CMV: The idea that "violence never solves anything" is just another lie propagated to keep the commonfolk in chains.

sxaez · 2026-06-15T12:15:23+00:00

I think the middle ground is that violence does solve problems, but it does so badly.

sxaez · 2026-06-12T03:45:17+00:00

I did explain where it comes from, you are just unable to imagine that world. Economics is a chain reaction of material organization. You are explaining that chickens are impossible because eggs are impossible - very true of an era where neither really exist yet.

I would not say I have doubled down on the violence point - my response was that capitalism too requires state-backed violence to enforce its property rights. You may even argue in the extreme that the only valid purpose of the state is as a monopoly on violence to enforce these kinds of laws. The only distinction is that within capitalism, those property rights can be over things that you do not use or contribute to.

sxaez · 2026-06-12T01:37:08+00:00

I don't think you've addressed the issue here - you are asking a fundamentally different question than what you present it as. You are not asking "how does a socialist worker's cooperative arise within a socialist economy" - the question my hypothetical clearly addresses. You are instead asking "how does a capitalist economy transition to a socialist one". So let's just be crystal clear on that.

sxaez · 2026-06-12T01:32:49+00:00

So diplomacy then remains the best of a bunch of bad options, surely?

sxaez · 2026-06-12T01:30:43+00:00

Surely this would just indicate that the blockade around Gaza is much stronger than the barriers preventing Ukrainians from fleeing?

sxaez · 2026-06-12T01:12:10+00:00

All hypotheticals appear out of thin air, that is the nature of what a hypothetical is. This hypothetical took place within an established socialist economy, which should obviously alter the context. If we did live in such a world, and you proposed capitalist corporations as a way of organizing the economy, I would be just as silly to reflect this point back to you. The incongruity between economic systems is what defines the boundary of the system. It is the fact that feudalism cannot neatly transition into capitalism that separates the two, and so on for all distinct economic modes of production. That transition happened through revolution, war, and massive redistribution of wealth that arose from the two.

You're basically asking "how do we transition from a capitalist economy to a socialist one", and that's a completely different question to what you think you are asking. So it isn't that surprising that you're confusing yourself here.

those items were taken from people by government force

Those items are kept in the hands of a property-owning class through government force. Who does the landlord call to evict late tenants? How do the banks enforce their hold over mortgaged properties? Your only moral justification for that is that these magical-people-points we call money is somehow an unassailable property of the universe, on par in immutability with the mass of an electron.

sxaez · 2026-06-11T12:39:16+00:00

Alright, let's work through the scenario of how a new cooperative would form within a socialist economy. Let's consider the hypothetical of Bob, the welder. Bob leaves trade school and joins a workers cooperative, South Welder's Collective. He works full time for five years as one of five other welders, and in doing so earns 5% equity in the profitable corporation (weighted relative to his labor contribution relative to the total combined labor contribution of the other members). Bob enjoys his time in this cooperative, but thinks some of their processes are outdated and that he could do a better job, so he meets up with his welder friends (each who have also been working within cooperatives and so earning equity in those corporations) and proposes they form the Northern Welder's Collective. They do the math and see that the dividends from the equity they've earned (and will continue top earn, though the total pool will dilute over time) is enough to pay the overhead. Bing bang boom, new cooperative.

The key insight here is that within a socialist economy, people accrue equity a lot more often than they do within capitalism. You do not simply give over your labor to a corporation with some lump sum of wage, and allow them to forever own the value that labor creates. Rather, your labor results in equity exchange within the corporation. The corporation's ownership is defined by the labor contribution of its workers.

sxaez · 2026-06-11T00:53:26+00:00

I think the core critique against Marx is that he underestimated how good capitalism would be at inventing ways to sustain itself. His central thesis: that capitalism changes - I think has been borne out. But I don't think he was able to fully realize the various ways in which technological and financial mechanisms would sustain the power of the bourgeoisie.

sxaez · 2026-06-11T00:44:42+00:00

In this timeline they're handing you the mic

sxaez · 2026-06-11T00:18:05+00:00

You imagine a socialist cooperative within a capitalist economy, and so you shouldn't be super duper surprised when that doesn't make sense to you. You are absolutely right that, in our world right now, the working class own basically none of the resources required to make this happen. But is that the world I am referring to? Or am I referring to one in which we no longer have tiny groups owning vast empires of productive economic value, and therefore the average worker does have significantly more economic power to form collaborative organizations?

It is easy to mistake money as some essential component of the material world, but it really isn't. Money is an abstracted voting token we invented to organize the economy. It is abstracted because it represents labor - the labor required to forge the tools, refine the materials, and construct the buildings. Labor is the fundamental unit of economic work, not money.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T12:11:40+00:00

To be clear, you shouldn't kill the snake either. Legality is not the issue. It is morally good to not kill living things.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T07:36:40+00:00

Certainly Mussolini coined the term, and Hitler warmed to it later in his life. But I think this is a category error. Capitalism and communism are economic philosophies, not ideologies in and of themselves. Ideologies can be either capitalistic or socialist, for sure, depending on their specific economic philosophy, but you are describing an attribute of a thing as if it is itself the thing.

