4 ms·

No matter how skilled you are, no matter how much you're compensated, to be labor is to be the disposable, exploitable end of these modern relations of producti

No matter how skilled you are, no matter how much you're compensated, to be labor is to be the disposable, exploitable end of these modern relations of production. To management, to the owner (whether an individual or a corporation owned by institutions owned by faceless stakeholders) you are but labor-power. Your body, your self, your individual knitted from human fabric is a liability. If they could chop your labor-power from your flesh, from your family, from your community, and expropriate it as their own, the owners would. The labor market is not a market for human beings, it is a market for working bodies. Bodies that don't work profitably are bad bodies.

mindcrime 11y ago
So are we just going to spout Marxist dogma, or do you have some idea for a solution? Preferably something that doesn't require a massive government apparatus and that doesn't infringe on the rights of every individual to make their own choices?
- praptak 11y ago
  Cry me a river about individual rights to bend over for the employer. I am ok with a huge government to protect me from having to compete with workaholics.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    I am ok with a huge government to protect me from having to compete with workaholics. Cry me a river about competing with people with a greater work ethic. I'm not OK with government doing anything that involves initiation of force to achieve political ends.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      "greater work ethic" meaning "performs well in this system of labor relations". It is a circular moral judgment. The status quo is maintained by force. The government you have distrust for is the thing that keeps everything from breaking down.
      - mindcrime 11y ago
        "greater work ethic" meaning "performs well in this system of labor relations". It is a circular moral judgment. There will always be people who want more, work more, work harder, strive harder, and are more ambitious. That has nothing at all to do with "this system of labor relations". The government you have distrust for is the thing that keeps everything from breaking down. Feh... I mistrust the government because they're the main reason things are so broken now. The only "government" I want is self-government and whatever voluntary associations people form that don't claim a right to use force for any cause other than defense.
- werber 11y ago
  I think stronger worker protections for life's inevitable catastrophes in a manner similar to Germany would be great.
- notNow 11y ago
  Are we only allowed to spew Capitalist propaganda and worship Adam Smith and Friedman here?
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    Of course not, but spewing tired Marxist rhetoric without offering an actual proposal isn't accomplishing much.
- api 11y ago
  My own view is this: The ideal would be to have a strong social safety net and a fair system of redistribution that operates with minimal micromanagement or intrusion into individual affairs. Basically you have a government that taxes everyone according to the same rate and provides health care, unemployment and disability protection, insurance against certain emergencies (FEMA, etc.), and some sort of basic income. But as long as you pay into this system and are a 'shareholder' you can do whatever you want. Employment should be at-will. Companies should be easy to start. Regulations should be minimal and justified by specific rationales (e.g. environmental protection). The problem with the USSR and to a much lesser extent European Socialist countries is that they try to micro-manage. They have all these messes of laws that try to dictate exactly how things work and exactly how people must live their lives. That doesn't work. It just chokes everything and weighs everything down. The irony is that all this micro-management is put into place because the obvious alternative -- just redistributing wealth -- is politically toxic. So instead of just redistributing wealth, we try to reach in and piecemeal adjust the operation of capitalism to make it 'more fair.' The end result is the worst of both worlds: the system remains unfair, and we end up with micromanaging regulations that are far more expensive than what it would cost to just redistribute wealth. The US healthcare system is a great example. We have everything that is bad about micro-managing Socialism (heavy regulations, bureaucracy, inefficiency) combined with everything that is bad about capitalism/free market healthcare (inequality, losing coverage when you get sick, etc.). No "system" is fair. All systems contain intrinsic biases, emergent behaviors, randomness, massive opportunities for cheating and exploitation, and unintentional/non-obvious "goal functions" that conflict with the stated intents of their designers or operators. Constructing a fair system through central planning is impossible... IMHO it is "perpetual motion" or "halting problem" impossible. Complex living systems are not logical and their behaviors cannot be pre-specified by an intelligent designer. Wealth redistribution is the obvious answer. Instead of trying to impose the impossible on a chaotic counter-intuitive world, just apply noise reduction and normalization.
  - Apocryphon 11y ago
    The insane thing is that what you're describing isn't even remarkable. Other capitalist countries have it. It's just the U.S. doesn't, and doesn't even want it.
- danharaj 11y ago
  Geeze, someone's salty. I didn't spout Marxist dogma. I used a term coined by Marx. I used it because it's a useful term. It makes utterable the abstraction that is the labor relation. I actually reject the part of Marx that is dogma. Marx was wrong in many ways. He predicted his revolutions wrong. His descendants were as authoritarian and capitalist as the bourgeoisie; the only changes they made were to give all property to the state and put its control in the hands of bureaucrats. Really, bourgeois property holders do the same thing: That's what management is. So, the only difference between the two is the number of owners: many or one. Why are states that claim to be communist in the tradition of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao so oppressive? Because people will revolt against a ruler that is bad to them. A single property owner is an inflexible proposition. Being unyielding, the only way it can maintain its position is with a stick. At least the bourgeois states have made their body politic agree at least at some level that it is fair to have a system of property where everyone, in legal principle, is capable of becoming a property owner. The promise that one can achieve economic security by accumulating capital through labor and becoming a property holder is the carrot. The police, military, and private security forces are the stick. It's easier to maintain order with a carrot and a stick than with just a stick. Your criteria for a solution are exactly mine as well. I bet, though, we have very different ideas about what an individual is or what it means for them to make their own choices. On government: I cannot say anything about the presence or absence of large governments. It's possible that large scale coordination of human beings requires large scale structures. Capitalism has large scale structures of its own. Markets, financial institutions, national and supranational bodies of law and force, political parties, and who knows what else that slips my mind are all massive apparatuses of power and coordination. Does capitalism not require large government bodies? There are many people