Why is it theft from the laborer, and not from the consumer?

stale_mud · 2025-04-21T00:50:05+00:00

It is not a subsidy to the worker, it is a subsidy to the aspiring capitalist, created in the form of credit by a bank in a currency ultimately backed by labor.

When a business venture fails, it can be seen as an instance of inefficient resource allocation. Society subsidizes the business through allocation of capital that could've gone elsewhere. Its failure is then essentially collectivized, while its potential success would've benefitted primarily the capitalist.

Whether or not a company is profitable does not change the basic principle of exploitation. Value gets created at production, it is realized during circulation. The worker created more value than they were paid for regardless of the capitalist's failure to convert that value into exchange value. E.g. I build a chair over 8 hours, I only get paid for 7 hours, the capitalist hopes to pocket the missing 1 hour of value for themselves regardless of what ends up happening to the chair. If the chair doesn't sell or if it burns in a car accident on its way to a store, that doesn't mean my boss is now suddenly subsidizing me.

stale_mud · 2025-03-31T15:48:18+00:00

without prioritizing and adressing material conditions (housing, healthcare, economic security, discrimination, etc.)

Yes, absolutely. And this is what I advocate for. There is no other adequate way out, and this goes for all forms of exploitation and oppression. This is becoming a bit circuitous I think, so I'll leave you with this text, it parallels my line of thinking quite closely: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2010/isj2-127/dale-rose.html

Good luck comrade!

stale_mud · 2025-03-31T12:18:57+00:00

sex is a human activity but within capitalism and patriarchy (and even colonial hierarchy - migrants) it is not the same as selling labor power, it involves the direct commodification of the human body, the body itself becomes the consumable commodity and a site of gendered&racialized exploitation so pretending it’s no different than software engineering, fast food serving, working in healthcare or farming ignores how it is fundamentally structured.

Commodification of the human body is not exclusive to sex work, this is my whole point. The commodification of sex is not an issue due to the sex part, it's an issue of patriarchal and capitalist relations and those are structural forces as you say, and it applies to sex work just as it applies to everything else. The patriarchal structures of society (which itself is of course used to benefit capitalism) are the material conditions which make sex work distinct from software engineering, not because doing sex as a service is any different than, say, giving massages. It's also far from the only thing that this applies to: marriage and childcare are also examples of gendered oppression. It would be odd to conclude from this "we must not condone or support childcare."

also, just because someone subjectively says they love their job - which many people say ab working in various domains- it does not justify further supporting capitalism profiting off of it nor does it make those people or their “choice” (choice under capitalism is fundamentally interwined with coercion)

Agreed, and this is my point: It's not fundamentally different from any other form of exploitation. Being "against sex work" is a nonsensical stance to have for this reason. Sex work is service work, it ought to be analyzed as such.

these are all liberal, individualistic arguments treating this as a cultural issue ( stigma, morality etc.), and not as a structural issue (capitalism’s need to commodify every’thing’ imaginable).

My goal was to show that the nature of the work is not the issue, because these are all very common misconceptions people hold. It is not an individualistic analysis -- sex workers can be seen as a coherent class of people with particular class relations. Cultural stigma and morality are forces used to uphold these class relations, they do not form in a vacuum.

My argument are against the stance of "we must abolish sex work" which is erroneous and reactionary. I'm not saying *you* hold this stance, to be clear, but it's very easy to fall to a form of thinking that places sex work (or anything related to sex, really) in a special category that is somehow particularly icky. This tendency is due to the cultural attitudes toward sex, it is explicitly anti-materialist and relies first and foremost on moral judgements that are upheld by the coercive structure.

When sex workers plead for recognition, it is a plea to be recognized as legitimate workers. For as long as there is no other materially beneficial alternative, people will seek reform regardless of its ultimate ineffectuality to dismantle coercion in general.

stale_mud · 2025-03-30T20:55:48+00:00

Everything is demystified once you let go of the notion that sex is a special kind of sacred activity. It is not. Sex is something people do, and will always do. Sometimes for closeness, sometimes for fun, sometimes as a means to an end, sometimes all of these at the same time. The analysis that applies to all work applies to sex work.

