Ask a Red III

[Takhisis]

I was baptized Episcopal and raised Baptist. If you read this thread, you will discover that I came to the communist morality by way of Christianity. It was only later (but not much later) that I discovered Marx.

Well, you seem to have… abandoned some of those beliefs, by the tone of your comments. It sounds to me -might be a wrong impression- that you despair of religion, at least in part.

And you're not the only one to have arrived at 'unAmerican' pinkoism through religion and/or morals, ethics, etc.

I disagree. Violence, on some level, will be forced.

Well it depends on how you define 'violence'. We won't ever gain anything by overthrowing government or starting a massacre. Change will coem from within.

I don't understand; are you saying this to me, or as a supplemental to my statement? Because I should think you would know or realize how I feel about this.

Supplemental. Big capital realises that exploitation sucks (for the exploited) so tries to make them feel well. It's like someone toggling with the happiness sliders in a game of Civ. It still doesn't change the nature of the relationship, or that all of those perks are dependent on you -the worker- performing.

Sorry if the answers seem incomplete, but I have to rush.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Well, you seem to have… abandoned some of those beliefs, by the tone of your comments. It sounds to me -might be a wrong impression- that you despair of religion, at least in part.

A communist who is skeptical of religion? You don't say. But these are hardly uniquely communist feelings. You can find them in many places, including the founding fathers of the United States.

At any rate, I was 1. speaking of how Marx viewed religion, and 2. I don't think how I feel about it matters. If you're curious, I've answered more in depth several times.

And you're not the only one to have arrived at 'unAmerican' pinkoism through religion and/or morals, ethics, etc.

I know.

Well it depends on how you define 'violence'. We won't ever gain anything by overthrowing government or starting a massacre. Change will coem from within.

Socialism can never come from within. The rich will never voluntarily give up their privilege.

 

[Hygro]

Why not?

For two reasons:

1) Because it doesn't account for more important quality of living issues, like the fact that housing in poor areas has much higher exposure to lead, car exhaust (very important), pollution emitting industries, access to grocery stores with healthier and cheaper food to liquor, lack of quality healthcare which is also more expensive due to price levels being driven up by richer people and the limits on supply, entrapping education, a legal system that is punitive to poorer folk, cultural discrimination that causes emotional and physical health deprivations, less cultural respect which sucks on a philosophical level, poorer education which has a myriad of problems, much less political agency, poverty associated increases in crime rates causing threats to well-being and property and stress levels, all the factors (many listed above) that promote a cycle of physical and emotional child abuse and broken homes, and others. I mentioned this in a few examples, but because of inequality, people with more money result in an increase in the general price level. This means that the more inequality there is, the more expensive things are relative to poor people's buying power.

2) Statistically we are supposed to think that graph means most of those poorer people have most of those things. Well poorer people have only so much money, so most of them won't have many of those things. Some will have some, some will have others. And some of those things show that serious issues of poverty are actually quite prevalent, and not rate. Lots have experienced homelessness, which we don't take seriously enough (homelessness is horrifying), lots have experienced real hunger, lots don't have access to good technologies, and so forth.

And that's what your list (point 1) does not show, and that's what bad things your list (point 2) does show.

 

[WindFish]

Fully 92 percent of poor households have a microwave; two-thirds have at least one DVD player and 70 percent have a VCR.

Who the hell has a VCR now? and DVDs/microwaves are jolly cheap

● Nearly 75 percent have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.

What type of car do they have?

Also, apparently in Yankee land, you need a car to survive.

More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation.

oooh, they have a previous gen games console, big whoop.

● Half have a personal computer; one in seven have two or more computers.

Whats their spec?

● Just under half — 43 percent — have Internet access.

Big whoop, internet access is cheaper than a microwave oven

● One in every four has a digital video recorder such as TiVo.

Digital video recorders are cheap now

The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Sweden, France, Germany or the United Kingdom.

what does that have to do with anything?

 

[Hygro]

Exactly. No internet access for many which is a necessity in modern times. Work is often further away for poor folks so cars are even more needed. Probably lower quality stuff that isn't keeping up with needs. All of those things are waaaay cheaper than the stuff I mentioned in my point 1, stuff that matters lot more.

