. Not very surprising because the whole point is them getting this education to be “worthy” to lead. Hard to do when people can manage without your leadership. Allegedly they are smart, but I think their actual intellectual power is below that of most engineers.

If amazon overcharges sellers of a 40% fee, then why can’t I get the same object elsewhere cheaper?

Obviously if you remove from your mind all market mechanisms, then it doesn’t look like a market anymore

Depends what you are buying. In some cases you can buy it elsewhere and in other cases, Amazon may be the only option left.

Chinese stuff you can find it cheaper elsewhere most of the time. For the rest, amazon is still cheaper, faster to deliver and easier to return

Yes, but not with the same shipping speed. Often temu/aliexpress requires you to wait week(s).

I wasn't thinking of Chinese goods. Their labour laws and prison camps are even more questionable.

amazon is just a middleman for the chinese goods. your objections apply to a fantastic number of amazon sellers.

Amazon enforces a Most Favored Nation (MFN) condition on sellers, basically implying that they cannot sell the same product elsewhere for cheaper. Funny enough - when Amazon pushes their fees higher, it means the prices go up everywhere, that's Amazon inflation.

https://www.proskauer.com/blog/amazons-most-favored-nations-...

so does this go for companies which sell electronics like phone companies etc. or since I think resellers sell it on amazon, maybe we don't have MFN condition?

But like, my question is, Doesn't this cripple every company which sells electronics on amazon or something?

I think amazon tries doing it to say that you would only get the best price here, thus people might buy from amazon which can then increase the sales making retailers believe they need to be on amazon agreeing to MFN policy and then crippling their custom market too I suppose

Are there any loopholes to this? What if I am a seller and then I can have lets say my book be on amazon for 100 bucks as an example and I can create a website where I sell it for 110$

But when someone signs up they can get a voucher for 20$ and then they can apply it for what I am selling which for them becomes 90$

I think amazon's MFN is monopolistic especially for things like books which is what amazon first was created for.

I kinda wish if there was a service where I can buy one time right to publish a book from the authors directly for like the books price and then be able to download it or print it from local competing printing/tech service shops..

It does cripple them, but only those Amazon can strong arm. There are some companies that refuse to sell on Amazon for this very reason - one example I know is Jellycats. MFN applies at reseller level - not at product level (obviously).

Yes, it is monopolistic - some call it technofeudalism, because Amazon owns the "land" and extract land rent out of it - with questionable service in return.

That's nonsense. People actually choose to use Amazon because their service is impeccable.

The argument about Amazon requiring cheaper prices is true in theory but in practice not strongly enforced. I just bought a kettle on Amazon instead of from another seller who had it 2 euros cheaper because I combined the purchase with other stuff that the seller didn't have. I have readily told people that some items they were buying could be found for cheaper on AliExpress, but they didn't care because they wanted the convenience and fast service. By the way, many of Amazon's suppliers sell the same product cheaper on AliExpress and other marketplaces; that completely kills the argument in the first place.

Amazon is successful because other companies were complacent and ignored the upcoming internet economy. Amazon built a very complex logistic system that took a very long time and a lot of investment to build. Now that they dominate, the lazy competitors cry about monopoly. In my country (France), the traditional supermarkets are just about now coming in with alternatives to compete, and they are very far off the mark for both service/selection and often price as well…

Can be said for all monopolies. I am not arguing that Amazon is not successful. They are so successful that they are now showing monopolistic behaviour.

The MFN principle is enforced - but only for the same reseller. The same product may be sold in another channel under another reseller, Amazon cannot touch that. AliExpress is surely outside of that scope. Also, EU managed to "convince" Amazon to stop MFN in principle in EU countries, practice is different (they don't enforce it, but give credit breaks) - it's still being enforced in USA and subject to legal challenges: https://www.johnstonclem.com/news-insights/amazon-antitrust-...