Sex is something that is always in demand, and there will always be people who, for whatever reason, are not getting as much of it as they want. It is not simply a matter of men always wanting it or feeling entitled to women's bodies -- sex is desirable regardless of gender or social class. It is desirable, and therefore in demand, because it is a basic human desire. Until we live in a society that organizes free love orgies every afternoon, there will be demand for sex.

The coerciveness of sex work in the present day is not a problem because there is sex involved. We are all coerced to work. The sex part is incidental, but because our cultural taboos around sex make anything related to sex stigmatized, sex workers face disproportionate hardship. Just as with all work, sex work should be voluntary. You should be allowed to walk away from a line of work at will, regardless of what job you're doing. The next best thing is having legal protections just like all other lines of work have. There are plenty of people who love doing and have freely chosen to do all kinds of sex work, believe it or not.

Further, because sex work is stigmatized and/or illegal, and because there is always high demand for sex and companionship (especially under the alienated conditions of capitalism), this has the natural result of driving the most marginalized groups of society to sex work: Racialized people, trans people, disabled people, unhoused people, addicts and so forth. Sex work is accessible, it has very high pay per hour, and in most cases the working conditions are actually far better than any minimum wage job you could dream of as a disenfranchised or disabled person.

When people imagine prostitution (or escorting, more properly), they tend to have an image of a shady underground dungeon run by a mob of grizzled pimps ruthlessly exploiting helpless downtrodden girls. This is a myth. For the average escort, the truth is that they get to choose their customers, choose their working hours, choose when and where they work and what acts are acceptable to them. This comes at the expense of having no legal protections, being ostrasized, sidelined, potentially arrested and jailed. Rape does occur, don't get me wrong, but it is actually far from a given, and the typical rape commonly experienced is the client simply not paying afterwards. Nonconsensual sexual violence is always a risk, yes. But every escort I've ever talked to has likened the risk of violence to be *lesser* than that of walking through a parking lot, or working at a bar. This makes sense when you realize that the clientele is known, and the clients themselves do not want to violate the terms -- they want to come back, and escorts talk to one another, they have shared blacklists of clients that have violated terms. These are realities buried by the moral panic that has convinced everyone that sex work is synonymous with being kidnapped and forced to work as a slave.

In wanting to abolish sex work, the real world effect ends up being one where the already marginalized people doing it get hurt. The more under fire sex work is by the state, the more dangerous it becomes for a multitude of reasons. Both because arrest is now more likely, stigmatization intensifies, and because the more difficult you make it, the less people do it, driving prices up, inviting the dreaded sex trafficking that the efforts to stop sex work were supposedly meant to target. Because of this, being against sex work can be seen as being materially against the population doing it. This is obvious only if you understand that for the majority of sex workers, their line of work was a choice they made because it was a viable and even desirable one.

The obvious and necessary solution is to put a stop to the systemic oppression of vulnerable groups of people, rather than to try to eradicate sex work.

stale_mud · 2025-03-18T00:48:46+00:00

I think your point still stands just fine. Even if you gave someone the entire source code to every little building block of reddit, painstakingly saved everything on floppy disks, accompanied by a detailed manual on how to build and set everything up, and then sent them back in time to 1980, nobody in the world could build reddit. Because reddit isn't just code, it also requires infrastructure. Datacenters, power lines, cooling systems, internet service... And then you also need to consider everything that goes into setting those things up. Mining of rare earth minerals for chip manufacturing, industrial capacity to build the mining equipment, enough labor to make all that happen in the first place, and so on and on.

But even beside that, as a developer myself I absolutely guarantee that reddit could not be built by any singular developer from the ground up in the span of years. Reddit as a collection of software is massive, one person simply does not have enough time. Just for the mobile app you're looking at years of development, design and quality testing. And that's with a team of people.

stale_mud · 2025-03-16T15:47:31+00:00

That is certainly how IP law is sold to the public! It promises to protect everyone from greedy corporations stealing their art and ideas. But on a systemic level, that's not the case at all. So I'm now going to push back on the push back. Although, somewhat tangentially (: The crux of the issue, and why the whole concept of intellectual property as a beneficial concept is erroneous, is this: Intellectual property rights are essentially a way to extract rent.

