Well actually…
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Marketing people are the management sand between the engineer roller and the user bearing track, needed to ensure that the future doesn’t arrive too fast. The reason progress is so fast in wartime is because marketing people are taken out of the bearings and sent to pursue their favourite military metaphors in command of rifle platoons.
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To me that kind of thinking falls for the fallacy that because things evolved the way they did, without explicit public spending it simply would never have happened. It’s absurd to think that without government, to pick one example, no one would have ever had the idea to network computers into one big network, or to build computers in the first place just because for many years governments were a driving force in computer development. Everything would have happened differently in ways that we might not be able to imagine, so it could have turned out better or worse, but it’s absurd to think humanity would just leave that revolutionary development on the table.
Not that government has no role of course, the elaborate artifice of a stable society including enforcement of property rights is necessary to get to the point where successful investment build upon successful investment that leads to things like computers.
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Doesn’t that assume that X was inevitable in the first place, rather than acknowledge that how we structure our societies shapes the outcomes and possibilities? That the world we exist in was built by us (meaning human beings, not you and me as individuals).
This is not to say that revolutionary changes to society aren’t possible without governments, but that often big scale projects are the result of large institutions like governments in the modern age - let’s stick with your example, of computing and the net. We know this is true because we have the historical evidence to back that up - we can see the connections between the government, universities, and individuals in the private sector. As @anon50609448 noted, the private market did not nearly as much as public spending did, in the modern age. And lets not forget that corporations are brought into being by and benefit from government. None of that means that it could not have evolved otherwise, but that it would probably be something very different in nature and not what it is.
[ETA] On market place once, I was listening to a story about how many corporations are overly focused on short term gains now rather than on a longer view, and the person they were interviewing made a salient point, that corporations (and any large scale institutions) are specifically made to allow for long term projects to be created and sustained by humanity. In other words, the purpose of governments, corporations, universities, etc, are meant to be focused on thinking long term and the short term, quarterly thinking really stymies that goal.
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You and several others seem to think I am endorsing capitalism somehow, and I am not. Please argue what I have actually said, not what you’ve (incorrectly) inferred, if you would.
The German Schutzkontakt system is still perfectly usable. My least favorite plugs are the very early ones that are threaded to fit an Edison bulb socket.
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That all brings to mind this video:
The UK style plug is an absolutely great design. Until you stand on one.
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Even later, with the rise of kingdoms/nations, those large entities are simply extensions of the “tribe”/“clan”, although our basic nature causes frays and cracks at the edges, when we do so.
and
At the tribal level, yes, “pure” communism works just fine both in theory and in actual example, throughout history to the present. But attempting to generalize the tribal level to governing an entire nation simply doesn’t work very well, as history (and sociology) also shows us.
Appear to me at least to be contradictory in terms. Are kingdoms/nations simply extensions of tribal/clan relations, or are they not? Further, capitalism as theory requires generalizing not just individual behavior, but “tribal” (group) behavior as well- this is what is meant in practice by things like markets and people being inherently rational. If I’m misreading your position here, I’ll need clarification. With that out of the way…
What’s “natural” is how we, as a species, have acted since the dawn of history, especially before organized agriculture, and that was as tribal/clan-based groups, which has persisted to this day. Even later, with the rise of kingdoms/nations, those large entities are simply extensions of the “tribe”/“clan”, although our basic nature causes frays and cracks at the edges, when we do so.
To argue that pre-agrarian human “nature” is the same as it is now is to claim that our “nature” itself is somehow beyond the grasp of the evolutionary forces that govern everything else. I agree with @anon50609448, who said it much better.
“Capitalism” is, in some form, probably inevitable for a very long time, since we really don’t know how to “do” an economy that doesn’t involve capital in some form at a large scale.
There’s no probable about it, it happened- capitalism is a stage in the evolution of human economy. However, we certainly do know how to do things, big and small, without any capital at all. You’re committing a genetic fallacy common amongst conservative economists- the argument that capitalism can be retroactively applied to past systems. To put it simply, Rome did not build aqueducts with capital; slaves (mostly) built them with rocks and concrete. For further evidence, The Great Wall of China, The Port of Carthage, Machu Picchu. These were all large scale projects built for specific economic purpose that required the coordination of large quantities of resources and labor, and zero quantities of capital.
At the tribal level, yes, “pure” communism works just fine both in theory and in actual example, throughout history to the present.
Pre-agragrian tribal social relations were highly egalitarian, what Marx coined primitive communism, and are not relevant to modern times, and doesn’t describe what Marx considered communism to be.
There has yet to exist a society which has evolved into a communist form socio-political organization (Marxist or not,) so we simply can’t say that communism will work or not based solely on the existence of any state body past or present. For the most part, IMO what we’ve really gained from the failures of the USSR and the like is a greater body of knowledge on the failures of totalitarianism, not communism.
But please do explain how we’re going to run a national economy without money, the essential root of capitalism.
Well, can you just as easily explain to me how capitalism will solve the current, existential economic crises of today?
