FWIW, when Lincoln ran for president as an opponent of slavocracy and Slave Power, he believed that one of the most difficult pro-slavery argument he had to contend with was the slippery slope argument that slavery couldn't be unjust, because if it were, wage earning would have to be unjust too, because there's virtually no difference between the two practices (and at least slaves were treated better than wage earners, so some at the time argued, because slaves were provided with basic necessities such as shelter, clothes, etc).

And Marx argued that serfdom was preferable to wage labor, for many of the same reasons (adding to it the fact that serfs were entitled to their surplus).

Enough contemporaries of indentured servitude argued that it wasn’t worse than wage labor to make me suspicious that, yeah, uh,

Don’t mistake me for arguing in favour of slavery. I’m arguing against wage labor, period.

Huh, I guess that's one way to spin what I'm doing. Certainly the sort of thing someone would say if they were trying desperately to register (for some strange reason) that they disagree with another person, despite it already being established that they agree on the main point of contention...

Did you know that in the antebellum south, slaves were considered too valuable to perform any of the really dangerous jobs. Instead they hired wage laborers to do them, especially Irish people.

I suppose that's a dispositional difference between us. I don't think there's anything particularly just or fair about wage labor, and I'm sympathetic to arguments against it, but as far as my political instincts go, it seems like a practice that's so firmly established that arguing the world would be better without it is like arguing the world would be better without laws of thermodynamics. It's a way in which my sense of the horizons of the possible are thoroughly shaped by liberalism, I suppose.

I guess if you own laborers it creates financial incentives to protect your property rather than to treat your labor as expendable because there's an inexhaustible supply of additional labor.

Well my argument is that capitalism is inherently exploitative and coercive, and that its successes lifting people out of poverty are grossly overstated (e.g. by not imputing incomes from subsistence farming etc.) and even then takes credit for advances not exclusive to it (like industrialization). It really didn’t seem you were agreeing with me about this, so I apologize if I have misunderstood you.

Like, remember that shoe startup that promised to send a pair of shoes to the developing world for each pair sold in the developed world? And then the press went there and it was like, “um, we do have shoes here, thanks”.

Edit: Because I just wanna make it clear, for most of the year subsistence farmers in the developing world only spend a couple of hours a day on farming. The rest of the time they spend doing other forms of labor, including wage labor or light industry. You’ve been posting about this like dirt eating savages scratching a living off the land when that’s not at all what’s going on, it’s more like: you have your job, and if the crop goes well you don’t have to spend your money on food next year. None of this kind of labor is accounted by GDP so it’s also invisible to the World Bank. This is what I mean when I say incomes aren’t imputed to include it. Without an accurate accounting it is impossible to actually know whether you’re better off making a dollar a day. All we do know for sure is that the option for unaccountable income is being taken away, and when you do that, per capita GDP “magically” rises.

I’m not saying subsistence farming is better than industrial agriculture either. I’m not advocating for people to start gardens. What I’m really advocating for is people in developed super high productivity countries to start getting a piece of their productivity. Even subsistence farmers in the third world get that.

Well, my argument was just that while capitalism involves exploitation and coercion, it's not simply bad, and that that is evidenced by the fact that there are some practitioners of subsistence farming in developing countries who actually find industrial society to be more promising and to offer a better future than subsistence farming, and elect to move to cities in the midst of industrial transformation in order to escape their "traditional" ways of living, because, as bad as industrial capitalism is, subsistence farming is even worse. And while capitalism and industrialism are not the same thing, it is capitalism that has enabled many people to escape subsistence farming, by bringing capital and economic opportunity to the developing world.

I find it interesting that in common parlance, even on the left, the terms 'capitalism' and 'industrialization' are very often conflated. In part I imagine because separating the two is (I imagine) historically artificial, perhaps requiring the construction of something called 'socialism' as an alternative. Or maybe I am missing a whole chapter (fictional or otherwise) of pre-capitalist, post-industrial society.

The communists would be very unlikely to conflate the two.

