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I'm not sure how quite to word this. You saying "he could theoretically stream off his laptop" is no different than saying a luddite could "theoretically sew c

I'm not sure how quite to word this. You saying "he could theoretically stream off his laptop" is no different than saying a luddite could "theoretically sew clothes with needle and thread". It really comes across like a lack of respect for the argument Marxists make. I'm not asking you to be a Marxist but if you aren't willing to engage the argument seriously, I'm not sure what I can say. Even your "solution", is exactly what the early Marxists thought. They needed to coordindate to overcome the sole power of factory owners and they did that through striking. What is striking, if not coordinated market power? The rest of your post comes off as Marxism, but in a different font. It's as wishy-washy as the solutions proposed by the Marxists on Bluesky. "if only we would come together and coordinate, the revolution will be here soon!". The issue with "No problems but coordination problems", is that today, in our society, capital solves coordination problems. And before that was monarchy, and before that was religion. The entirety of human civilization can be distilled with "how do we get n-million people to do x?" I don't consider myself as a Marxist but the actual problems he highlights are very salient even if his followers have failed to solve them. Just because there's no found solution for P=NP, doesn't mean the entire field of computational complexity is a wash.

dannyobrien 1y ago
Well, yes. Marxists also try to identify and solve these coordination problems, and their analysis is fundamentally one of class analysis. My claim isn't that they aren't pursuing the answers to these problems: it's that there attempts to do so have notoriously failed. Which is fine: these are not easy problems. The best models for successful coordination, as you've described, all have negative externalities. The point though, is that you really can stream off a laptop: we had BitTorrent; we have WebTorrent. We've built peer-to-peer infrastructure that works. In the last 25 years we have built great collective works with minimal capital outlay -- so minimal that we saw an explosion of capital investments because the returns to low capital were so high. Heck, you're using one of those low-capital, capital-adjacent artifacts right now. In the class of problems, scaling up peer-to-peer collective action is (I would suggest) difficult, but not as difficult as it would have been to coordinate peer production in the 19th century. We've just barely begun to explore their potential.

dannyobrien 1y ago

Well, yes. Marxists also try to identify and solve these coordination problems, and their analysis is fundamentally one of class analysis. My claim isn't that they aren't pursuing the answers to these problems: it's that there attempts to do so have notoriously failed. Which is fine: these are not easy problems. The best models for successful coordination, as you've described, all have negative externalities. The point though, is that you really can stream off a laptop: we had BitTorrent; we have WebTorrent. We've built peer-to-peer infrastructure that works. In the last 25 years we have built great collective works with minimal capital outlay -- so minimal that we saw an explosion of capital investments because the returns to low capital were so high. Heck, you're using one of those low-capital, capital-adjacent artifacts right now. In the class of problems, scaling up peer-to-peer collective action is (I would suggest) difficult, but not as difficult as it would have been to coordinate peer production in the 19th century. We've just barely begun to explore their potential.