This is absurd. What we need to do is study the data, take into account material reality, and act accordingly. In other words, treat economics as science, not some hoo-doo bullshit about what may or may not be human nature. Further, money isn’t the root of capitalism, the root is in the dang word. Money and capital, while often intertwined, are not the same thing. Money is one form of stored value. Capital is any form of stored-value which can be used to create more capital, organized by relative liquidity. Money happens to be the most liquid form of capital, at least much of the time (but not in instances of hyper inflation/deflation.) Your car, if you own one, can be considered a form of capital. Five dollars in your wallet is not, generally speaking, capital. $1000 dollars in your bank account is capital, but how much value that capital holds to you versus how much value it represents to the bank is significantly different. To you, if that $1000 might gain you $15 bucks in a year on 1.5% interest.
Then, how you’re going to “govern” a country with zero centralized power (communism)
The short answer is I’m not, because that’s a contradiction. There is no state in communism. Are people capable of self-governance, and working together in free association to meet group needs on a larger scale? I don’t know! This is the million dollar question, ain’t it? I do happen to believe that we certainly are capable. I’m just not sure if we’ll survive long enough to find out.
how you’re going to regulate UNregulated markets (no, the “magic hand of Adam Smith” is not sufficient)
Well, you’re never going to hear any socialist worth their salt try to argue Smithian mythology.
A market is mechanism by which goods/resources may be exchanged. Regulation exists to safeguard property concerns in the market. The exchange of goods and resources in a socialist economy stand for the equal benefit of everyone, so most of the concerns of regulation under capitalism are not present. Does there need to be a mechanism to keep individuals or groups from hoarding at the trough, so to speak? Sure, this I’ll grant. But we wouldn’t need a seatbelt law, because in a socialist economy we already would’ve determined that cars with seatbelts are safer than cars without and acted accordingly because everyone benefits from seatbelts, instead of a handful of fat-cat shitheads raking extra pennies off the pot through their intransigence to reform. The point is, many of the problems we perceive of the market are actually problems of capitalism.
without generating a ruling mafia class (libertarianism)
Anarcho- or minarcho- capitalists are bat-shit. No arguments here.
It’s an old saw, but apropos: Just about everything Marx said about communism, he got wrong. Just about everything he said about capitalism, however, is spot-on.
If it’s an old saw, it’s also rusty and chipped in tooth. We don’t know what if anything Marx said of Communism is wrong. We know that state-induced attempts to create the conditions which Marx theorized would give rise to a communist society have failed (the jury is still out on Cuba.)
I look at Marx as the Newton of economic science- he was the first to attempt analyze these forces with quantifiable, reproducible methods. Whether he was wrong or right about any specific facet of capitalism is far less important than the fact that he said we don’t have to treat economics like metaphysics, built on some strange natural forces we simply can’t understand. Newton may have been wrong about the fundamental nature of gravity, but this does not diminish one anion his contributions to physics.
We also need to realize that capitalism IS NOT directly contradictory to any other governing “-ism” because, unlike the rest, it isn’t a form of government; rather, it’s purely an economic system.
Naw. Capitalism, like any other formulation of economy, interacts with socio-political organizations, reflects back on them, and is reflected on by those organizations. Of course capitalism isn’t a form of government. Neither is socialism. Feudalism wasn’t, either.
But no large social structures exist in any sort of pure form, isolated from the others. The only pure form of any ideology exists on paper, never in praxis.
Edit: This essay in the Atlantic provides another P.O.V. to the discussion of choice and rationality.
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That’s exactly the point of having so many meaningless variations: so that the average customer can’t really compare. Free market can’t work properly without symmetry of information, but by giving the buyer too much information to treat, you can make sure that free market doesn’t work properly most of the time, which is better for the seller’s bottom line.
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Well, they are pretty chunky, for sure. But the quality of the plastic used varies quite a lot these days (try http://www.urbancottageindustries.com/light-fixtures/plugs-sockets-switches?p=1 for some good quality plugs), and some folks have been designing folding plugs for USB functionality. I have the ‘Worldwide Traveller’ version of https://www.themu.co.uk/ and swear by it - I can easily switch between UK, EU and US forms by snapping off the ‘pin’ end and attaching the required one. I also find the folding UK plug very convenient. My only complaint would be that it lacks an Asia/Australia pin set (which I think could be solved with modification to the US adaptor) and the ‘click’ to connect each adaptor should be firmer - sometimes it’s possible to accidentally disconnect it in use, although so far I’ve never exposed the internal pins in doing so.
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For me it is all about laziness.
As someone who has to clean his own toilet, I prefer to pee sitting down. So much less splatter, and thus much less cleaning.
But, if you pee sitting down the bottom of the front of a normal toilet see collects splashback/spray. At least it does for me, maybe I just have a very powerful stream. Anyway, a horseshoe shape means the spray just falls on the rim of the toilet bowl where it is (a) easily visible and (b) easily wiped with some toilet paper. No secret pee residue collecting invisibly on the underside of the toilet seat.
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Thank you so much! We thought Mr. Smith was a treasure. I will send that to my sister -in-law.
Leila
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