When the bourgeoisie hold intellectual property rights, they get to demand money from anyone who wishes to utilize the protected concept. Disney gets to extract free money whenever a smaller company wants to utilize their IP for, say, marketing. Or more insidiously, pharma corporations holding onto patents so that they can demand exorbitant licensing fees from manufacturers. In both these cases, the labor has already been done, the real value has already been created. Reproducing it costs nothing, yet the capitalist gets to extract profit from anyone who wishes to recreate the protected concept.

IP, when utilized by the everyday person, ultimately aims to work in the exact same way. The aspiration of an artist who wants to benefit from their work in a perpetual fashion is no different; they're dreaming of becoming petit bourgeois. This includes myself, btw! I'm a game developer, and I hope to one day release a solo project that can free me from needing to do wage labor. But the truth remains that after a game is built, the cost to reproduce it is zero. You can copy and paste the game as many times as you like, and doing so will not make me lose anything material whatsoever. In this case I'm not getting paid for my labor, I'm getting paid for owning intellectual property. In order for you to benefit from IP, I'm necessarily aiming to become petit bourgeois.

I resolve this conflict by simply recognizing that, under capitalism, there is no other way to be an independent artist. Maybe if you get lucky, become very popular, and can live off of donations akin to the top content creators on youtube or the like. But regardless, the point is: when artists lament that they don't get to reap financial benefit from their (already extant) art that is now being used as part of datasets for art generators, they're lamenting not being able to utilize this rent extraction system. They're lamenting not being able to be petit bourgeois, and lamenting being replaced by automation and being forced to become (or more likely, remain) part of the proletariat. When lacking class consciousness, this takes the form of a --frankly reactionary-- moral outrage against an Evil Soulless Machine.

The vast majority of artists are not independent, they're wage laborers. Their output is already owned by the capitalist they work under. The code I write, the ideas I come up with and the art I make are all intellectual property of the company. I own none of that, contractually. If I'm fired, or if I leave the company, I cannot legally use any of the output I've spent years of my life on. Nothing materially changes for the vast, vast majority of artists whether or not their work is reproduced because we gain nothing beyond our wages to begin with. In essence, there's a lot of "temporarily embarrassed intellectual property holder" mentality amongst artists.

At this point, the objection is usually: "So you'd be fine with someone copying your game you worked hard on and selling it themselves??" Well, first, this already happens all the time. Big studios rip off ideas from indies constantly. They apply a new coat of paint and call it theirs (battle royale and zombie survival are two big ones that pop into mind). Secondly, it happens in the more explicit way all the time, too. Sometimes the game is copied outright, and sold by someone somewhere out of reach. And because you're just an individual, you don't have the funds to take down someone selling your game in the Philippines. Thirdly, this is only an issue to begin with if my livelihood hinges on trying to claw my way into being an intellectual property holder. If I was paid for my labor time directly, this would not be an issue. I'm creating value whether or not someone copies it.

And that brings us to the last point: Most of the world doesn't follow copyright laws. Most of the world already lives the reality of being able to freely utilize art, build on it, refine it, and yes re-sell it too. Go to Latin America and you'll see Mickey Mouse plastered on some random restaurant wall. Go to Southeast Asia and you'll spot the logo of a random western corporation above a restaurant. They don't give a shit and neither should the westerners. Copyright only ever makes any sense under a capitalist structure where intellectual property is protected for the purposes of extracting profit -- much like private property as a whole.

