For all the talk conservatives give about private enterprise creating jobs, they can never reconcile that with their love of increased profits. Automation boosts profits by sacrificing jobs, every bit as much as downsizing. The government can create jobs, conservatives just don’t want it to. (Plus you can’t expect the unemployed to start their own businesses when they can’t even afford health care.)
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As with all automation, what it does (if done right) is buy us time. Nothing wrong with that if we use some of the time to figure out the next step necessary to stave off the collapse.
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As much as I appreciate the design of the hammer-and-sickle, we really should abandon it for something with less baggage.
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She has brought more people into the party, and gotten way more people interested in politics again, than she has alienated. Because people listen to her and say “yes, that’s how the world works” - and so they take her proposed solutions seriously, and think about them.
AOC is not a visionary, she is an accurate observer who proposes solutions that fit the problems they are supposed to correct.
And of course many people with power in the Democratic party will try to derail her - they’ve done that before to lots of good politicians who worked for the good of the country instead of the good of Democratic politicians. Hopefully they will not succeed this time, but they will certainly try. Her high public profile may save her - or may be the tool they use to slime her. We’ll see how it all works out, but I’m rooting for her.
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Marx never paid attention, and struggled in class.
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Nice to have an audio version, that was an unexpected treat.
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She’s the best, isn’t she.
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It’s always bugged me how Star Trek can’t figure out what its own economy is supposed to look like, when hubristic pronouncements over how we’ve fixed all human problems are such a central feature of the franchise.
Isn’t that exactly the point? They can’t show how the Star Trek universe made a utopia because the scriptwriters don’t know. So being as vague as possible is the best way.
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I was hoping someone would mention this.
So perhaps somebody who has read Marx much more recently than I have could weigh in, but I’ve always seen his main value as being predictive of the consequences of capitalism, where taking him as prescriptive has been a source of lots of pain and failed social experiments. Communist revolution (perhaps not by that name explicitly) is the logical consequence of unrestrained capitalist excess in a society, but the revolution is a symptom of the problem, not the solution to the problem. Revolutions almost always lead to “meet the new boss, same as the old boss" because getting rid of the bastards without a solid plan for what comes next just leaves a bastard vacuum.
The idea that we must dismiss Marx completely at risk of being labeled a pinko commie traitor is a huge disservice. All revolutions happen because the social contract becomes a too overwhelmingly bad deal for the average person to stomach it, and all those with unrestrained power naturally tend towards unbalancing the social contract to their own advantage. People will revolt not because they are “communists” or have read Marx, but because you’ve squeezed them so hard they can’t breathe, and continuing to play by your rules is practical suicide.
The lesson is, if those with the power to dictate the social contracts view that power as a license for unlimited exploitation instead of an obligation to responsible stewardship of that contract, then they will not enjoy that power for long on a historical timescale. It isn’t for the communists to “hasten the revolution.” That’s what the capitalists (and the governments that host them) accomplish by stubbornly refusing to take the lesson and moderate themselves. Collapsing into inevitable revolution isn’t a goal to aspire to. It’s the failure to evolve a just society by being reasonable and humane in the first place.
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The thing about fully automated lamprey luxury communism is that the primary reason that the recessions and collapse of shoe factories, the need for profit*, has been eliminated. If the only point of the shoe factory is to make shoes, with no involuntary human labor, then there will be no reason to worry about insufficient customers, or new technologies or their asymmetries, or competition at all.
* Exponentially increasing profit at that.
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Remember: racism is a weapon deployed by those in power to divert class conflicts into race conflicts.
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The view through the Overton window has improved dramatically since AOC came on the scene. And that already is a dramatically powerful achievement.
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Which is her explicitly avowed intent.
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That’s a relatively common trope in dystopian fiction. Present a world where all serious problems have been solved but claim it is horrible because some of intangible thing like “lack of purpose” or “the lack of the right to be unhappy” or some such nonsense. First World problems at their most banal.
That being, said, while Player Piano isn’t the best Vonnegut work (it was his first novel, after all), I did like the bit where is it is implied that nearly everybody had a doctorate. Vonnegut was writing when an university degree was beginning to be required for a lot of jobs that didn’t traditionally require one, and he was implying that educational inflation would continue onward.
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Aren’t we at the point where shoe factories did all that and became speculative real estate concerns in some type of optimism-performative vulture-picking-at-the-bones of our sad economic present?
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I would suggest the seemingly minor change “[R]acism was a weapon deployed by those in power to divert class conflicts into race conflicts.” The thing about racism, and more specifically white supremacy and the whole notion of “whiteness”, is that its effects are an self-perpetuating multi-generational pox on our society and is under no individual’s or group’s control. We have no choice to but to confront both of these problems, the rot of racist attitudes woven into our societies stories and, at the same time, the invidious individuals who are clinging to their illegitimately derived power.
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You are putting words in my mouth.
That is a shitty habit.
That is a great explanation. My worries are that mobilized public influence often times snaps back.
I don’t want to see the Democratic Party put an end to AOC in such a fashion. So I am only offering the thought to temper the blade before welding it.
True enough. But I’d argue even further that both “is” and “was” are the problem.
I was thinking about this the other day vis-a-vis eminent domain and the highway system. A lot of land seizures were explicitly framed in terms of “improving sanitary conditions of depressed neighborhoods”, which is code for “clearing out the undesirable races”. But even if racism weren’t part of the equation for where to plop down a highway, what land has the lowest value? And what residents have the least legal power to fight an eminent domain claim? Vulnerable communities are, by definition, vulnerable.
The insidious part of institutionalized racism is that it keeps going after you get rid of the racism.
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