That's certainly true I'd need to confess. And yet communists are often the ones at the receiving end of some of the most extreme criticism of those on the left, mostly (from what I gather) because industrial, Stalinist centralized planning is also about a hierarchical society built around the concentration of capital in the hands of a select few (thus making many of the critiques of capitalism made by the left equally applicable to communism as to capitalism). (C.f., Animal Farm?)

At any rate, communism seems to me something that couldn't have existed without capitalism (obviously, considering who came up with the idea, of course), and involves a minor shifting of ownership of the already concentrated capital.

Interesting, to think then that maybe the best critiques of concentration of capital apply equally well to capitalism and communism. The libertarians who cite Hayek and even Mises should all flock to the left in solidarity against centralized planning, public and private alike. Without going neo-Nazi

Marx viewed the revolutionary road to communism as founded on developed capitalist countries, but that doesn’t rule out industrializing other countries for the purpose of making them communist (indeed, communism was meant to be something that would spread, and industrializing the target was necessary to achieve it). This is because communism is meant to be a post-industrial, post-scarcity system where labor and capital returns don’t make sense anymore.

This is distinct from Stalinist state capitalism, which also industrialized, but for the purpose of extracting labor from the public and directed to the benefit of the political elite.

The only cogent criticism of communism is that such a system is impossible. Because, yeah, post scarcity systems are impossible. If it were possible, though, it would be amazing. You’d basically have to be a monster (rapacious capitalist) to oppose it.

I’m reminded of when you recently corrected me about how Stalin wasn’t really communist because he didn’t adhere to the orthodox Marxist notion that you can’t jump from feudalism to communism without capitalism first. Where does the distinction between capitalism and industrialization fit with all that?

EDIT: nevermind I think the question was answered in your intervening post.

Actually, I take the edit back. It answers the question about Stalinism but not the question about Marxism. I’m not really sure how “industrialization for the purpose of communism” is supposed to differ from capitalism in practice while it still wouldn’t be possible for communism to arise except from out of capitalism.

Well, according to Jon`C's post, I think it follows that any state claiming to actually be communist is going to be a fraud (since post-scarcity societies can't actually exist), and probably going to starve or murder by the thousands or millions. Which would explain why that has been the case in actual history anyway.

Post scarcity systems being impossible seems intuitive and obvious to me, but I would be interested in hearing some elaboration on why this is the case from the two of you who mentioned it.

Marx argued that a communist revolution couldn’t start in a poor country. You’ll have to take it up with him.



Trivially, because there are always limits on how much you can take. Whether today, where it’s primarily bounded by the labor output of humanity, tomorrow when it’s bounded by accessible material, or the distant future where it’s bounded by the total energy of the universe. All things are limited and all economic systems will need to decide how to allocate those limited things.

More concretely, only one of us can marry the girl in our home room class with the biggest ****.

You can’t cheap out on this problem by saying something like “well what if humans become more enlightened and voluntarily consume less”. That’s still an allocation strategy.

1. No such thing as unlimited energy in the universe, and even with fusion we have scarcity of real estate (not to mention natural resource, such as certain elements).
2. Value is subjective. There are only so many signed Mickey Mantle baseball cards.

That said, one way to emulate a post scarcity society would be to murder every potential consumer who tries to pay for goods or services (are you reading, Skynet?).

Yeah, I guess you can’t have scarcity if you have 0 demand. Life hacks.

One way of eliminating all demand is to live in simulation

Or more seriously replace anything that is normally a scarce resource with a freely replicable simulacrum. More concretely, all of us us can "marry" the 2D anime girl with the biggest ****.

Although this is somewhat facetious, because this just reduces demand to a point, since simulacra are inferior replacements of the real thing.

WE FOUND THE PEE-PEE TAPE (NSFW)

heh, not really: slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/inside-the-convincing-fake-trump-pee-tape.html

Seems like a dodge. Are there historical instances of industrialization that you can point to that aren’t capitalist? (Either state capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, or otherwise?)

So much of our media now collapses the distinction between fact and fiction. Add technology like VR, which can have the effect of undermining your sense of reality, and maybe capitalism collapsing under its own contradictions just means Enlightenment rationalism transforming into mania and technologically enabled lucid dreaming.