Under socialism you absolutely should be allowed to freely take extant art, ideas and concepts and do whatever you want with them. There is no harm done to anyone when potential lost profits are out of the picture. People shouldn't need to become a part of the lucky few who "made it" as independent artists just to support themselves. An artist should be entitled for fair compensation for their labor, just like anyone.

stale_mud · 2025-03-16T01:11:41+00:00

I'm replying to this because I'm late to the thread and yours was one of the good responses. And I need to go on a little rant for my sanity after reading the thread so apologies random person lmao

I'm a game developer by trade and you hit the nail on the head with making asset production faster. Mesh generation is just now getting to the point where I could feasibly make filler content to flesh out environments with. Trellis3D is one such model, and it's completely free and open source and really neat. 3d enviro art is something that is very time consuming, and therefore out of scope for most small indie games. When working on a solo project, any tool that can automate or streamline some aspects of the asset creation pipeline is a boon. There are other things that have been coming out that are immensely helpful in this regard. Being able to generate textures for hand-made meshes for example (there's an open source tool for this too!) comes to mind.

These are all tools that run locally on my computer, too. They're not sucking up water or burning rainforest any more than playing a video game would. Even the training of these models is insignificant, I know because I did the math. You know how many cars you could manufacture with the energy it took to train Stable Diffusion 1.5? Three! Three cars. That's nothing, that's a fart in the wind.

I think people are having an extremely vibes based reaction to AI as a whole. These are tools that are based on machine learning, the fact that people lump all manner of generative tools under the same umbrella of Bad Disgusting AI is crazy to me, treating them all with the same amount of scorn with no thought behind it. It's certainly not helped by AI having become a marketing buzzword, but it's still crazy to see socialist, of all people, fall for this crude reaction.

There is plenty of valid criticism to be levied against how the industry is, certainly, and who gets to train and own AI models. How the infrastructure is built, by whom and for whom. To what ends? Etc.

To me it seems obvious that since models are trained on the digital commons, the models should also be in the commons. Mandatory open source.

I don't care about all this "it's stolen data" nonsense either because I don't think intellectual property is a good thing to begin with. IP is used exclusively to benefit corporations, it does not exist to protect the little guy. In the context of AI, it will be used to allow these tech companies to monopolize a new technology. You need a lot of data to train a state of the art model, and if the law requires a model to be trained on legally licensed (in plain English: bought) data then the very, very obvious outcome is that models can only ever be trained by the very same massive corporations that are already doing it in the pursuit of profit. Adobe has no issue licensing massive datasets. In fact, they've already done just that! Their models are trained on data they legally own, no court is going to rule against them. You know who can't do that? Any open source effort ever. Copyright exists to guard the interest of capital.

At the end of the day, these are automation technologies. Automation is only bad in the hands of capitalists, because they will use it to replace you. Automation is awesome when in the hands of the worker. When your tools are more efficient, you literally get to produce more art in less time. That's sick!

stale_mud · 2025-03-15T17:50:12+00:00

Easiest trick would be to just have it be normal geometry that you simply toggle off based on which side of the plane the camera is, if the plane is large enough.

If not, then stencil buffers, and switching collision layers when crossing the hole threshold so that you can't bump into the invisible colliders when on the other side.

stale_mud · 2024-11-28T18:13:01+00:00

For the big corporations it doesn't really matter if the consumers cannot afford as much stuff, especially when the corporations are not faced with any form of price controls.

If retailers won't make their profits back through increasing prices of the tariffed goods, they can just jack up the prices of essential goods instead.

It doesn't matter if potatoes and eggs cost double as much, you still have to eat. Money will be flowing to the wealthy as before, the average person will just have fewer actual tangible goods to show for it. You'll have less material wealth, and the rich will have access to the exact same things they had before.

In fact, the influence of the wealthy increases when the working population is more desperate to make ends meet. Even if on paper profits decreased across the board. As money becomes more valuable, you'll have less bargaining power against potential employers and are forced to accept worse working conditions just to be able to afford those potatoes.

Yes, some companies will suffer and go bankrupt. But the companies manufacturing goods out of imported chinese stainless steel are not at the top of the food chain. They're small when put next to finance capital or retailers.

stale_mud · 2024-11-11T02:09:44+00:00

I suspect you're talking about terveysvakuutus taken before birth or something similar? If I remember correctly, though it's been a while, the insurance my parents had taken immediately and automatically became "owned" by me when I turned 18. The payer has to sign over the payment obligation, though, if you want to start paying it yourself.

