We live in a post information scarcity society and we still haven't moved on from capitalism.
Edit: Changed title to be more accurate.
Also here is the summary from Wikipedia on what Post-scarcity means:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
Perhaps we live in a post DATA scarcity society. But information is still a scarce commodity
I think that we do live in a society where information is not scarce because the ease of replicating any information has increased significantly.
That does not mean everyone has access to it
The idea in relation to capitalism is referring to information from a physics standpoint, not from a data analysis standpoint, as in Information Theory and it's laws as opposed to the laws that govern matter / energy.
Capitalism won't overthrow itself.
It's collapsing by itself but I don't think that's fast enough. (And a hard crash will mean a lot of trouble, we need a transition)
And for the accelerationists in back - no, a crash doesn't imply anything nice will come later. We could end up back at feudalism.
– Buckminster Fuller
Do you see any clear paths forward for a transition?
Someone else on this thread mentioned parallel structures and that is probably what is going to be needed.
Side topic, how did you get your username to do that?
Edit: It was @Cowbee@lemmy.ml
Yeah, I read his take and yeah I agree with need that, thats not going to stop the billionaires from killing us though 😔
Username: I edited the DB directly on my Lemmy instance with Zalgo text. I also set my join date to somewhere far off in the future 😋
Ooh I like that idea.
Do you use your own instance for browsing? Does using another instance for browsing mean your own instance does less caching?
Yeah I use Sync for Lemmy connected to my own instance that myself and friends use. I have a VPS that I run it on, and it catches everything I'm subscribed to, it's the only instance I "browse" on. I have accounts on other instances which I'll fall back to if I CBF hosting Lemmy anymore.
I see, thanks!
We do not live in an post information scarcity society. Also information doesn’t work like electricity, so even if we did this is still stupid.
We live in a world where it costs essentially nothing to replicate a piece of information 7 billion times and distribute it everyone on earth.
A world where the pirate bay does that for the couple of grand that they get from some porn banner ads.
We live in a world where there is no reason for information to be scarce. The entire systems of copyright and patents and IP are hamfisted ways of creating artificial scarcity so that information retains value in a world where it could be ubiquitous.
I see what you are saying but it’s somewhat different from resource scarcity. There is no scarcity in the ability to transmit information, but there is still information scarcity.
However, what makes information still valuable is the difficulty of first discovery. It costs money to go on the ground in a war zone and find out what’s happening, and if nobody did it, we just wouldn’t know.
This doesn’t even factor in the costs of filtering through misinformation and disinformation.
Edit for clarity / sentence structure
It's actually valuable in a real world sense yes, but the point is that the mechanisms of capitalism say that if it's completely unscarce its value should be $0. So in a world without IP Law, the instant that piece of information is digitized and put on the internet, it's value rapidly drops to $0 since it costs fraction of a penny for someone to make a personal copy off the closest person / server to them.
We could easily afford to let information be replicated and distributed freely, except for this problem that it doesn't fit neatly in the mechanisms of capitalism because we would stop rewarding first discovery.
So what did we do, did we come up with a new system that rewards first discovery but still allows information to flow freely?
No. We decided to reward first discovery by inventing made up concepts like patents, copyrights, DRM, technological walled gardens, etc. and spend billions of dollars a year on them, all of which function by creating artificial scarcity, just to hamfistedly mash an information economy into the rules of a material economy.
Okay give me this mythical system that rewards first discovery without those ‘made up concepts’
(By the way whatever you type next is a made up concept by your own definition just so we’re clear)
The point about made up concepts is to point out that there is nothing fundamental, foundational, or intrinsic about IP law. It's just an arbitrary system that we made up that we can replace with a different arbitrary system.
It's really not hard to imagine a system where a certain portion of the government budget is devoted to rewarding artists and inventors and then the number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc means that they get rewards from that pool of money. We spend billions on creating systems of artificial scarcity, you put all those people and all that money to work and you can come up with a feasible system that catches most edge cases.
So here's the problem with that idea: it means that you would need to keep the entire IP system operating and add more layers on top of it. For example, you would still need to file patents, it is just that the way that it is monetized by the creator would change.
This means that you still need the same amount of money to keep doing what we've been doing, then you need more money because if things like pixiv uploads are eligible you need way more people to track way more things.
