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Big Tech are the new Soviets
- derelicta 11mo agoThe most capitalist thing possibly happening at the heart of a capitalist empire is actually gobbunism guyz
- js8 11mo agoExcept the Soviet society wasn't very communist. It definitely wasn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
- decimalenough 11mo agoFunny how no self-proclaimed Communist party has ever achieved anything even approximating communism.
- saubeidl 11mo agoIt's similar to the mythical "free market" in that way.
- nephihaha 11mo agoThe free market today (so called) is heavily managed by governments, leading to a kind of centralised control which converges with what Marxism produces in practice. Neither deliver what they promise. Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.
- saubeidl 11mo agoThat is precisely my point, that is the only type of free market to ever exist, because it's an ideological construct.
- nephihaha 11mo agoThe free market does exist, but not where it is supposed to. The black market sometimes acts as a free market... As do car boot/yard sales... Precisely because it is not interfered with by the authorities all the time. Putting everything online is going to increase government interference. We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
- derelicta 11mo ago> Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes. Well yes, because it does. You dont even need a fully planned economy, some market forces aint bad and some small bourgeois aint bad either. Bird in a cage etc etc.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.
- derelicta 11mo agoCommunism is no button you just have to push. It can be described as a society so prosperous that its members do not need to work anymore to live, where classes have been abolished and where the State has disappeared. It needs to be built and engineered. Countries like China and Vietnam are going in this right direction, and they are already more prosperous, more industrious and more democratic than their western adversaries despite starting from basically scratch
- hagbard_c 11mo agoSoviet society was communist, don't fall for the real Communism has never been tried ruse. Soviet society was one of the examples of how Communism at a large scale can end up looking, others are e.g. Cambodia under Pol Pot, China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, Venezuela under Maduro, etc. The things these societies have in common is that they were/are repressive, that the Party/ the government claims it was/is working for 'the people' and that there was/is a clear distinction between Party members and the 'common folk' with the former having access to perks not available or allowed to the latter. Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. It is there where Communism can work, at a small enough scale so that leechers and moochers can be put in their place and there is no (need for a) Party. As soon as the size of the Communi(ty) gets so large that any individual can no longer check on all of the others Commun(ism) no longer works since it offers far too many opportunities for less scrupulous individuals to leech of others and for ideologists to rise to power 'in service of the people'.
- darkwater 11mo ago> Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. And yet, we don't live as such animals and our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".
- hagbard_c 11mo ago> our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal". That 'inner animal' comes out the moment the shelves in the supermarkets are empty and the electronic payment systems are down. Those reasoning capabilities may have put a thin cultural veneer over the beast but it is still there, ready to defend itself and its own if push comes to shove as well it should - cultures have a way of collapsing when times get hard.
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- nephihaha 11mo agoIt was founded by Marxists to fulfil Marxist dogma. Either Soviet Marxism was not as predictive of reality as it liked to pretend to be or it compromised itself. Any system which says "my way or the highway", and that it alone is scientific, is inevitably going to lead to lead to oppression in practice whether it's Marxist dogma or the subject of this article. Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.
- saubeidl 11mo agoThat's a nice parallel to the article, which points out that the biggest fans of capitalism haven't managed to actually create their predicted free markets. Pure ideology.
- Hikikomori 11mo agoAnd when do something approaching free markets we get things like the Bengal and Irish famines.
- nephihaha 11mo agoBengal's famine occurred because British imperial government (not market forces) shifted food resources away to support the war effort. Ireland's famine occurred within a largely feudal system, and has been followed by massive land reforms within Ireland. It is arguable if either occurred due to "free market forces". For what it's worth, the massive famines in the USSR and PRC didn't take place due to free market forces either. The problem with the free market vs Marxism argument is that they are both materialist. These systems know the price of things and real value of nothing.
- saubeidl 11mo agoAt least in the context of the Irish famine, capitalist policies were a key driver: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43910575 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43910575
- _DeadFred_ 11mo agoThe most capitalist thing possible/unregulated scenario happened and was called the East India Company.
- ttoinou 11mo agoIf amazon overcharges sellers of a 40% fee, then why can’t I get the same object elsewhere cheaper? Obviously if you remove from your mind all market mechanisms, then it doesn’t look like a market anymore
- nephihaha 11mo agoDepends what you are buying. In some cases you can buy it elsewhere and in other cases, Amazon may be the only option left.
- ttoinou 11mo agoChinese stuff you can find it cheaper elsewhere most of the time. For the rest, amazon is still cheaper, faster to deliver and easier to return
- bushbaba 11mo agoYes, but not with the same shipping speed. Often temu/aliexpress requires you to wait week(s).
- nephihaha 11mo agoI wasn't thinking of Chinese goods. Their labour laws and prison camps are even more questionable.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agoamazon is just a middleman for the chinese goods. your objections apply to a fantastic number of amazon sellers.
- postexitus 11mo agoAmazon enforces a Most Favored Nation (MFN) condition on sellers, basically implying that they cannot sell the same product elsewhere for cheaper. Funny enough - when Amazon pushes their fees higher, it means the prices go up everywhere, that's Amazon inflation. https://www.proskauer.com/blog/amazons-most-favored-nations-policies-scrutinized-under-sherman-act https://www.proskauer.com/blog/amazons-most-favored-nations-...