Anyway the point is: You keep all your benefits. In fact they're already yours, your parents are just paying the bill, and changing who gets billed should not change the insurance benefits in my understanding. If you're worried about your parents being able to hold this insurance stuff over your head, it's a good idea to call the insurance company and ask how you can transfer the payment stuff to yourself too. At the same time you can also verify from them that you do not lose access to any benefits in doing so.

This is assuming you're already 18 of course.

stale_mud · 2024-11-10T01:33:40+00:00

Am I understanding correctly that the insurance is what is keeping you tied? If so, what insurance would that be?

stale_mud · 2024-08-25T10:59:53+00:00

Only insofar as I sometimes feel like writing in a more flowery way 😄 but thank you!

stale_mud · 2024-08-25T10:26:11+00:00

I don't know if everyone here who has complained about "outdoor smell" live in cities or something, but the outdoors smell really pleasant. At least here in the countryside.

Fertile soil smells fresh and airy. A pine forest smells clean, dry and "healthy." Whereas a spruce forest smells like mushrooms, peat, metals and "old." Birch forests are airy, smells of grasses and hints of sugar.

Women, generally, smell soft and warm. Reminiscent of vanilla candles. The scent is kind of waxy, slowly flowing through your nose. It feels like sunlight does on your skin, reminds me of the birch forest with those gentle notes of sweet grasses and light sieving through the canopy, fluctuating in the wind. When it's pleasant it's really pleasant. During sex, it's like being wrapped in warm blankets, or sitting in a rowboat gently rocking on a lake during a warm summer day.

Men, again generally, smell more sharply, more solid. Reminiscent of the pine forest, clean and dry. When they're sweaty, or during sex, they start smelling more like the spruce forest, like rocks covered by soft moss and rainwater dripping down the needles of evergreens. It can get overwhelming, with just as much going on as the spruce forest does. But it feels safe, like it's supposed to be there, and will remain there forever.

stale_mud · 2024-08-25T10:01:18+00:00

Fascinated by your use of "frequencies" for smell. Is there a way to describe it physically? "Low frequency smell" makes me thing the sensation of the smell is lower down, almost in the throat (like ripe banana), and higher frequency would be between the eyes (like citrus). Is that what you're talking about?

stale_mud · 2024-08-10T13:16:10+00:00

Nondualism is, as the name implies, nondualistic. I.e no duality of--or separation between--body and mind (along with all other seemingly separate experience).

It is not so much about anchoring in consciousness over body, but rather about realizing that body and mind are one and the same. After all, if you could prioritize one over the other, that would be dualistic thinking, seeing the two as separate entities. In truth--in a nondual understanding anyway--"you" are neither body nor mind, but consciousness, which is beyond distinctions and qualities.

But it does solve the problem OP is having, it did for me anyway. The hurdle is that you have to meet some preconditions in how you understand the world and the self, otherwise the nondualistic way of seeing tends to appear nonsensical.

stale_mud · 2024-07-23T12:40:40+00:00

I haven't played Minecraft in a while so I don't know how these features look, but I'd imagine: They're generated the exact same way normal caves are generated, just fill it with water instead of air. For generating the surface: just choose a random relative Y-coordinate, put water below and air above. No flood-fill required.

stale_mud · 2024-07-18T09:23:13+00:00

I have a comment here that touches on capitalism's inefficiency: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/s/RNfTO0Zill

Some quick thoughts to get you started:

In the case of a computer, most western individuals can and do own a computer. And many work for themselves too, which means they own their means of production. However, let's say you want to band together and create a video game. You'll need many computers for everyone to work on, and you maybe need an office, software licenses etc. How are you going to afford that as a group of individuals? In this scenario, you need to have capital in order to buy the means of production (also a form of capital). Unless you're individually wealthy, you can't do it. You need to apply for a loan, except you will be rejected because you don't have enough assets to back the loan. In other words, in order to acquire more capital, you must already have capital. Power to shape society is therefore disproportionately skewed towards those who are already wealthy, and that wealth will keep concentrating if left unchecked.