who believe invasive governments with their heavy-handed economic policies are a perversion of capitalism. I'm not such an idealist. Capitalism has been unstable since its early inception. It has come up with many, many tricks to keep itself afloat. Laissez-faire failed. What we have now, what many people call neoliberalism, is its latest incarnation. I believe people who believe in bourgeois ideologies and relations of property will be ever creative in coming up with new principles, instititions, policies and markets to keep the system afloat. Call it the efficient government hypothesis: The government is as big as it needs to be for the system to be stable. On the individual: I emphatically reject many fundamental liberal principles about the self. I am not an atom. I do not exist apart from my social relations. All of my relations are integral to my being. If you poked a hole in the social fabric where I am, I believe that you could reconstruct a large part of my being simply from the information of which fibers criss-crossed to stitch me together. An ideology that treats me as an atom that makes decisions for its own sake while ignoring how essentially mixed up I am with other individuals is barren to me. It does not tell me how to be happy, how to live a good life, how to be prosperous, how to be productive. My prosperity is fundamentally tied up with the prosperity of others. My productivity is nil without the productivity of others (I am a programmer, a profession extremely reliant on everyone else's work). Property is a relation between atomic individuals. Exchange is a social relation between atomic individuals. I am neither. I don't think anyone is. The failure of property and exchange to capture human relations makes the system unstable. It is an abstraction, and a leaky abstraction. Everyone knows what happens when you stick to abstractions that leak. You get into a lot of trouble. I am perfectly capable of cooperating in good faith with my fellow human beings. I extend that good faith to everyone else: I believe everyone else wants to live in harmony with each other. If I didn't believe this, I would have to accept that society must be structured by force and that some must dominate the others. I cannot accept this. If must be an optimist, I will be an optimist. It's not hard, though. People are good, or the makings of the good. My liberty and my prosperity are in good hands. On property and individual freedom: An individual tautologically, in a very weak sense, always makes their own decisions. It may be that their choices are strongly shaped by material conditions. When we talk about liberty in the bourgeois sense, we tend to think about making individual choices in the absence of violence. The problem with this is that you have attached a word to what is impermissible: Violence. It is a symbol, it is an abstraction. It is not reality. Power does not care about symbols, abstractions, or ideas. It only answers to reality. If a human being gives him or herself to an idea, they relinquish the ability to perceive reality outside of that abstraction and they become vulnerable to those who would manipulate that idea. I might not be very clear right now. It's a hard concept to pin down. What I mean to say is: If you believe that unjustified violence violates individual freedom, then those who seek to curtail your freedom will use their power to frame their actions that harm you as non-violent, or that it is justified violence. Hence propaganda and the manipulation of social customs. We are led to believe that being brought into this world helpless and dependent on others without our consent, and then being raised and inculcated in the way the human machine works, and then left to fend for ourselves in a reality where our fellow human beings will let us fall into the flames of despair and poverty below is a non-violent social situation. Individual choice, my ass. If one wanted me to act on my own choices, they would give me the security so that I could. Instead, I have to give up my individual initiative and ability to make choices to someone else in exchange for the means to survive. Individual freedom in our current system is a function of how much capital you own. That's not freedom. Calling this freedom is ideological propaganda. Everyone knows freedom is good, let's call our hierarchical society of domination free. If society believes in individual freedom, then society ought to provide for all individuals. Would this work? If one believes in individual freedom, it must be because one believes that individuals will act for the greater good, because the good of society is the good of the individual. Anyone who thinks individuals will behave selfishly and destroy such a society does not believe in freedom. They believe that only a few should be free, and everyone should be ruled by them in some way. Hence, our current economic relations. The right to dictate another person's actions is not freedom. It is tyranny.
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  I think you're confusing proper legal protections against exploitation of workers for Marxism. You can have a free market and still protect workers. No one in their right mind is expecting the means of production to be collectivized into a bureaucratic mess (considering how many corporations are practically Stalinist dystopias in their own right).
realusername 11y ago
I guess people are downvoting you because they disagree but unfortunately, this is sadly the world we live in. Without external factors to counter-balance all of this, massive companies have a massive power and can almost do what they want.
fixermark 11y ago
"If they could chop your labor-power from your flesh, from your family, from your community, and expropriate it as their own, the owners would." That sounds like "My work gets done while I stay home with my family and community," and that would be awesome. It's the dream that makes me get up and go write code every day!
- danharaj 11y ago
  They won't pay you for it. Remember, states like England passed laws expropriating land titles from yeomen in order to put it into the hands of bourgeois property holders. If they could take your labor, they would and if they could take it without paying you, they would. They have. They will.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    They don't need to pay me for it. If they've taken it without diminishing me, they're free to go about their business and I'm free to spend time with my family, living off the bounty of a richer society. (Your original description sounds an awful lot like the goal of open source, is what I'm saying. The infinite replicability and liquid scalability of software makes it hard to apply industrial-age metaphors to it ;) ).
    - danharaj 11y ago
      Oh, I see what you're getting at. What I was getting at, though, is that you wouldn't live off of the bounty of that society. Only owners of capital get to live off the bounty of their capital. Everyone else has to sell themselves to capital. If they don't need you though, why would they bother? They would just throw you away. Capitalism is a hell of a drug.
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  Or it could mean your brain gets leashed in such a way that you're not aware of your servitude all the while you don't get paid a dime for said servitude.
digikata 11y ago
All the worry that people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have over strong AI is misplaced. In the rule-of-profit era, algorithms running with disregard to humanity are already in charge, not executing AI software on a compute cluster, but on a platform of corporate policy executed on a hybrid of components consisting of people and machines.

