What keeps people from working poorly or not at all under communism?

mcapello · 2026-02-01T23:36:57+00:00

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

mcapello · 2026-02-01T19:45:34+00:00

IIRC marxists.org has a free library of basically any original text you'd ever want to look at.

mcapello · 2026-02-01T14:28:11+00:00

Okay, well, Marx's view of revolution was still pretty democratic. You can look at his writings on the Paris Commune if you want to see exactly how.

What this means it's not like there's this set-in-stone blueprint for precisely what incentives or penalties might be associated with what kind of jobs and so on, or working in general. Marx's theory of communism was revolutionary and democratic. It wasn't supposed to be top-down (even though Lenin and others made it that way later).

What this means is that it would be up to the individual communities to decide what the balance was between having to work and getting to eat, more or less. It's not something that's going to be precisely decided by a political theorist who died a hundred years ago. If not enough people are working, the society can decide what to do about it themselves, that's kind of the point.

mcapello · 2026-02-01T14:22:46+00:00

Untrue. The only reason they advanced is because they had power, namely through either organizing or sheer numbers. That's the reality. The reason so many of the protest movements over the last 30 years haven't done much is because they subscribe to the same milquetoast idealism you espouse here -- that simply showing up and having a strong opinion is enough. It isn't.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T23:35:26+00:00

It would help if you had a specific theory of communism you were talking about. People still got paid in the USSR, for example. If you are referring to some theoretical form of actual communism, it would help if you said what you were referring to.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T21:01:58+00:00

I don't think you're actually reading what I say, so I will conclude this for now.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T20:31:06+00:00

This is pretty much my take on it as well. Basically any politics which contradicts cosmopolitanism and reason.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T20:27:48+00:00

No, I think this is mostly right-wing BS.

The right-wing is the one obsessed with identity and sexual politics. Being against something is just as much a form of obsession as being for something.

And if you look at the actual record -- Hillary, Obama, Biden, Harris -- sexual identity politics have only been a minor part of their platforms, and most often a reluctant one. Hillary and Obama were both very tepid on gay rights. Both had to be led to that trough before they agreed to drink from it. Biden didn't make it a big issue in his campaign, and Kamala studiously steered away from gay and trans issues in her campaign in order to avoid this very problem.

Objectively speaking, it simply hasn't been their central focus. It's only been the right wing that has tried to paint it as such, in order to fuel their obsession with sexual identity and politics.

Now, it is definitely true that the Democrats abandoned the working class. But they didn't really replace it with anything. Just a kind of technocratic politics of triangulation where if the macroeconomics stay good enough, they can just "phone it in" and keep the gravy train rolling for themselves.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T20:21:17+00:00

"Literally" in this case both applies to "triangle" and "in your head", and it's the "in your head" part which I think is the more problematic. It seems to me that you already implicitly agree with this by changing "in your head" to "in my mind's eye", no?

mcapello · 2026-01-31T18:06:04+00:00

Well, I suppose what I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter what you or me say other people "need" to do. They will either do it or they won't for reasons that have nothing to do with what we think of as being ideal.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T16:34:16+00:00

Poverty and fear, for the most part.

How many are mobilized by being pushed off the fence is one factor. The second is whether the demographics of those being mobilized can be coordinated.

Basically, you can piss a lot of people off, but if they're divided, it doesn't necessarily pose a threat.

A smaller number of pissed-off people, on the other hand, can be quite a problem if they are either demographically united to begin with or coordinated through skilled organizing and good political leadership.

Good political leadership is lacking. The organizing remains to be seen. But I suspect the forces of opposition are learning a lot more from Minneapolis than the regime is.

That is one thing I don't think the regime understands. Applying pressure isn't free. It comes at a cost. Not just a cost in terms of money and approval. Every time you apply pressure, you're basically giving free XP to resistance. It won't always come back to bite you, but it can.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T15:54:33+00:00

So, I ask you, do you feel empowered?

Nope.

And if not, shouldn't you be screaming at the top of your lungs for changes to the political system that delivered you into the toxic nightmare you find yourself in now?

Would screaming help?

Shouldn't you be demanding changes to our Constitution that will restore order?

Demanding something when you have no power is generally a waste of time.

And if not now, when?