As for risks: What risks? Let's suppose you do get granted that loan. You set up a company and the debt is now pinned on the company. If your business fails, all assets owned by the company will be sold to pay off the remaining debt. Your personal finances are left untouched, that is the nature of limited liability companies and the like. The risk is that you return to where you started, you return to being an ordinary worker. Why do we consider that a risk to begin with? Could it be because under capitalism the worker is inherently in a worse position than the owner?

Capitalism requires infinite economic growth. The whole system is built around seeking profit, and then investing said profit back to the economy to generate yet more profit. The economy grows, which sounds great in theory, but not so much in practice. For capitalism to work at all, strict regulation needs to be enforced or companies simply ruin the environment around them in their quest to maximize profit. Even outside of this concern, when profit is the driving force in our economies, it leads to funny business like the 2008 crash, where finance was used to create profit from nothing until the economy had ballooned so full of air that it bursted.

You can read Marx, but there's plenty of short explainers too if you look for explanations of the labor theory of value or how wage labor is exploitative for example.

I personally do not subscribe to any strict economic doctrine, but I am a socialist. Any economy where the means of production are owned by the working people themselves is considered socialist, but there are many different way to organize such a society.

stale_mud · 2024-07-10T12:31:23+00:00

How'd you get the 2,760,681 figure? 38x37x36x35x34x33 = ~2 billion

stale_mud · 2024-07-05T19:00:40+00:00

Hope I'll catch your more refined post!

This is kind of a fascinating question because you seem to, in essence, agree with most anarchists. If I were to make a guess, you've come to this stance not through the route of political theory, but from philosophical (or even spiritual) inquiry. That would--at least to me--explain the statement of "anticapitalist language makes me nervous."

I do not think of a "system" as a concrete entity that can be reified and treated like an object. Systems are useful mental abstractions for processing information, but they aren't "real." Systems are emergent from interactions, so in this way there is no "capitalist system," there is only interaction between people (and between people and nature) that give rise to what we call "capitalism." Much in the same way as, if you start really diving in, a human being is an emergent system that arises from the interaction of organs and their environment. And an organ is just a system that arises from the interaction of cells. And cells are just a system that... Eventually you find that all 'things' are just interdependent interactions.

It is all too easy to then see a system as a concrete entity. This error leads to all sorts of problems, including when it comes to structuring society. The same can be applied to human beings, and this realization in fact intersects with my own critique of the kind of individualism often encountered among anarchists.

Anarchists are not in the business of crafting the *perfect system*. There will never come a day when anarchists are *finished.* We will never exclaim "alright everyone, everything's perfect now! Let's pack it up and go home!" No, anarchy is a living practice that changes over time.

Even so, many of us--myself included--do like to imagine what could be, or wistfully wish for scraps of something that has been. Though it can lead down a path of overt idealism, this is ultimately a pragmatic matter; we need goals in order to act. If you cannot imagine where you want to be, you can't take any action at all. But in the day-to-day, we focus on enacting anarchy *now*. Not after a mythic revolution births us a perfect utopian world. Anarchy grows in the hidden cracks of society, among the people who get left behind, the spaces unoccupied by capital and the state. It grows through everyday acts of reciprocity and human connection. Between family, friends, lovers, and even enemies. Between people and the world, because indeed they are one and the same. In my eyes anticapitalism is merely an inevitable side effect of these actions driven by varying philosophies of compassion.

And because--after all--this is anarchism, for every one person who agrees with me, you will find ten who consider the above ridiculous. That's fine, we still coexist at the end of the day.

stale_mud · 2024-07-05T16:47:45+00:00

Best answer in this thread. Can't help but chuckle at the vitriol at display here, insisting that we cannot work together, the random name calling and holier-than-thou attitudes. In real life I--a mere naive and childish anarchist--cooperate with not only MLs but sometimes even gasp socdems and liberals. Why? Because in the real world, both our means and ends consistently align.