mindcrime 11y ago

So are we just going to spout Marxist dogma, or do you have some idea for a solution? Preferably something that doesn't require a massive government apparatus and that doesn't infringe on the rights of every individual to make their own choices?

praptak 11y ago
Cry me a river about individual rights to bend over for the employer. I am ok with a huge government to protect me from having to compete with workaholics.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  I am ok with a huge government to protect me from having to compete with workaholics. Cry me a river about competing with people with a greater work ethic. I'm not OK with government doing anything that involves initiation of force to achieve political ends.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    "greater work ethic" meaning "performs well in this system of labor relations". It is a circular moral judgment. The status quo is maintained by force. The government you have distrust for is the thing that keeps everything from breaking down.
    - mindcrime 11y ago
      "greater work ethic" meaning "performs well in this system of labor relations". It is a circular moral judgment. There will always be people who want more, work more, work harder, strive harder, and are more ambitious. That has nothing at all to do with "this system of labor relations". The government you have distrust for is the thing that keeps everything from breaking down. Feh... I mistrust the government because they're the main reason things are so broken now. The only "government" I want is self-government and whatever voluntary associations people form that don't claim a right to use force for any cause other than defense.
werber 11y ago
I think stronger worker protections for life's inevitable catastrophes in a manner similar to Germany would be great.
notNow 11y ago
Are we only allowed to spew Capitalist propaganda and worship Adam Smith and Friedman here?
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Of course not, but spewing tired Marxist rhetoric without offering an actual proposal isn't accomplishing much.
api 11y ago
My own view is this: The ideal would be to have a strong social safety net and a fair system of redistribution that operates with minimal micromanagement or intrusion into individual affairs. Basically you have a government that taxes everyone according to the same rate and provides health care, unemployment and disability protection, insurance against certain emergencies (FEMA, etc.), and some sort of basic income. But as long as you pay into this system and are a 'shareholder' you can do whatever you want. Employment should be at-will. Companies should be easy to start. Regulations should be minimal and justified by specific rationales (e.g. environmental protection). The problem with the USSR and to a much lesser extent European Socialist countries is that they try to micro-manage. They have all these messes of laws that try to dictate exactly how things work and exactly how people must live their lives. That doesn't work. It just chokes everything and weighs everything down. The irony is that all this micro-management is put into place because the obvious alternative -- just redistributing wealth -- is politically toxic. So instead of just redistributing wealth, we try to reach in and piecemeal adjust the operation of capitalism to make it 'more fair.' The end result is the worst of both worlds: the system remains unfair, and we end up with micromanaging regulations that are far more expensive than what it would cost to just redistribute wealth. The US healthcare system is a great example. We have everything that is bad about micro-managing Socialism (heavy regulations, bureaucracy, inefficiency) combined with everything that is bad about capitalism/free market healthcare (inequality, losing coverage when you get sick, etc.). No "system" is fair. All systems contain intrinsic biases, emergent behaviors, randomness, massive opportunities for cheating and exploitation, and unintentional/non-obvious "goal functions" that conflict with the stated intents of their designers or operators. Constructing a fair system through central planning is impossible... IMHO it is "perpetual motion" or "halting problem" impossible. Complex living systems are not logical and their behaviors cannot be pre-specified by an intelligent designer. Wealth redistribution is the obvious answer. Instead of trying to impose the impossible on a chaotic counter-intuitive world, just apply noise reduction and normalization.
- Apocryphon 11y ago
  The insane thing is that what you're describing isn't even remarkable. Other capitalist countries have it. It's just the U.S. doesn't, and doesn't even want it.
danharaj 11y ago
Geeze, someone's salty. I didn't spout Marxist dogma. I used a term coined by Marx. I used it because it's a useful term. It makes utterable the abstraction that is the labor relation. I actually reject the part of Marx that is dogma. Marx was wrong in many ways. He predicted his revolutions wrong. His descendants were as authoritarian and capitalist as the bourgeoisie; the only changes they made were to give all property to the state and put its control in the hands of bureaucrats. Really, bourgeois property holders do the same thing: That's what management is. So, the only difference between the two is the number of owners: many or one. Why are states that claim to be communist in the tradition of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao so oppressive? Because people will revolt against a ruler that is bad to them. A single property owner is an inflexible proposition. Being unyielding, the only way it can maintain its position is with a stick. At least the bourgeois states have made their body politic agree at least at some level that it is fair to have a system of property where everyone, in legal principle, is capable of becoming a property owner. The promise that one can achieve economic security by accumulating capital through labor and becoming a property holder is the carrot. The police, military, and private security forces are the stick. It's