Then you have to actually assess performance of a given thing, be it number of streams / downloads / units sold / etc, meaning that we have to basically track everything happening in the entire economy as well as the entire internet.
Sounds like a bureaucratic black hole to me, but I will grant you that if it was feasible it would probably lead to more innovation.
One thing I will add to the end here is that the current IP laws specifically are currently ridiculous, fuck Disney.
If you have enough information you have noise, and hence less information. It actually does not work like electricity or any other physics phenomenon.
Is a library noise just cause there's a lot of information in there? We're talking about a user being allowed to reach out and copy and modify information, presumably from a curated source they trust.
Yeah but that doesn't get rid of the fact that the information it self is still easily reproducible. What you are saying is that there still needs to be effort in curating information, but you aren't saying that there is a cost of reproducing information.
Old knowledge is abundant, new is not. If takes effort to discover/create new knowledge. Patents and copyright are there to allow the inventor/creator an opportunity to monetize their invention.
Yes, and they're a dumb way of doing that because they are systems based on creating artificial scarcity where there is no actual need for it. The only need for creating scarcity is because capitalism requires things to be scarce for them to have value. Rather than looking at a system other than capitalism to reward creators, we spend billions of dollars and waste thousands of peoples lives dedicated to creating systems that enforce artificial scarcity.
How do you reward inventors then?
Create a system of attribution, where by new products and inventions acknowledge the work they're based on (and they acknowledge the work they're based on etc), and then have a system that takes total sales volumes etc and splits a portion of government money to all the inventors / creators based on how popular their product was. Fund it with a small increase on sales tax for all products, then there's no incentive to not provide attribution since it doesn't effect your take home pay regardless, and have a system for applying for attribution when you think it wasn't fairly given to you.
We spend billions and billions of dollars on our current patent system and the legion of lawyers required to maintain it, there's more than enough resources to build a system that's not based on scarcity.
You pretty much described the current patent system but instead of the market determining license fees some buerocrat does.
No I did not. In the current patent system, once a piece of knowledge is discovered, only a single person or entity is legally allowed to use it for 20 years.
In the system I described, anyone is allowed to use it, modify it, and improve on it, immediately. Discover something great that can improve lives? Great! You'll be rewarded for your efforts, but we're not going to wait for you and you alone to figure out how to setup a global manufacturing and distribution supply chain to get it to everyone, and we're not going to prevent anyone else from daring to improve upon it
In the current patent system the owner can choose to licenses their patent, they can choose how much licensing should cost and manufacturers can decide to pay it.
You're awfully light on the details of how an inventor is rewarded.
Yes, but they do not have to, because it is a system of scarcity. They get to choose whether or not it's scarce and exactly how scarce it is. In many cases companies buy patents just to sit on them and prevent anyone else from using them. In the system I'm describing, all ideas are available for everyone to use in any way they want.
It honestly feels like you're intentionally not understanding that distinction at this point.
I've already explained it very clearly. You want more details on a specific aspect, go ahead and ask a specific question. You want a fully fleshed out system that covers every edge case? Then get politicians and lawyers to start actually designing the system, if we spent the billions and billions and billions of dollars that we have spent creating and enforcing our current system on creating and enforcing a new one, a lot of those details you're looking for would get filled in.
Inventors getting a percent of sales doesn't is a vague description.
How is the royalty rate determined?
How are cheap to manufacture/replicate inventions handled? With a low royalty rate the inventor may not recoup costs for a valuable patent.
How are products with multiple patents handled?
How are patent fees enforced?
Why would a company publish a patent in your system? They can be 1st to the market and be the only ones in the market until their competitors reverse engineer their patent.
How was 20 years decided for patent lifetime? This is an implementation detail to be argued about to find a fair formula.
Again, this is a matter of determining a fair mathematical formula that rewards inventors appropriately depending on the amount of sales.
Also, for comparison how does our current patent system ensure that inventors recoup costs on valuable patents? How does our current patent system reward downstream inventions and ideas? You seem to have lofty goals for a new system that our current system doesn't address.
Again, implementation detail, but if multiple ideas contribute to the same product then the inventors of both would get rewarded.
What patent fees? We're talking about taxing products / services / corporate profits and then using that money to reward inventors.