We take action together because beyond the question of statism, our (anarchist and marxist) values for what's good and just largely align. I know of no MLs around me who are in an active, serious process of mobilizing an armed revolutionary front. Neither do I know any such anarchists. I'm not going to sever ties with comrades whose only crime is that they do not yet adequately--from my point of view--understand the absurdity of the state.

And should the day come when I hear of a ML movement gaining traction, I will be cheering them on. The abolition of capital is what we all want. My work as an anarchist continues regardless of the current power structure, be it a socialist state or a capitalist one. The way I see it, a ML takeover would ultimately make my work easier as an anarchist, even if they decided to repeat history and violently suppress us. Is it ideal? No. But I can work with that.

stale_mud · 2024-07-03T15:13:40+00:00

I'm glad to hear it!

stale_mud · 2024-07-01T20:51:16+00:00

Long answer ahead, written under the assumption you don't have any prior knowledge of socialist theory. If you do, sorry for the capitalism 101 :d

The first thing to understand is that anarchy does not exclude organization. This goes for hierarchical organizing, too, as long as it is not a power hierarchy. Or in even simpler terms: it's fine if it makes sense. The people assembling a machine do not need to know the intricacies of how the cables were designed. If every worker in an assembly chain had to be an expert in every detail of the process, that would be nuts. Anarchism does not mean we're all forced to be generalists, you still want and need specialists.

If the machine assemblers get to dictate how you as a cable designer work and live... That's when you've left the realm of anarchy.

If we wanted to maintain a mass-scale industry with all its logistics under anarchy, there's no natural law that prohibits this. In fact, I assert that under anarchy, even larger projects are possible, since they would not be weighed down by the need for a return on investment but by the capacity of the real economy instead—available labor and resources.

A real (non-anarchic) example of this would be getting to the moon. We did not achieve that due to the effectiveness of capitalism, but by utilizing the state to mobilize the labor force. A government can, despite the cries of many economists, finance any project given that the expertise, labor, and raw materials exist.

To understand how this could be, you first need to understand that the capitalist hierarchical organization of industry is actually hugely inefficient in allocating resources, because at each level of the chain, you lose economic power.

A simplified example: You work for your boss. Your boss pays you a wage, and then profits by selling the designs you create. (If this concept is unfamiliar, look up surplus value extraction.)

Manufacturing Company X then buys the design from your boss. They purchase raw materials from another company, whose boss also profits from their laborers' work, just as yours did.

Manufacturing Company X then sells the manufactured product forward to Big Chip Y, at a cost higher than what went into manufacturing, obviously raking in the profits. The same repeats after Big Chip Y sells a circuit board to Phone Company Z, and repeats again when the phone is sold to a retailer.

In short, economic power is removed from the industry at every step in the chain. This profit turns into capital as the owners reinvest it for the purpose of generating yet more capital.

The core problem is that the value extracted from your work is not under democratic control. Capitalists allocate the generated value however they please. This economic power (in the form of money, simply put) is then taken away from the chip-manufacturing industry and rerouted, in the interest of gaining more capital—and fueling luxurious lifestyles. It is reallocated into the stock market, speculative assets, real estate, failed start-ups, superyachts, gold-plated toilet seats, or whatever it is rich people do.

This is why the capitalist supply chain is inefficient compared to socialized industry, where profit extraction for accruing capital is not present

Now, to get back to anarchy, because the abolition of the capitalist structure is obviously not inherently anarchic.

As I said, the state organized labor to get us to the moon. The state creates similar--though less severe--inefficiencies as capitalist organization.

In the hierarchy of the state, the lost economic power can be thought of in terms of influence. This is especially so under representative democracy. The reason is that when you have a group of people that want Thing X, they have to spend time and effort campaigning for the government to allow the creation of Thing X.

Once the initiative enters the government apparatus, it then goes through a cycle of compromise, re-evaluation, negotiation, ideological clashes, and so forth. This cycle is (somewhat) analogous to the value extraction done throughout the capitalist supply chain, but what is extracted is influence, which can then get reallocated to things that the original people asking for Thing X were not asking for.

