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Righteousness drives cancel culture. Power structures and capitalism have nothing to do with it. Historically communists literally cancel people by imprisoning

• pessimizer 6y ago
  In order to fire someone, you need power. In order to fire someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of labor rights. edit: in the US, it's completely legal to fire people because you don't like their taste in shoes, or because you're so attracted to them that you think you'll be tempted to try to cheat on your wife. I don't think we should have a carved out protected class for employees who sounded transphobic on twitter once. We should have a minimum process for firing people that is dictated by the state, and further process that is negotiated by the employee's union. "Free speech" libertarians hate that a lot more.
  • rpiguy 6y ago
    In order to send someone to a gulag, you need power. To disappear someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of human rights. Socialism as a cure for Capitalism is a case of the cure being far worse than the disease.
    • paulryanrogers 6y ago
      Authoritarianism (whether abusive or benevolent) is orthogonal to the economic system.
      • DuskStar 6y ago
        Is it, though? It seems to me like you can't have a command economy without authoritarianism.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • Nasrudith 6y ago
          You technically can but it requires pretty fantastic conditions as prerequisites right now. Theoretically if it was known that obeying lead to better outcomes than anything you could do on your own people would follow them without coercion. Actually being that right on their own would be difficult for the same reasons it would for a command economy period, and proving it enough to gain followers would be difficult but it would be possible. Give a reliable "crystal ball" and predictions always being clear and right where those that obey see outcomes accordingly the sensible would start to follow the commands without any force behind it. There is no need to use force to punish jumping off of a cliff essentially. It implies the reason it depends upon authoritarianism is because as a model it cannot compete.
          • johnday 6y ago
            > Theoretically if it was known that obeying lead to better outcomes than anything you could do on your own people would follow them without coercion. Anti-mask-wearers and anti-vaccinators have conclusively shown that this cannot happen in practise.
            • DuskStar 6y ago
              I think the answer there is that the anti-mask-wearers and anti-vaccinators might not know that obeying leads to better outcomes. (they're almost certainly wrong, but that's still what they know)
        • claudiawerner 6y ago
          This won't be a very popular response, but: generally the answer to this has been to question the framing of authoritarianism. Marx spoke of a society in which labour is no longer alienated, but "man's prime want". His assumption (true or false) was that people wouldn't be need to be pressured to work. His claim was that in capitalism, itself an authoritarian system descended from previous class systems, authority lurks behind free rights and duties, in which he commented that under capitalism the worker must be free - free to sell his labour, and free from the means of production. In summary, to anti-capitalists the question is not only how to have an economy without authoritarianism, but also how to rework the very concept of labour, how it is thought of, practised, etc. What is it about labour in class societies, they ask, which means that it can only be seen as something which needs to be compelled, either by holding the means of survival (a wage) over the worker's head, or by placing them in a state-industry job for labour tokens? Both the capitalist and 'socialist' solutions are authoritarian. Why? Unfortunately a lot of the popular discourse around Marx's actual works has been obscured or discounted. Yet it is impossible to validate the USSR, Cuba, China, etc. as 'Marxist' or not without knowing what he wrote himself. It's just as rare to find a leftist who's read Marx as it is to find a right-libertarian who's read Marx.
      • rpiguy 6y ago
        Agree that is exactly my point, but the article claims that capitalism drives cancel culture and that is what I was responding to.
    • herio 6y ago
      As someone living outside of the US I find it interesting (and perhaps a bit predictable) how the normal response is something in the lines of "If you do not want capitalism, you want communism". This form of polarized view is false dichotomy, much like choosing with horn of the bull to be speared by. There might be other ways of handling the bull. From my point of view there is a whole spectrum of things in between these two opposites. I see full unfettered capitalism as harmful as I consider full blown communism. They're both totalitarian systems just with different masters and propaganda. Social democracy as done in much of Europe is in between the two (or at least used to be when I grew up). It tries to respect basic human rights such as housing and health care, while still allowing corporations to do their thing. Controls imposed on corporations tries to ensure that they don't go completely bonkers in search of the almighty profit.
  • cnity 6y ago
    > In order to fire someone based on vague accusations or how they worded a tweet, you need a complete lack of labor rights. Not really: "I'm sorry, it's now clear that your values are out of alignment with the company values. While your work here has been effective, we can't justify the harm your value misalignment is bringing the company."
  • throwaway373438 6y ago
    " you need a complete lack of labor rights." What on earth does a lack of labor rights have to do with capitalism? Labor can be -- and often is -- unprotected in all economic structures. A laborer in a communist state has historically had very few labor protections.
• zozbot234 6y ago
  Right. Capitalism doesn't "drive" cancel culture any more than it drives other cultural developments of all sorts. People have always sought to take advantage of cultural and political shifts, and this is no different.
• deleted 6y ago
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• jb775 6y ago
  Righteousness lies in the eyes of the beholder. And often nowadays, the disconnect is in how much righteousness-attention is placed on specific topics in relation to others, dependent on what's in-vogue politically.