Because 6 months later when it's reverse engineered any competitor will be able to recreate it. If your idea is so unique and complex that you don't think it can be reverse engineered then fine, keep it as a trade secret, that's already how our current system works.
it's not just inventors, there are so many other people. Even if food is free who is going to keep or ship it to someone who needs it? and how do you reward them?
I feel like most of the comments here are written by people who have never worked full time job and don't know how hard it is. Most likely bunch of kids.
This was reported for being hostile. Please keep your comments focused on the topic being discussed and do not attack the other people in the discussion.
Your premise is wrong in like... A bunch of ways. We sure as shit do not live in a post-scarcity society lol
I specifically said we are in a post-scarcity information society. I didn't say everything is post-scarcity.
@wikibot@lemmy.world
So a post-information-scarcity society. It means something else with different word-order.
Yeah my mistake. I'm gonna fix the title.
So you're saying that everyone has sufficient and easy access to information? How does that relate to capitalism?
Some people say that if we lived in a post-scarcity society we would move on from capitalism. I am pointing that out as not true since there is an aspect of our lives that is already post-scarcity yet we still use the same capitalist system to distribute that information.
Also post-scarcity doesn't mean everyone has sufficient and easy access it means that everything can be produced in great abundance.
Edit: would to wouldn't; Most to Some
Edit 2: Rephrased some words so that my meaning comes across better.
Because you can’t eat ideas.
We can have all the free information in the world, the people who control the bare necessities still control the bare necessities and they can use that to keep people down and divided.
Exactly. Information is a luxury - you could go your entire life without learning even a shred of information, but you'd still need to eat.
We don’t just use capitalism to distribute information. There are free libraries all over the U.S. It’s possible to learn most of what knowledge-workers need to know for free. Then you can seek employment for using what you know and not your physical labor.
But also, economists consider humans to have infinite wants. Certainly society as a whole has infinite wants. So no matter what resources we extract from the environment, society always wants more, which creates scarcity, which creates markets, which, in a free society, creates capitalism.
Markets and currency have existed for thousands of years. Capitalism has existed for barely more than 200 years. Markets don't create capitalism. However capitalism destroys markets.
Unregulated agriculture also destroys land. Just because something has negative effects over long-term unregulated use doesn’t mean it should be abolished despite the positive effects. Just because a system is older than another doesn’t mean it’s superior. Or do you yearn for serfdom?
What positive effects has it had?
The only reason I pointed out the age is that markets and currency often are, and were being confused/conflated with capitalism.
I actually advocate for a system 100 years newer than capitalism. And even then I push for a version of it that has been modernized to fit current realities.
Well, the device you are reading this on is a product of capitalism. Whether it’s a phone or a computer, it has hundreds of chips made at hundreds of factories in at least half a dozen countries, all the parts had to be brought to a place and assembled, then brought to another place and sold to you. And you likely didn’t even have to pay for it in advance before it was assembled and ready for you to use!
Did you eat food today that wasn’t grown near where you live? “That’s just trade” you might say, but it took a significant investment of capital to set up the system of trade that got it to you, at the very least the ship or the train it was transported on, if not the equipment used to grow and harvest it. If you ate a banana or chocolate and you don’t live in the tropics then you only ate those things thanks to capitalism.
Are you wearing shoes? Are they completely hand-made by an artisan, did you commission them to be made and come back in a year to pick them up, or did someone invest in capital so you could buy them in a store?
Did you go to college? Did you pay to have the school built and the teachers hired to teach you, or did someone raise and donate a bunch of capital to create it? Did it own a farm you had to work to pay for its operation, or does it have an endowment it can invest as capital to raise money to pay for some of your education? Just because it’s (hopefully) a non-profit institution doesn’t mean it would exist without capitalism.
Just look at the improvements in the living conditions of a huge portion of the planet over the last 200 years when we had capitalism, then look at the improvements for the 200 years before that. Haven’t there been more improvements in more people’s lives since capitalism than before it?
Look I know it’s not a perfect system, it needs regulation, and it’s not the right tool for every situation but generally it blows mercantilism and feudalism out of the water, and it’s done better than every planned economy so far.
No it isn't. It's a product of human ingenuity. People invented things before capitalism. And they continue to invent outside it. In order for things to be a product of capitalism, you have to show how they couldn't be made outside of it. And yet those very same phones are made outside of capitalism today. Not to mention their precursors were made even in Soviet, Russia in the '70s and '80s.