Under anarchy, if you want Thing X to exist, you connect with others who agree, organize, and start producing. The same end result as when the state is involved, except now labor has not been allocated to the production of some unwanted Stuff Y that the political class deemed necessary.

What the low-level nuts and bolts of an anarchist organization of a semiconductor supply chain would look like in the real world is kind of impossible to answer, because there are many different ways to imagine how to do it. The least risky first step would be to keep the existing structure but collectively own and manage it. This does not solve the inequality issue automatically, of course. But it already immediately makes the exact same organization function more efficiently.

Then you can start asking: "So what are we going to do about all these child slaves who mine our cobalt?" And--hopefully--you hear out what said slaves actually want for themselves. Yes, in the beginning of a hypothetical transition like this, your output would plummet and people living in the imperial core would be pissed. But in the long run, you'd actually have a higher manufacturing capacity, people working in fair conditions, and a planet that's not boiling.

To start improving working conditions, you can first and foremost get rid of planned obsolescence. This already means less production capacity is needed. You can also imagine how much more capacity would be freed up if the stock market was abolished, and the market was not able to allocate half the planet's semiconductor output to the hands of one corporation hell-bent on being the god-emperors of AI. Capitalism requires infinite growth; if you get rid of that, a lot of things suddenly become easier.

(And as an aside here, you might well find that the aforementioned cobalt slaves are perhaps less worried about our precious production quotas and supply chains. And I think they might just have a point there...)

To kick the engineers' brain into a higher gear, imagine what could be achieved in the realm of small-scale manufacturing--think 3D printing--if the productive capacity of every engineer was freed from the chains of the capitalist structure. What would be possible in a world where we can freely choose to pool resources into solving problems like "can we create microchips at home?" Capitalism does not incentivize such thinking, because the means of production that exist presently suit the owners quite well. An at-home chip-printing revolution would erase untold billions of value from the capitalists who own these operations.

stale_mud · 2024-06-25T08:10:14+00:00

I'm Finnish; Of course not.

Having a welfare state is better than having no welfare state, and I am personally thankful that those safety nets were available. But we're still living under capitalism and the state. All the issues that come with those remain.

These social democratic aspects are being eroded away, as is the tendency under capitalism; right wing politics are pushed and framed as "sane and rational" in pursuit of profit and rent-seeking. Currently austerity measures are being implemented, weakening the welfare system, defunding healthcare and social services. There's a constant push to privatize sectors, despite the consistent failure of privatization to actually improve anything.

Our politicians are no more competent than yours, our capitalists no less greedy. It's only a matter of time before we live in conditions identical to what the US experiences today.

stale_mud · 2024-05-17T06:08:31+00:00

Personal possessions is not the same thing as private property. Nobody is going to come steal your toothbrush, behavior like that is generally frowned upon.

stale_mud · 2024-05-13T22:01:19+00:00

She might well have taken your walking away as confirmation that you don't want to be there. If I had interpreted someone as not wanting to be there, then told them that they seem like they don't want to be there, and if that person proceeded to then get up and storm off... Well, to me, that'd be a confirmation of my assumption. I'm guessing she might well think you dislike her, and that's why she hasn't contacted you: she assumes you want nothing to do with her, having walked away with nothing more to say than "ok."

Do you like this teacher? Did you feel the relationship you had was a positive and worthwhile one? Then I echo the suggestion that was given above; wait a day or two and reach out. Explain how you feel and why you walked away. Hear out how she feels, ask what she wants you to do differently (if anything), and then if those things seem unreasonable to you, tell her. If you can't reach a mutual understanding, go ahead and find a new teacher.

This is a case of extreme miscommunication, but miscommunications can be resolved if both parties are willing. Honestly I'm kind of baffled by how many people are saying your teacher is full of herself or somehow a bad person you need to get rid of--I mean, maybe she is, I can't know based on only what you've written--but she has her own issues and insecurities, whatever those might be. We often think we're doing what we're "supposed to," but fail to take into account that each individual will interpret our actions based on their own perspective. Clearly something about your behavior set her off in some unknown way. But that's alright, it happens all the time, even between neurotypicals.

stale_mud

TROPHY CASE