easier to maintain order with a carrot and a stick than with just a stick. Your criteria for a solution are exactly mine as well. I bet, though, we have very different ideas about what an individual is or what it means for them to make their own choices. On government: I cannot say anything about the presence or absence of large governments. It's possible that large scale coordination of human beings requires large scale structures. Capitalism has large scale structures of its own. Markets, financial institutions, national and supranational bodies of law and force, political parties, and who knows what else that slips my mind are all massive apparatuses of power and coordination. Does capitalism not require large government bodies? There are many people who believe invasive governments with their heavy-handed economic policies are a perversion of capitalism. I'm not such an idealist. Capitalism has been unstable since its early inception. It has come up with many, many tricks to keep itself afloat. Laissez-faire failed. What we have now, what many people call neoliberalism, is its latest incarnation. I believe people who believe in bourgeois ideologies and relations of property will be ever creative in coming up with new principles, instititions, policies and markets to keep the system afloat. Call it the efficient government hypothesis: The government is as big as it needs to be for the system to be stable. On the individual: I emphatically reject many fundamental liberal principles about the self. I am not an atom. I do not exist apart from my social relations. All of my relations are integral to my being. If you poked a hole in the social fabric where I am, I believe that you could reconstruct a large part of my being simply from the information of which fibers criss-crossed to stitch me together. An ideology that treats me as an atom that makes decisions for its own sake while ignoring how essentially mixed up I am with other individuals is barren to me. It does not tell me how to be happy, how to live a good life, how to be prosperous, how to be productive. My prosperity is fundamentally tied up with the prosperity of others. My productivity is nil without the productivity of others (I am a programmer, a profession extremely reliant on everyone else's work). Property is a relation between atomic individuals. Exchange is a social relation between atomic individuals. I am neither. I don't think anyone is. The failure of property and exchange to capture human relations makes the system unstable. It is an abstraction, and a leaky abstraction. Everyone knows what happens when you stick to abstractions that leak. You get into a lot of trouble. I am perfectly capable of cooperating in good faith with my fellow human beings. I extend that good faith to everyone else: I believe everyone else wants to live in harmony with each other. If I didn't believe this, I would have to accept that society must be structured by force and that some must dominate the others. I cannot accept this. If must be an optimist, I will be an optimist. It's not hard, though. People are good, or the makings of the good. My liberty and my prosperity are in good hands. On property and individual freedom: An individual tautologically, in a very weak sense, always makes their own decisions. It may be that their choices are strongly shaped by material conditions. When we talk about liberty in the bourgeois sense, we tend to think about making individual choices in the absence of violence. The problem with this is that you have attached a word to what is impermissible: Violence. It is a symbol, it is an abstraction. It is not reality. Power does not care about symbols, abstractions, or ideas. It only answers to reality. If a human being gives him or herself to an idea, they relinquish the ability to perceive reality outside of that abstraction and they become vulnerable to those who would manipulate that idea. I might not be very clear right now. It's a hard concept to pin down. What I mean to say is: If you believe that unjustified violence violates individual freedom, then those who seek to curtail your freedom will use their power to frame their actions that harm you as non-violent, or that it is justified violence. Hence propaganda and the manipulation of social customs. We are led to believe that being brought into this world helpless and dependent on others without our consent, and then being raised and inculcated in the way the human machine works, and then left to fend for ourselves in a reality where our fellow human beings will let us fall into the flames of despair and poverty below is a non-violent social situation. Individual choice, my ass. If one wanted me to act on my own choices, they would give me the security so that I could. Instead, I have to give up my individual initiative and ability to make choices to someone else in exchange for the means to survive. Individual freedom in our current system is a function of how much capital you own. That's not freedom. Calling this freedom is ideological propaganda. Everyone knows freedom is good, let's call our hierarchical society of domination free. If society believes in individual freedom, then society ought to provide for all individuals. Would this work? If one believes in individual freedom, it must be because one believes that individuals will act for the greater good, because the good of society is the good of the individual. Anyone who thinks individuals will behave selfishly and destroy such a society does not believe in freedom. They believe that only a few should be free, and everyone should be ruled by them in some way. Hence, our current economic relations. The right to dictate another person's actions is not freedom. It is tyranny.
norea-armozel 11y ago
I think you're confusing proper legal protections against exploitation of workers for Marxism. You can have a free market and still protect workers. No one in their right mind is expecting the means of production to be collectivized into a bureaucratic mess (considering how many corporations are practically Stalinist dystopias in their own right).