The one that truly unique thing you might be able to attribute as a product of capitalism. Is the unavailability of affordable housing in general.
Wow! And the rest of your spiel. It's like you have no idea what you're talking about. Trade went on for thousands of years before capitalism. Things were manufactured in Russia all throughout the 19th century without capitalism.. oh now I remember your name. You posted this exact same heavily debunked bullshit response in another reply to me once before. Well I'm sure you post it to a lot of people. I was going to say no one could be as hilariously wrong as you are without trying to be that wrong. And it turns out I was right. You are trying to be wrong.
OK then, what has socialism produced? Remember you have to show what it produced can’t be made under capitalism, or any other economic system.
Anyone can tell someone they’re wrong, but if you can’t explain why, why should they believe you?
Economic systems themselves don't produce anything. They're economic systems. That's the whole point. Anything produced under capitalism could be reasonably produced under socialism, etc. It is simply a different way of doing things. But you do make a good argument against your own argument.
Markets aren't Capitalism. You can have non-Capitalist markets, such as ones made up of Worker Co-ops.
You can have a market-based economy without exploitation a la Capitalism.
Fine. Factories are capital. If you want manufactured goods and the freedom to get a job you want more than you want to work in a factory then you want capitalism.
No.
All tools are Capital. If Workers collectively share ownership of industry, there is a free flow of labor to where you wish to apply it. Are you under the mistaken impression that Socialism is when someone picks where you can work? You sure you aren't talking about Capitalism?
I’m quite sure we’ve outlawed the direct ownership of people so, yeah, in capitalism no one tells you where to work, they pay you to work. There is a job market. In planned economies, someone tells you where to work. Planned economies are an expression of socialism. On the scale of individual firms, capitalism doesn’t require them to be organized in any particular way. If you want to run a business as a cooperative, where the workers own the company, you can certainly do that in the United States if you want. But if a collective tells you where to work, then someone is still telling you where to work. Please explain how you’d do socialism without anyone telling anyone else where to work.
In Capitalism, Capitalists ultimately decide where you can work, as opposed to being democratically decided by the Workers. Pointing to something that can happen in both Socialism and in Capitalism, ie Planning from a state, is not the dig against workers collectively owning the Means of Production that you think it is. In Socialist systems, you can absolutely choose where you want to work, explain the opposite, why you think they can't. That's an unfounded claim with nothing backing it.
Why do you think it's better that Workers have no say, as opposed to having democratic ownership of industry? I personally value freedom and power to the people, not to people focused on enriching their own personal lives well beyond that of normalcy, so I support leftist organization.
Workers do have a say. They own their labor. If they are educated and organized enough they can bring a corporation to its knees, because corporations can’t do anything with their capital without labor. Just because I’m arguing capitalism has merits doesn’t mean I don’t think there should be strong unions, or shared ownership of companies, or regulation of markets.
I don’t want to do a job I don’t want to do just because the majority voted that I should do it either, really. I can count on people to vote for their own self-interest, but I can’t count on them to vote for mine.
Unions are inferior to direct ownership, and your only argument against direct ownership so far seems to be that you can't count on people to vote on your interests, yet for some reason you ignore that Capitalists exclusively have their own interests at heart and don't care about workers.
Capitalism keeps people from the jobs they want. Literally. If the job you want can't meet your basic needs. Capitalism falsely posits that it's because the job has no value. Rather than the value of it not being generally understood or valued by others.
Capitalism is still good at making menial valueless work to under pay you for however.
I’m not saying it gets you the job you want, I’m saying no one can make you do a job you don’t want to do. People can incentivize you, with money. And I think collective organizing and bargaining is important to make things fair. I hear German firms have a union representative on the board, that seems pretty smart.
And it needs to be regulated. The government needs to force firms to pay to mitigate harmful externalities as well as incentivize positive externalities. And there should be social programs to take some of the edge off market fluctuations, like free or cheap training, help finding employment, cushioning some of the effects of market fluctuations for the average person.
I'm struggling to see what alternative you are envisioning here, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you. People and companies pay for the work they need done. When not enough people do that work, the salaries paid for it will increase. When there's a large pool of people willing to do a job but not enough people and companies who need that job done, the salaries drop. The capitalist job market, from a theoretical perspective, seems to regulate the job market such that people choose jobs that are desired by society.