It's certainly not the case that you can just buy something outside of Amazon and it'll magically be 40% cheaper. For a long time Amazon pursued aggressive strategies to drive out competition and physical stores, leaving Amazon the most convenient or sometimes the only option.

Having built an extremely strong position, they can now increase prices and fees, and leverage power over sellers to stop them from listing lower prices off-Amazon, if they want to also sell on Amazon. See page 42 of https://web.archive.org/oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/... for an example of this

So, a competitor could also invest a lot, drive out competition, be the most convenient, build themselves an extremely strong position then reap the rewards ? This strategy can be replicated, thus is subject to market forces

The market today is extremely different to what the market looked like at the time Amazon worked their strategy, it was dominated mainly by physical retailers that may have required a long drive, things were not always stocked, limited choice on what's stocked on shelves. And ordering over a phone from paper catalogs had long delivery times and limited information beyond just a picture and short description. Amazon disrupted the industry by changing all of this and becoming the first major online retailer.

You won't be able to just replicate their strategy, and they've spent ridiculous amounts of money on next-day/same-day delivery infrastructure that nobody's gonna be able to invest that much. But if you do have any ideas on how to disrupt Amazon and be more convenient than them in 2025 let me know :)

So they worked a lot to get to the position here and no one else wants to make the same efforts. There's no easy play here

Plenty of people do want to make the efforts and have tried. Physical retailers like Walmart have opened online retail but adoption remains limited. Startups like Jet.com, Quidsi, Fab.com, Rakuten/Buy.com, Woot and many others have tried and failed to take on Amazon, leading to bankruptcy or being sold. The reality is that nobody can take on Amazon due to their slimy tactics but also nobody can realistically provide something to customers that Amazon doesn't already provide. Fees will keep increasing and costs inflating as much as Amazon wants, while customers are none the wiser and sellers can do nothing about it.

What you say is contradictory. If fees and prices are increasing on Amazon it means more potential for the competition if they can operate with lower margins. Amazon is winning because they toe the line, not because of an innate monopoly.

If you read the parent comments we've already established that Amazon punishes sellers for pricing lower on other platforms than Amazon, and Amazon's margins affect item pricing everywhere. You could have zero margins, you could have negative margins, Amazon will see that Seller X's items are available on your Amazon competitor for $2 while it's $20 on Amazon and say that they're in violation of policy. Unless you make it worthwhile for Seller X to abandon Amazon you will not be able to compete.

Sure, "a competitor" with hundreds of billions of dollars and a few decades to burn could, in theory, do that.

But what would be the payoff? Getting to compete head-to-head with Amazon? Amazon, that's a well-established incumbent, with a well-known pattern of ruthless dealings, including leveraging their ties with governments, to protect their monopoly?

No one's going to be able to make a profit doing that.

So, the market is good with this solution then. All good. Bit Techs are not Soviets.

(Note that my personal opinion is that Amazon profits / are protected thanks to governments through unfair IP / patents though)

"The market" is not a real entity with desires and opinions.

"The wisdom of the market" only works with an ideal free market, or something close to it.

Such a thing has a number of requirements, such as low/no barriers to entry, perfect information, elasticity of demand, etc.

Those do not exist here. No useful information on how things "should be" can be obtained from the fact that Amazon cannot meaningfully be challenged.

Your position, essentially, boils down to "however things are right now, if they're even remotely stable, that's how things should be, because that's what the market wants." Worship of the status quo.

I’m only criticising Varoufakis point of view and some people arguments here. Of course I have some things to say about Amazon… and yes information is never perfect

You can't realistically compete with a Monopoly like Amazon. They'll buy you out way before you can be an inconvenience to them, or drown you by artificially lowering their price until you go bankrupt if you refuse their deal. And even in the off-chance you somehow replace them, then great. We're back to square one.

  We're back to square one.

So, all good, we're not in Big Tech are Soviets.