 

[luiz]

Still, the point stands that the average poor american lives a materially comfortable life. It doesn't change this fact that his laptop doesn't have the best specs or his grocery doesn't sell European delicacies.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I could care less about either of those things. In fact as we speak, I'm typing on a heavily outdated computer, eating a sandwich made entirely of store-brand foods. It doesn't matter how they compare to other societies, it matters how they compare to others in their own society. I mean, yes, ultimately the Filipino worker employed by Wal-Mart is worse off than the American worker employed by Wal-Mart. I'm not debating that. But that doesn't mean that our country doesn't have serious problems with inequality caused by the capitalist system. And that's how it should be measured. It doesn't matter that the poor have trinkets and gadgets; all that illustrates is cheap prices, or bad spending habits. Hell, even if workers made the exact same amount of money as their bosses (not that this would ever happen, but let's imagine for the sake of reductio ad absurdum argument), it would still be just as rotten a system, because they have no control over, or say in, the company, and the boss gets reimbursed for value he did not create. You liberals and conservatives rage on and on about bureaucracy and people unaccountable to the population, well this is the same thing. Making businesses be owned and managed by their workers is the same thing as self-determination in countries, is the same thing as choosing democracy over despotism. How wealthy or poor those people or those countries are compared to others is irrelevant to the question of freedom.

 

[Hygro]

Still, the point stands that the average poor american lives a materially comfortable life. It doesn't change this fact that his laptop doesn't have the best specs or his grocery doesn't sell European delicacies.

No. He doesn't HAVE a grocery. He has a liquor store with two aisles of low quality food. And he's still facing chronic asthma, stress, a host of environmental health problems stemming from things like chemical and mold exposures, long emergency response times for when he gets his premature heart attack coming from both his environment and from his lack of affordable care and affordable palate and reasonable access to nutritional education. (I didn't have to seek it out to learn foods, why should poor folk have to self initiate that?)

And given that list (ignoring the likely coupling of goods) he's only got a 25% chance he has both a computer and an internet connection. Seriously, this whole discussion of what consumer items poor people may or may not have is a complete red herring for quality of life.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Also, if you do a quick rundown of everything on that list, I think you get a value of about...
$1,550?

Not all that much, yeah?

 

[Tahuti]

I could care less about either of those things. In fact as we speak, I'm typing on a heavily outdated computer, eating a sandwich made entirely of store-brand foods. It doesn't matter how they compare to other societies, it matters how they compare to others in their own society. I mean, yes, ultimately the Filipino worker employed by Wal-Mart is worse off than the American worker employed by Wal-Mart. I'm not debating that. But that doesn't mean that our country doesn't have serious problems with inequality caused by the capitalist system. And that's how it should be measured. It doesn't matter that the poor have trinkets and gadgets; all that illustrates is cheap prices, or bad spending habits. Hell, even if workers made the exact same amount of money as their bosses (not that this would ever happen, but let's imagine for the sake of reductio ad absurdum argument), it would still be just as rotten a system, because they have no control over, or say in, the company, and the boss gets reimbursed for value he did not create. You liberals and conservatives rage on and on about bureaucracy and people unaccountable to the population, well this is the same thing. Making businesses be owned and managed by their workers is the same thing as self-determination in countries, is the same thing as choosing democracy over despotism. How wealthy or poor those people or those countries are compared to others is irrelevant to the question of freedom.

How would you respond if someone were to make these counter arguments:
"Property rights may not be democratic, but this, and capitalism in general, is a form of checks-and-balances on otherwise democratic societies. Without them, we would be poor and destitute, as democracy is inherently shorttermist."
or this one
"Democracy is decadent; if a human society can be likened to a human body, a democratic society would be comparable to a man without self-discipline only seeking to fulfill material needs, while monarchical societies give its subjects purpose by striving for achievement as an ambitious and disciplined person would."
I don't necessarily endorse any of these, I've just made them up, from the perspective of how others might think. Both imply that a boss is necessary to drive people, since most of them are not self-driven.

 

[Hygro]

Both imply that a boss is necessary to drive people, since most of them are not self-driven.

Quick point of clarification: is this a positive assertion, or is this a theoretical assertion purely to be consistent with you devil's advocations?

 

[Traitorfish]

How would you respond if someone were to make these counter arguments:
"Property rights may not be democratic, but this, and capitalism in general, is a form of checks-and-balances on otherwise democratic societies. Without them, we would be poor and destitute, as democracy is inherently shorttermist."
or this one
"Democracy is decadent; if a human society can be likened to a human body, a democratic society would be comparable to a man without self-discipline only seeking to fulfill material needs, while monarchical societies give its subjects purpose by striving for achievement as an ambitious and disciplined person would."
I don't necessarily endorse any of these, I've just made them up, from the perspective of how others might think. Both imply that a boss is necessary to drive people, since most of them are not self-driven.

Both arguments hinge on unexplained and rather dubious assumptions- primarily that" democracy is inherently short-termist" in the first case, and that "a human society can be likened to a human body" in the second- which we don't have any self-evident reason for accepting. If they remain unexplained, which I'd imagine is going to be the case when the people making them don't actually exist, it's not really possible to engage with these positions beyond simple contradiction.

