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Protestation
  • Slaves don’t earn wages to buy products. The slave-owners have to spend funds to feed, house them etc.

    But it was really more about creating consumer markets. There is no capitalism without vast consumer markets for mass produced goods.

    Mercantile slavery produced less, more artisanal goods, for a very small class of people (aristocracy and nascent bourgeoisie).

    And it wasn’t possible to expand the consumer markets without creating a new class of people who had an income to spend on commodities.

    This is extremely simplified, but it’s the main interpretation for the end of slavery. Like, when we study the Industrial Revolution, the British empire and the end of slavery in school, it’s always under that lens, of creating new consumer markets.

    But just to make it clear, slavery is still lucrative, to this day. Which is why we have more slaves in absolute numbers now than at any other point in history. But it can’t be the main relation of production, because capitalism depends on mass consumption by masses of people. So slavery can only ever exist as a marginal system.

  • Trump floats eliminating U.S. income tax and replacing it with tariffs on imports
  • The real rich don’t pay any income tax tho? Not sure what you mean. Sure the high-income developers and engineers and lawyers etc. would become a richer, but they are not the rich, are they? The owners of the businesses they work at are. And they don’t pay income taxes.

  • I could see benefits and drawbacks
  • That does make intuitive sense, but archeology shows otherwise. There was a much bigger diversity of gender roles and relationship structures/child rearing systems, including in agricultural societies.

    The modern almost universal ideal of romantic monogamous nuclear relationships was born from romantic (as in the movement) puritan petit bourgeois ideals in the 19th century.

    Working class women during the medieval age for example, worked and lived outside the home, had affairs etc. This changed around the 18th century with the hegemony of the bourgeoisie and working class mirroring of their ideals.

    Basically while it’s true that patriarchal strictly dichotomous societies existed for as long as we can tell, And that they have prevailed and “won out”. But doesn’t mean they are the norm for humanity. Their universality is extremely recent.

  • The Genetic Arms Race | How CRISPR and AI Destroy the World - YouTube
  • It’s not. It’s about the real implications it might have, such as for eugenics and genetically enhanced soldiers. But it also does talk a lot about the real good it does and can do. But the main points are about those two topics. That like with every technology, the issue is the social and political structures around their use. And also how eugenics never really went away. In many ways it’s using CRISPR to start a conversation about eugenics tbh.

  • The Genetic Arms Race | How CRISPR and AI Destroy the World - YouTube
  • You don’t know what you are talking about lmao

    The Why Files is one of the best YouTube channels out there. They talk about fringe and conspiracy subjects but debunk them. You didn’t even watch the video and you are just making a BUNCH of assumptions that have nothing to do with it.

  • Growth as an end
  • I do understand all that. But explain this, how are all these commodity producing worker owned business regulated? How do they operate on a market? Who sets and controls this market? Who ensures collective property of the means of production?

    Socialism as an economic model with the workers owning the means of production kinda still has commodity production, money etc. otherwise the whole concept of a collectively owned business makes no sense.

    Unless you advocate for the complete atomization of groups into self-sufficient cells that have no organisation between them, to me you are still describing a state.

    Also, can’t workers be in direct control of their means of production in a socialist state? What mechanically or physically impedes that? Like coops were a major part of the soviet model, right?

    How long do you envision the transition from capitalism to socialism/communism to take then?

    (Also also, Marx did talk a lot about “lower stage” communism or socialism later in life. Also about how a revolution could move towards a completely free worker’s state instead of going through an authoritarian phase - he had correspondence with a revolutionary peasant woman in Russia about this it’s really interesting, if I find it I’ll share).

  • Growth as an end
  • I think that definition of socialism is insufficient. It sounds like an end-goal. I thought we were all communists. We wanted the dissolution of all hierarchy, of the state and of classes, of money and work.

    Socialism was then just born as a way to define what comes right after capitalism, and right before communism.

    We can still all agree that those are two different socialisms in themselves. It won’t look the same right after capitalism from right before communism.

    But getting back to it, how does your socialism maintain itself without markets? How does it protect itself? How does it function without regulations? You imply a state with your definition and don’t even realise it.

  • Growth as an end
  • But capital that stops dies, and if you are outcompeted you stop. So you always have to do better than everyone else. And capital has to accumulate exponentially to keep growing, and not stop and die.

    The mechanics of the system make sustainable growth impossible. Tweaking the surface of the system will never change that core.

  • Growth as an end
  • wat

    Like out of all arguments against a socialist state, saying it’s like cancer which is like capitalism is… dumb? Like how? Which socialist state metastasised and “grew” without natural limits? What even is this argument?

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