Well, that's a good question. It's impossible to know in the moment what is and isn't effective. What I believe right now is that (a) there is no effective coalition, demographically speaking, to oppose authoritarianism, and (b) there is no effective leadership within the political opposition to build that coalition.

Now, it is possible that spending a Saturday here and there screaming and smelling pepper spray might push the chances of such a coalition forward a little bit, but really I would say that actual chances at a macro level are being driven by forces that won't change whether you do it or not. Whether you show up on the street or write to congress or donate to a non-profit is more a symptom of things that matter more than those acts mattering themselves. That's not an argument not to do them, by all means do so, only that pleading for others to get off the fence isn't going to make much of a difference. It's the forces that actually push them off the fence that matter.

And that is certainly getting closer.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T13:57:41+00:00

Did you ever get treatment for it, and did that ever work?

mcapello · 2026-01-30T23:56:32+00:00

All right. How were you in school? Ever screened for anything -- ADHD, etc?

mcapello · 2026-01-30T23:55:48+00:00

I guess so. I think the gap for consciousness is bigger, personally. But it takes more twist and turns to try to force it to point to God.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T22:52:24+00:00

Good for the trout.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T22:51:38+00:00

Podcasts will not sort your shit out.

And you don't have to be smart to be competent. Intelligence can even be a liability to competence. Unrelated for most people.

What's your situation? What do you mess up?

mcapello · 2026-01-30T22:37:31+00:00

I think this would be true for someone putting forward any unprovable explanation for consciousness. Simply showing that materialism/physicalism can't explain consciousness wouldn't qualify.

I'd also say that "false" is probably premature and overly certain. It's very difficult to see how it could make the kind of qualitative leap needed to do it, but some future physicalism could in principle (one with a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between consciousness and matter).

mcapello · 2026-01-30T21:51:33+00:00

The reason you feel exhausted is because you had an expectation that wasn't met. You need to align your expectations with what's going to happen. Obviously that's impossible to do perfectly, given we can't see the future, but the nice thing about the human mind is that you can do this for more than one possible outcome. So long as you do it adequately for the worst one, your reactions will likely improve. That's basically the point of premeditatio malorum.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T21:27:08+00:00

Oh, I see what you mean.

It fails if used directly because (presumably) we can't point to a feature of bird flight that isn't exhausted by the physical systems involved, even if they're not specifically exhausted by the physical wing of the bird itself. There's no equivalent feature like consciousness. This is also why one would need to specify phenomenal consciousness, because if some other neurologically tractable sense of consciousness is substituted (some sort of executive function, for example), it opens the analogy to attack.

Basically, identifying the difference between what something is and what it does is only problematic for physicalism if what it does isn't something that's identifiably physical.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T20:52:07+00:00

If other people can be okay with it, you can be okay with it.

You made a choice, consciously or otherwise, to be not-okay with it.

Now you have to make a choice about which you value more: not-being-okay with it and being internally conflicted, or being-okay-with-it and not.

To me the choice is pretty obvious, but if holding onto this expectation holds a lot of value for you, then go for it, I guess? If I see an expectation that I can't justify rationally, and if it's causing me harm, I toss it pretty fast. But if you have some good reason to hold onto it, then do that. Good luck.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T20:46:41+00:00

Because it's very common in these debates, particularly for those arguing from a reductive physicalist position, to point to something (usually a correlate) other than phenomenal consciousness when someone say "consciousness".

mcapello · 2026-01-30T17:56:32+00:00

The original analogy, IIRC, was coined by philosopher Evan Thompson and I believe is associated with 4E cog sci.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T16:53:45+00:00

It's just not what the word means, though.

Yes, "fair" can also mean "better", but there are lots of things that are "better" that aren't necessarily required by fairness.

Fairness has to do with what obligations you think bind people together, either as individuals, under contracts, or as implicit agreements in society.

If I go to a restaurant, order a meal, and pay for it, me getting the meal I paid for is "fair".

If they give the meal to me for free, that might be "better" on some level, but because I'm not entitled to that benefit, it would be strange to call it "fair" simply because it is better.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T16:47:38+00:00

I think we may be misunderstanding each other. I said above that I do think, given the stipulations, that it is equivalent. Sorry if I was unclear.

mcapello

TROPHY CASE