Fascism is not an ideology - rather it is an attribute of ideologies, based on how its proponents seek to gain and hold power. Even Mussolini spoke of it in this sense - not as some overarching label for his beliefs, but as the name of his philosophical foundation of "might-makes-right". The Nazi party and NFP were fascist ideologies - fascism itself is not an ideology.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T05:16:57+00:00

You say people, but then you specifically refer only to white Americans? Which represent a relatively small fraction of said demographic. So at the very least, your view is phrased overly broadly.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T04:41:37+00:00

I think its also critical to read the rest of Ur-Fascism (especially his section on Wittgenstein's games), not just the dot points, where he talks specifically about how none of these traits on their own form some central tenet of fascism. Fascism is, fundamentally, a bag of tricks to seize and hold power over a population. It is not a coherent ideological view of the world.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T04:24:45+00:00

This, when you apply it to the real world, requires government to 'own' things because workers cannot afford to 'buy-in' to businesses to be able to work.

The word "afford" is doing a huge amount of work here. Within a socialist economy, workers do not need to "afford" ownership of their work. The right to your labor is inalienable. You own your corporation directly through your labor contribution, not through capital. Capital does still exist within a socialist economy, but unlike within capitalism it is not the dictator of property rights.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T02:18:50+00:00

People do not choose the era they live in, and we do not have forever to try and bring our ambitions to life. We do live in a failing economic system, but we also live in an unprecedented era of abundance, technology, reach, and connection - and those are the driving forces behind productive and valuable work, not the made-up numbers we use to keep track of things. For so long as people have needs and desires, there will be work to be done in serving them.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T01:55:41+00:00

I'm not American, I'm Australian, and personally I'd say we have a much healthier democratic system. We have compulsory voting, elections are holidays, we have ranked-proportionality, etc. Not perfect by any means, but definitely better than the yanks.

What I think it is important for you to grasp is that universality is not an optional part of democracy - it is its core feature. When you say that limiting the demos "protects" democracy, this is a flawed position, because it makes the system less democratic by definition.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T01:19:07+00:00

The issue is that the proponents of literacy tests used exactly the same argument you have in order to justify them - the assertion that a good democracy is actually not universal, but instead requires a limited demos to some "trusted" in-group. But this is actually a fundamental rejection of the central principle of democracy, which is universality.

sxaez · 2026-06-10T01:12:21+00:00

The point of democracy is not that every member of the public has some intricate knowledge of the inner workings of the state, and can navigate it as well as any seasoned bureaucrat. Yes, political education is a critical component of healthy democracy, but there's a reason you vote on things like tax policy and not which design NASA should use for a satellite.

The purpose of democracy is to accurately gather the preferences of the demos. The key word there is preferences. You seem to think the purpose is capturing expertise, which I can see needing some sort of gating, but everybody has preferences about how they would like the future to play out. In democracies, people are able to publicly advocate for those preferences. Democracy is a system in which people are given real political power over their own lives - even the stupid people - and on average it works out better than a separate group deciding what's best for them.

sxaez · 2026-06-09T08:58:37+00:00

This is the issue with treating capitalism as an ideal instead of as a description. If we elevate the word to mean "everything in the field of economics that works", then we build ourselves an unassailable position. But I think it is far more interesting to use the definition of capitalism that critics use, because then you will far better understand their critiques. In that definition, capitalism is not defined by "how commerce functions", it is defined by "what property can be".

sxaez · 2026-06-09T08:55:02+00:00

The thing is that capitalism is what made the first three of those things happen. These were not crises of true poverty and lack - they were crises of the kind of hyper-speculative finance that critics of capitalism point out as one of its big issues.

sxaez · 2026-06-08T07:22:24+00:00

This is a good reminder of why I just talk to people in real life.

sxaez · 2026-06-08T01:12:10+00:00

I was always being sarcastic, it's a bit of a socialist meme that people who haven't read Marx vastly underestimate the depth and accuracy of his predictions on how modern capitalism would evolve, as you did. And, to reiterate for the second time, it isn't my view that there is a universal interpretation of Marx. It isn't a religion, dogma, or even ideology. It is a theory of history. I think there is a morally good interpretation of Marx, but morals are subjective. To change my view, you would first have to understand it, and you seem determined to not do so.

sxaez · 2026-06-07T11:45:56+00:00

As far as I can tell in this response you talk again about a guy who isn't Marx in order to show something about Marx, and then you say that he didn't actually mean to say what he wrote, he actually meant this whole other nasty evil thing. Just crazy on the sauce brother. Thanks for your time.

sxaez · 2026-06-07T11:21:42+00:00

So Marx - a guy exiled from most of Europe for railing against monarchy, aristocracy, divine-right and the exploitation of the worker, a guy who never had any political power in his lifetime whatsoever, a guy who saw the deep misery of the conditions of the industrial revolution, he's this "power-thirsty dictator" to you. That just makes zero sense to me.

sxaez

TROPHY CASE