I often dislike Varoufakis' weird champagne Marxist with libertarian and nationalism bent. But he is spot on this time: American Big Tech are a vampire squid on the Western economies. They have a good product but they are tyrants. It would be good to break them up and make open fair systems. But the American top 10%, including most of Congress, put most of their savings in their stocks so it will never happen in the current system. Ever.

And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.

https://archive.is/T8VQC

You can just close the pop-up and read the entire article. At least it worked here.

I've been saying this since before Yanis was even a Greek MP. It's just so damn ironic that capitalism and free markets ended up building these huge corporations which are essentially planned economies at nation state scale.

Yes. As someone who has grown up in a country occupied by communists and who knows how much worse is that than anything that can be imagined by someone without firsthand experience, I can say that the claim which was frequent in Western propaganda that communism is something opposed to capitalism is completely false.

There is a great difference between theoretical communism and practical communism. Theoretical communism was just a bunch of lies without any relationship to the practical communism that was implemented in any of the countries claiming to attempt to realize a communist society.

On the other hand, practical communism has been everywhere something not opposite to capitalism, but something equivalent with the final stage of unregulated capitalism, where the big monopolies have won in every market, leaving no alternatives.

During the last 25 years I have been dismayed to watch every year how the Western societies become more and more alike to the communist societies that they had criticized vigorously a half of century ago.

Well, he'd know being part of the system. Here is his WEF page. That door opens from the inside.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

Except everybody in the cabinaet disliked him.

https://www.politico.eu/article/alexis-tapis-yanis-varoufaki...

It's only ironic if you don't understand that all of this is the logical endpoint of any capitalist economy. Accumulation of capital is the name of the game, and capital is power. At some point, the largest actors inevitably become untouchable. There can be no free market, they will always devolve into this plutocracy.

Horseshoe theory strikes again. The end game of captialism and communism is the same authoritarian dictatorship

The most capitalist thing possibly happening at the heart of a capitalist empire is actually gobbunism guyz

Except the Soviet society wasn't very communist. It definitely wasn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

Funny how no self-proclaimed Communist party has ever achieved anything even approximating communism.

It's similar to the mythical "free market" in that way.

The free market today (so called) is heavily managed by governments, leading to a kind of centralised control which converges with what Marxism produces in practice. Neither deliver what they promise.

Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.

That is precisely my point, that is the only type of free market to ever exist, because it's an ideological construct.

The free market does exist, but not where it is supposed to. The black market sometimes acts as a free market... As do car boot/yard sales... Precisely because it is not interfered with by the authorities all the time. Putting everything online is going to increase government interference.

We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.

> Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.

Well yes, because it does. You dont even need a fully planned economy, some market forces aint bad and some small bourgeois aint bad either. Bird in a cage etc etc.

> We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that

Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.

Communism is no button you just have to push. It can be described as a society so prosperous that its members do not need to work anymore to live, where classes have been abolished and where the State has disappeared. It needs to be built and engineered. Countries like China and Vietnam are going in this right direction, and they are already more prosperous, more industrious and more democratic than their western adversaries despite starting from basically scratch

Soviet society was communist, don't fall for the real Communism has never been tried ruse. Soviet society was one of the examples of how Communism at a large scale can end up looking, others are e.g. Cambodia under Pol Pot, China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, Venezuela under Maduro, etc. The things these societies have in common is that they were/are repressive, that the Party/ the government claims it was/is working for 'the people' and that there was/is a clear distinction between Party members and the 'common folk' with the former having access to perks not available or allowed to the latter.

Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. It is there where Communism can work, at a small enough scale so that leechers and moochers can be put in their place and there is no (need for a) Party. As soon as the size of the Communi(ty) gets so large that any individual can no longer check on all of the others Commun(ism) no longer works since it offers far too many opportunities for less scrupulous individuals to leech of others and for ideologists to rise to power 'in service of the people'.

> Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans.

And yet, we don't live as such animals and our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".