- nephihaha 11mo agoYanis Varoufakis is a curious character, endlessly promoted across mainstream media including the BBC. His wife is said to be the basis of Pulp's song "Common People" about a rich girl at St. Martin's College trying to slum it. That's debatable, but her father was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. Yanis Varoufakis went to a private school in Athens and has taught at Cambridge... Seems like he has a pretty elite background.
- master-lincoln 11mo agoHow is that relevant here? Did anyone claim anything to the contrary?
- nephihaha 11mo agoIt skews his view of the entire situation in ways he isn't even aware of. In this case, he talks about feudalism, and it's arguable if that's where we're headed at all. Feudalism requires the peasantry to provide something useful to the overlords, which will not be the case when low paid jobs are automated.
- gsf_emergency_6 11mo agoMarx married into minor mobility and was himself descended from prosperous Jews. Lenin's father was ennobled. Aristocrats turning against capitalism is as old as communism.
- nelox 11mo agoYanis, wasn’t an aristocrat. However, these were all from upper-class or elite backgrounds too: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito.
- nephihaha 11mo agoThere are tonnes of people like that in Marxism. The irony is that they claim to want to liberate the working class when they were never part of it. Guevara especially came from a wealthy background. YV was born into a monied family and married into one. He also went to private school as a child. As far as I know he has spent most of his life in an ivory tower.
- weeeeelp 11mo agohttps://archive.is/T8VQC https://archive.is/T8VQC
- darkwater 11mo agoYou can just close the pop-up and read the entire article. At least it worked here.
- dauertewigkeit 11mo agoI've been saying this since before Yanis was even a Greek MP. It's just so damn ironic that capitalism and free markets ended up building these huge corporations which are essentially planned economies at nation state scale.
- adrian_b 11mo agoYes. As someone who has grown up in a country occupied by communists and who knows how much worse is that than anything that can be imagined by someone without firsthand experience, I can say that the claim which was frequent in Western propaganda that communism is something opposed to capitalism is completely false. There is a great difference between theoretical communism and practical communism. Theoretical communism was just a bunch of lies without any relationship to the practical communism that was implemented in any of the countries claiming to attempt to realize a communist society. On the other hand, practical communism has been everywhere something not opposite to capitalism, but something equivalent with the final stage of unregulated capitalism, where the big monopolies have won in every market, leaving no alternatives. During the last 25 years I have been dismayed to watch every year how the Western societies become more and more alike to the communist societies that they had criticized vigorously a half of century ago.
- nephihaha 11mo agoWell, he'd know being part of the system. Here is his WEF page. That door opens from the inside. https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/ https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/yanis-varoufakis/
- petre 11mo agoExcept everybody in the cabinaet disliked him. https://www.politico.eu/article/alexis-tapis-yanis-varoufakis-greece-economist-former-allies/ https://www.politico.eu/article/alexis-tapis-yanis-varoufaki...
- thrance 11mo agoIt's only ironic if you don't understand that all of this is the logical endpoint of any capitalist economy. Accumulation of capital is the name of the game, and capital is power. At some point, the largest actors inevitably become untouchable. There can be no free market, they will always devolve into this plutocracy.
- steve_gh 11mo agoThe problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world. For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely. With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy. Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.
- nephihaha 11mo agoIt's certainly the case with energy. Many people can barely afford their electricity expenses and yet big tech wants to build data centres which will gobble up energy like no one's business. In fact it runs completely counter to the environmental rhetoric.
- Muromec 11mo agoElectricity is like 30 euros per month. What are you even talking about?
- cbruns 11mo agoMuch more expensive in the US. Especially in areas that use resistive heating in the winter.
- Muromec 11mo agoHow bad it is exactly? Resistive heating sounds cursed, when the houses are (I guess) not the fancy European newbuild. I'm looking at something like 1000 kWh on a heat pump a year in a mild weather, where kWh is around 0.30 eurocents. I don't however own the pump, energy company leases it to me, so I pay about 150 a month the whole year (cold months are about 4 GJ, but it totals to 18-ish in a year). Then there is another 10-30 a month for normal in-house electricity consumption. When I had actual district heating (powered by gas, when the gas was expensive af) and the house was "leakier", I looked at something like 50ish GJ a year and paid close to 350.
- demarq 11mo agoHear me out. What if it’s not capitalism as a whole but one specific facet. Debt. > In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running. In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns. But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances. > Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation. YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc… And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage. Uber, AirBnB etc..
- impossiblefork 11mo agoSurely though Schumpeter must have been right when it comes to new industrial projects where the technology is already well-understood, maybe research in universities or similar?
- demarq 11mo agoYes, there are a lot of situations where that is true. And as you say industrial projects, and I assume you specifically mean heavy industries, like building a new type of airliner. I agree. But when it comes to information technology those situations are far and few in between.
- impossiblefork 11mo agoYes, but I think it also applies to things like transformer-doomscaling, as emphasized by OpenAI, for example.
- charcircuit 11mo ago
- alecco 11mo agoI often dislike Varoufakis' weird champagne Marxist with libertarian and nationalism bent. But he is spot on this time: American Big Tech are a vampire squid on the Western economies. They have a good product but they are tyrants. It would be good to break them up and make open fair systems. But the American top 10%, including most of Congress, put most of their savings in their stocks so it will never happen in the current system. Ever. And now they are going all-in with AI. And I don't believe their official narrative. At all.
- haunter 11mo agoHorseshoe theory strikes again. The end game of captialism and communism is the same authoritarian dictatorship