If you aren't happy with me redirecting your question about an imaginary/grossly misunderstood post to the works of the author I was probably originally citing, I doubt I can make you happy by doing your homework too.

Hmm, trivially it’s of course true that everything is limited, but still... Like, one crucial difference between communism and capitalism is that, because the economy is a post-scarcity economy, there is no need to compete over resources, and so politics, which is defined as a way of negotiating how society allocates resources, is obsolete. But isn’t there an imaginable threshold where there is enough abundance to make politics obsolete, even if resources are not technically infinite? Like you can imagine a power source that’s not technically infinite but that greatly exceeds the capacity of humans to exhaust.

And doesn’t the home room thing fall outside or what Marx is talking about? Communism would entail such a thorough transformation of society that even interactions between individuals not pertaining to the distribution of resources could not possibly involve conflict? It seems like “the end of politics” should only pertain to commodities.

Oh hey, speaking of 'cancel culture'. Thank you Cody for teaching old people like me what the whippersnappers are angry about on Twitter now!

Oh yes, and where exactly does Spinoza talk about the deus sive natura? Oh, in the complete works of Spinoza? I see, how foolish of me, I should have done my homework.

Marx doesn’t necessarily have anything to say about historical instances of non-capitalist industrial societies, and they may well have existed since he died. You made a big hooplah about how different capitalism and industrialization are in this thread, and while they’re obviously definitionally different concepts, I’m asking you if there are historical instances of non-capitalist industrialization.

Fascism?

I don't use twitter, don't ask me

Now that I'm at a keyboard I'd like to clarify a few things you don't seem to tunderstand:

Stalin considered himself a true communist, and when he came into power he purged the party of moderates who he felt were compromising on the mission. He considered his system communist or transitional to communism. European communists derided it as state capitalism, arguing that true communism (and socialism) cannot be definition exist when the means of production are owned by private individuals, whether a monopoly by an individual dictator who embodies the state, or by a group of investors under more conventional modes of capitalism. This is a subject of debate, but generally speaking western socialists and communists continue to hold the same view today, that the Soviet Union was never communist, while the Soviet Union and western capitalists agree with each other that it was/is. You can decide for yourself which group is applying which label for their own political convenience.

Marx didn't say any such thing. Capitalism is not a prerequisite, but the communist manifesto does argue that capitalism makes the developed world more vulnerable to a universal revolution:

"By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others."

Marx did argue that a poor nation couldn't successfully start the revolution, for a few different reasons. One being that they wouldn't be able to provide the kind of quality of life that would tip the developed countries over, something he viewed as essential for spreading communism. European communists were always broadly skeptical about an attempted revolution in Russia, and by all accounts it turned out about as well as they'd expected.

I don't understand this question. Consult your dictionary, I guess? Capitalism and industrialization are different words and have different meanings. Industrialization is a mode of manufacturing. Capitalism is an ownership structure.

What question?

Non sequitur / answered above.

That guy on that somemorenews youtube show... really makes just think of this:

You actually enjoy this and find it informative? It’s just a guy complaining and making a bunch of exasperated declarative statements for 24 minutes while rehashing arguments you’d find in a Vox article on this subject. (I assume, I only watched about 5 before I decided it was intolerable.)

Yeah... I found it extremely grating, and cringe that people actually think they're smart for laughing at it.

I dunno... his fascism videos at least seemed relatively well-researched given what they were trying to do, but this is... blech!



Yeah!

You can’t cheap out on this problem by saying something like “well what if humans become more enlightened and voluntarily consume less”. That’s still an allocation strategy.

No, what you should have done is make sure you didn't hallucinate a thing before asking me follow-up questions about it. If you ask an insane question, you're probably not going to get an answer you like.

Roman collegia and the later college systems were organized methods of large-scale goods manufacturing, existing well before the development of capitalism. If they'd had the steam engine back then, there's no real reason that structure couldn't have continued.

For examples specifically about or following the industrial revolution, it's important to keep in mind that capitalism arose in response to the industrial revolution, not vice-versa. Hereditary manors couldn't extract as much surplus labor from serfs as industrialists could. The lords switched jobs.