realusername 11y ago

I guess people are downvoting you because they disagree but unfortunately, this is sadly the world we live in. Without external factors to counter-balance all of this, massive companies have a massive power and can almost do what they want.

fixermark 11y ago

"If they could chop your labor-power from your flesh, from your family, from your community, and expropriate it as their own, the owners would." That sounds like "My work gets done while I stay home with my family and community," and that would be awesome. It's the dream that makes me get up and go write code every day!

danharaj 11y ago
They won't pay you for it. Remember, states like England passed laws expropriating land titles from yeomen in order to put it into the hands of bourgeois property holders. If they could take your labor, they would and if they could take it without paying you, they would. They have. They will.
- fixermark 11y ago
  They don't need to pay me for it. If they've taken it without diminishing me, they're free to go about their business and I'm free to spend time with my family, living off the bounty of a richer society. (Your original description sounds an awful lot like the goal of open source, is what I'm saying. The infinite replicability and liquid scalability of software makes it hard to apply industrial-age metaphors to it ;) ).
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Oh, I see what you're getting at. What I was getting at, though, is that you wouldn't live off of the bounty of that society. Only owners of capital get to live off the bounty of their capital. Everyone else has to sell themselves to capital. If they don't need you though, why would they bother? They would just throw you away. Capitalism is a hell of a drug.
norea-armozel 11y ago
Or it could mean your brain gets leashed in such a way that you're not aware of your servitude all the while you don't get paid a dime for said servitude.

digikata 11y ago

All the worry that people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have over strong AI is misplaced. In the rule-of-profit era, algorithms running with disregard to humanity are already in charge, not executing AI software on a compute cluster, but on a platform of corporate policy executed on a hybrid of components consisting of people and machines.