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So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification. An interesting position to take in a hacker community but ok :) However you c

• Gormo 2mo ago
  > So you’re basically against the concept of classes and the act of classification. No idea where you got that from. I think I was fairly clear in explaining that the concept of classes and the act of classification are value-laden and subjective things, that are applied for the sake of their utility in pursuing equally value-laden purposes. Very much within the "all models are wrong; some models are useful" understanding. The point is that classes and classification are analytical tools we use for pursuing our own purposes within the world, not sources of empirical information about the world. > However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally. How do you figure? Surely rejecting a fundamental axiom on which an entire ideological system is based would entail dismissing all subsequent literature predicated on that axiom. If you rejected the premise that the position of celestial objects determined the outcomes of events in human society, would you not dismiss the entire field of astrology on that basis? > Sure, every human being is unique and individual. But if you take a few million of them, patterns arise. Marketing people know and abuse this. And they make good use of it in trying to sell narrowly-tailored markets to narrowly-tailored market segments. If they tried to use it as a way of making normative judgments applicable to society as a whole, they'd be neck-deep in error to the same extent as the "class struggle" folks. > If you actually look at what people are doing, you can observe similar patterns too. If you actually look at what people are doing, you will almost invariably witness them pursuing their own particular individual interests according to their own particular values and assumptions, and not making their decisions in line with someone else's theoretical constructs. > Yes some groups fail to act for their best interests because they are oppressed. Groups do not act at all: first, categories and groups are two different things; second, only individuals act, often in relation to other individuals, and the categorization of those individuals together is itself a post-hoc analysis. People generally do act in pursuit of their best interests: even if people are being oppressed, oppression itself is an external phenomenon -- it may constrain the range of feasible choices available to an individual, but it cannot usurp the agency of individuals in making choice between the options that remain available. Naturally, these "acting against their own interests" claims are made by external observers looking at people actually making choices from whatever options are available, and concluding that of those available choices, they chose the one less compatible with their own interests. In almost every such case, the observer drawing that conclusion has projected their own notion of what the other party's interest ought to be onto them, rather than attempted to ascertain what their interests actually are. No one is actually obligated to determine their own interests in compliance with someone else's taxonomies or values hierarchies -- everyone can and does do so according to their own.
• imtringued 2mo ago
  >However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally. You can, you just assert that everyone is a worker and a capitalist simultaneously and that these individual components exist independent of their classification and the assortment of people into groups of classes and that what you call class is just the mundane reflection of some of those components outweighing other components. When I suggest a tax on holding cash, hardline communists will argue along this insane line of thinking "this will impact workers the most because they are holding most of their net worth in cash". Ah yes, the capitalist worker, fighting for his capitalist interests. Amazing. What was the class struggle about again? Blaming others and absolving yourself of your own responsibility to fix this mess of an economy? Great, you are the problem! Any remotely sane person siding with workers would realize that workers have an asset known as their own body including the associated lifespan of that body and this is an asset that is producing a future income over time. This asset is illiquid and completely exempt from a money based tax, but if you were to introduce a true wealth tax on all physical capital, the government would not be in the wrong if it assessed the "net worth" of your body and taxed you accordingly. So the ideology of taxing property directly is inherently a tax on labor and therefore not much different from a capitalist taking a cut from your labor. Meanwhile the tax on holding money is purely a tax on a passthrough asset that nobody should hold significant quantities of to begin with. In a hypothetically perfectly optimized society, nobody pays that tax because the transient money supply is zero, that's very different from a tax that grows indefinitely.
• philipallstar 2mo ago
  > However you can’t simply dismiss a whole literature of class struggle by simply rejecting the notion of class fundamentally. Of course there's a literature on it. Tribalism is one of humanity's most primitive traits. Being principled, reasoning, and being fair are the unusual things that develop and are developed by the most advanced civilisations. Just having different prices in shops based on who you are is normal. Having a set price for every customer is the advanced version, and less common.