> our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".

That 'inner animal' comes out the moment the shelves in the supermarkets are empty and the electronic payment systems are down. Those reasoning capabilities may have put a thin cultural veneer over the beast but it is still there, ready to defend itself and its own if push comes to shove as well it should - cultures have a way of collapsing when times get hard.

Tell that to China, Vietnam! Life's never been this sweet since they applied scientific socialism. It's been so successful there that Westerners are getting angry and they are accusing them of "flooding other markets" or of "overproduction". They caught up in less than 80 years! Imagine what they will be able to do in 50 years :)

> Imagine what they will be able to do in 50 years

"scientific socialism"... really?

Without a market for their goods they'll end up just where they started, ripe for a new revolution.

"Scientific" is opposed to "idealistic" in the Marxian traditions. It opposes anarchism and social reformists. It is scientific because it seeks to understand the root causes of all major human historical events that passed and those that have yet to happen. And until now, history gave reason to Historical and Dialectical Materialism, which are respectively the scientific and philosophical pillars of Marxism.

Regarding the markets, considering their ever growing export sector, I wouldn't worry too much for now ;)

"Scientific" socialism versus what you label as "idealistic" socialism is the equivalent of Protestantism versus Catholicism: two iterations of a religion (it is not that commonplace yet to see Marxism and the Hegelian dialectics from which it originated as non-theistic religions but replace 'god' with 'man-as-god' and you'll understand the comparison). Both Catholics as well as Protestants consider their religion the true one while the others may have heard the bell but are lost when it comes to locating the clapper. The same goes for all your various strains of Marxism, good for endless philosophising by academics as well as for being regurgitated by Lenin's [1] 'useful idiots'. How many angels can stand on the point of a pin? Does historical materialism show the inevitability of the end of Capitalism? Philosophise away but don't forget that's all it is: philosophising without basis in actual reality.

[1] whether Lenin ever used the phrase I'll leave in the middle but the concept stands

It was founded by Marxists to fulfil Marxist dogma. Either Soviet Marxism was not as predictive of reality as it liked to pretend to be or it compromised itself. Any system which says "my way or the highway", and that it alone is scientific, is inevitably going to lead to lead to oppression in practice whether it's Marxist dogma or the subject of this article.

Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.

That's a nice parallel to the article, which points out that the biggest fans of capitalism haven't managed to actually create their predicted free markets.

Pure ideology.

And when do something approaching free markets we get things like the Bengal and Irish famines.

Bengal's famine occurred because British imperial government (not market forces) shifted food resources away to support the war effort. Ireland's famine occurred within a largely feudal system, and has been followed by massive land reforms within Ireland. It is arguable if either occurred due to "free market forces". For what it's worth, the massive famines in the USSR and PRC didn't take place due to free market forces either.

The problem with the free market vs Marxism argument is that they are both materialist. These systems know the price of things and real value of nothing.

At least in the context of the Irish famine, capitalist policies were a key driver: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43910575

I cannot reply to the link in the Irish famine above. Very debatable if most of Ireland was "capitalist" at the time especially outside the cities. It was mostly feudal, with an anglicised (or effectively English) aristocracy and peasantry, operating in basically the same way that they had done in the Middle Ages.

For the purposes of discussing the article, Yanis's grasp of working class realities is moot; his thesis is that:

  From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state

I don't agree with that interpretation either. The USA is not very feudal at all, yet. I live in a country which is still partly feudal and was even more feudal when I was a child. Ordinary Americans often have a very different attitude to life, less deferent to government than more feudal countries, and more independent minded.

It may well head towards technofeudalism, but I dispute that. With automation, the peasantry become dispensable to the ruling class and that isn't very feudal at all. Feudalism is a system where money and power flows upwards. In feudalism, the lords are dependent on the peasantry for food, goods and troops... Which is not the case when all these are provided by machines.

The most capitalist thing possible/unregulated scenario happened and was called the East India Company.