 

[ParkCungHee]

"Democracy is decadent; if a human society can be likened to a human body,"

If a human society can be likened to a human body, we're in trouble because we're about 10,000 years overdo for a bowel movement.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Property rights is not a form of checks and balances, it's a form of oppression. Checks and balances are equal to one another, and split power between several bodies precisely to prevent one from becoming more powerful than the other. Property rights empower only the propertied, there is no check nor balance to this privilege, except for the entitler and protector of property - who is itself propertied.

If a human society can be likened to a human body, we're in trouble because we're about 10,000 years overdo for a bowel movement.

 

[Traitorfish]

It's kinda telling how many defences of capitalist rest on the premise "let's all just pretend for purposes of argument that we're all petty-proprietors of more or less equal wealth", as if wage-labour was something merely contingent to the whole business, and only predominate across the globe through some coincidence of history. When you need to abstract your system out of itself to make your defence work, you're going to be on shaky footing.

 

[aelf]

Supplemental. Big capital realises that exploitation sucks (for the exploited) so tries to make them feel well. It's like someone toggling with the happiness sliders in a game of Civ. It still doesn't change the nature of the relationship, or that all of those perks are dependent on you -the worker- performing.

Hell, I don't even think they bother with that anymore these days. The contemporary narrative is for the need to face a new 'reality', which is that you need to work work work because you've been lazy and living on borrowed money.

 

[Lone Wolf]

"let's all just pretend for purposes of argument that we're all petty-proprietors of more or less equal wealth"

Distributism FTW.

 

[Tahuti]

Both arguments hinge on unexplained and rather dubious assumptions- primarily that" democracy is inherently short-termist" in the first case, and that "a human society can be likened to a human body" in the second- which we don't have any self-evident reason for accepting. If they remain unexplained, which I'd imagine is going to be the case when the people making them don't actually exist, it's not really possible to engage with these positions beyond simple contradiction.

I thought you were familiar with the idea that democracy could be shorttermist. If the majority decided to maximally consume all available resources for their own benefit within their lifetimes, it would be dumb not to do it, despite being to the detriment of future generations. (admittedly, this rests on the idea of the homo economicus)

Pretty much anything that needs to make a fulfill life-needs, like hunting, can be compared to a human being and pretty much every animal species there is. Societies that are overly idle get extinct, which is why we don't have many of such societies anyway. Of course we don't have a self-evident reason to accept this, but then, were not debating exact sciences, and even then there are no reasons why exact sciences are self-evidently tre either.

Democracy is not a form of checks and balances, it's a form of oppression. Checks and balances are equal to one another, and split power between several bodies precisely to prevent one from becoming more powerful than the other. Democracy empowers only the majority, there is no check nor balance to this privilege, except for the entitler and protector of the majority- who is itself majority.

See what I've done here? Now this is not a valuable counterargument persé as it rests on the fallacy of tu quoque without further explanation, but the idea is that property rights serve as a check to unlimited democracy.

If a human society can be likened to a human body, we're in trouble because we're about 10,000 years overdo for a bowel movement.

I didn't say we weren't in trouble.

 

[Traitorfish]

I thought you were familiar with the idea that democracy could be shorttermist. If the majority decided to maximally consume all available resources for their own benefit within their lifetimes, it would be dumb not to do it, despite being to the detriment of future generations. (admittedly, this rests on the idea of the homo economicus)

I'm familiar with the idea, yes, but that doesn't mean that I think it holds true, or at least not universally so. As you say, it rests on the contentious- and I would say blatantly ideological- assumption of man as the rationally self-interested atom, so it 's certainly not something I'm willing to take as axiomatic!

Pretty much anything that needs to make a fulfill life-needs, like hunting, can be compared to a human being and pretty much every animal species there is. Societies that are overly idle get extinct, which is why we don't have many of such societies anyway. Of course we don't have a self-evident reason to accept this, but then, were not debating exact sciences, and even then there are no reasons why exact sciences are self-evidently tre either.

You're confusing the appeal of an analogy for the validity of an analogy. Yes, we can compare societies to bodies. It may even serve to illustrate certain points. But that doesn't mean that the comparison is instructive, and certainly not that what is a rule for one is a rule for the other. All we can really say is that both bodies and societies reproduce themselves, but, so what? That's so abstract an observation as to tell us nothing about the specifics of either.

 

[Traitorfish]

Hell, I don't even think they bother with that anymore these days. The contemporary narrative is for the need to face a new 'reality', which is that you need to work work work because you've been lazy and living on borrowed money.

Did you ever read Mark Fisher's pamphlet/essay/short book/whatever Capitalist Realism? It talks about a lot of this stuff, well worth a look.