Hear me out. What if it’s not capitalism as a whole but one specific facet. Debt.

> In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running.

In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns.

But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances.

> Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development

I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation.

YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc…

And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage.

Uber, AirBnB etc..

Surely though Schumpeter must have been right when it comes to new industrial projects where the technology is already well-understood, maybe research in universities or similar?

Yes, there are a lot of situations where that is true. And as you say industrial projects, and I assume you specifically mean heavy industries, like building a new type of airliner. I agree.

But when it comes to information technology those situations are far and few in between.

Yes, but I think it also applies to things like transformer-doomscaling, as emphasized by OpenAI, for example.

I think it's unfair to think that growing a small service or operating system to a billion users doesn't require innovation. The skills and requirements to grow a company from 1 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,000,000, 1,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 are going to be different. It makes sense to me that there are companies who specialize in growing companies of a particular size. And innovating around the problems of doing so.

How is youtube's recomendation system, automatic subtitles (including translation), or content id system not innovative? These were key technological improvements required for the service to grow to a massive size.

When was the last time YouTube did anything innovative? Aren't they just an ossified bureaucracy now?

The Soviets, too, innovated. Sputnik shock and all that. But at some point the structures were just too rigid - just like they have become in Big Tech capitalism.

Much of the Soviet space programme was down to the personal brilliance of Sergei Korolev and other such figures, and large dollops of intelligence taken from the Germans and the Americans. Definitely the greatest Soviet achievement, but Korolev died prematurely due to his time in a prison camp and their manufacturing sector often let them down.

YouTube is quite innovative, by the way, just not in the way it should be. Its comments sections change on a frequent basis allowing for ever more complex shadow banning and censorship systems. Its search algorithms also tend to exclude certain channels and big up others.

I’d love to learn more about the Soviet Space programme. Short of asking my favorite LLM, are there any books / articles you’d recommend?

I can't remember the titles offhand unfortunately. Bear in mind that a lot of details didn't come out until the 1990s due to Soviet censorship. The BBC did a great documentary on Korolev about thirty years ago when some details came out.

Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements. Some of the ones that people forget include first probe and first automated rover on the Moon, first space station, first probe on Mars, first rover and picture from Mars (albeit scrambled), also first pictures from the surface of another planet (Venus)

NASA tried to claim recently it had the first sound from another planet (Mars) and airborne probe (helicopter). The Soviets had already transmitted audio from Venus in the 1980s and had a balloon there.

Thanks for the response. Lots of rabbit holes for my kids and I to explore. First up for this weekend is this -> "Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race" found here https://ihavenotv.com/cosmonauts-how-russia-won-the-space-ra....

> Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements.

So true. Kids and I are slowly working through the Gelfand correspondence course (math) and it's amazing.

Do you not think the achievements of YT are down to the personal brilliance of its engineers?

And what you describe is fiddling with knobs at best, not actual new innovative features.

A lot of that innovation benefits only YouTube . Also these other innovations (recommendation system, translations etc) existed before YouTube.

There are definitely innovations from the big companies but not “key” innovations.

In the article it looks at innovation from a national level. I.e new products and services, and methodology.

The scaling you describe is great but its only impact is within YouTube, and it’s not unique. Every other company of that size has also figured their own way to scale. No one was depending on YouTube for this.

Almost everything can be termed innovation, but we need to be mindful that we are trying to justify the existence of monopolies. Ie “society needs them otherwise we couldn’t figure it out”. With that the threshold for innovation increases quite a bit.

That's not really what Adam Smith proposes in "the Wealth of Nations" by the way.

Despite claims to the contrary, we live in a system where government and big business are coalescing. In fact, they make many decisions together behind closed doors at the World Economic Forum, which Yanis Varoufakis is a member of. (You don't get into Davos unless you are either a) invited from the inside or b) pay vast amounts of money to attend.)

https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/

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