Now there's obviously some downsides to this, because the gap between income levels is way too large in my opinion. Regulation is required so the CEO's don't earn like 200 times as much as the cleaning people. But in the end any system that exists needs to make sure that people do work that benefits society. And certain jobs are just more desired by society than others. Not everyone who likes drawing can become an artist, because in the end society just doesn't need many artists. So any system should penalize people who try to do a job that society simply doesn't need at that moment and incentivize jobs that have shortages.
The alternative is simple. But again obscured by saturation of capitalist propaganda. To start we, in the US especially, need to move towards social democracy. Single player health care, Austrian style public housing, etc.
If we provide people with a basic level of food and shelter. They will be free to work or not. And if you aren't free enough to be able to choose not to work, you aren't actually free. And here's the kicker. Even though people wouldn't have to work, they still would. Only now capitalist wouldn't be able to use starvation and homelessness as a stick to beat people over the head with. In order to get them to accept traditionally bad capitalist deals.
Better still, entrepreneurs would be able to chase any business ideas they had. Artists would be able to persue their art. Musicians able to persue their music. If you wanted to spend your days gardening and landscaping a public plot. That capitalist deemed had no value. Just for your own enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. You can do that.
Pretty simple actually. Capitalists have pushed for the better part of a century to stop or demonize any progress towards communist evolution. And the other group, the revolutionaries have done nothing but give it a bad name.
..they posted, on the fediverse.. 🙄
Either way, your framing of the existence of media and information exchange free from capitalism, as something that would somehow invalidate or contradict the existence of capitalism, oozes yet you participate in society vibes..
Who?
Do we? I mean, some information, maybe. But all information? As a concept?
I have 3kg of cheese in the fridge but no bread.
go conquer some.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely. Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
^article^ ^|^ ^about^
lol. Tell that to the scientific papers you have to pay for otherwise they’ll run out and the researchers won’t be able to research.
A post-scarcity society doesn't mean a post-resource society. We have enough resources to make sure everybody has what they need. None of it is scarce in the slightest. We just need to distribute it equally.
Or sufficiently equally to eliminate scarcity.
Yeah I was confused by this. The world is pretty far off post-scarcity! Might need more context here
Capitalism will collapse eventually, whether planned or not. The best we can do is build up parallel structures that can weather that collapse, like complex networks of Mutual Aid, strong Unions, FOSS software, and more.
I like this view of parallel structures
Yeah I totally agree. I'm trying my best to integrate these things into my life today.
I'd be willing to bet 3 out of 4 people in this thread couldn't even define capitalism. I count myself among them.
Capitalism is a Mode of Production by which the Means of Production are bought, sold, and traded among individuals. This results in Capitalists, ie owners of Capital, and Workers, those who Capitalists employ to create Value using said Means of Production.
And what’s the problem with owning, buying and selling things? We’ve been doing that for millennia. Obviously, unregulated American style capitalism is very broken, but there are better ways to do business. It’s just that those ways are not that appealing to the greedy.
Markets aren't Capitalism, Capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.
I think the simplest way to put it is "an economic system where individuals are allowed to have exclusionary ownership of capital"
Technically, Monarchism falls under that definition as well, which is why it gets a bit more complex than that.
A monarchy can be capitalist as long as peoples property rights are respected. The moment the monarch decides to lop somebodys head off and take their stuff you'll be back to the old-school feudalistic "might makes right" societies.
Sort of. Monarchism is more about respecting a family's right to rule, than a claim on economics, though usually Feudalism goes hand in hand historically. The British parliamentary system with a vestigial Monarchy is an exception, not the rule.
I would call monarchism a form of religious capitalism where the ruling class claims divine right as the methods to accumulate capital, rather than using financial means to accumulate capital
Certainly more hierarchical than Socialism, but also more than Capitalism. Fundamentally, the lack of a market for Capital separates Capitalism from Monarchism, the class dynamics of today are different from before. This is helpful to understand IMO when trying to see how to solve it.
Does the exchange of land between kingdoms via wedding dowries/treaties/violence fulfill the definition of a "market for capital"?
Not really. Capitalism allows anyone to buy and sell Capital, whereas these more primitive exchanges aren't the same. The Bourgeoisie are fundamentally different from the Aristocracy.
That's pretty fair. It may feel impossible for me today to afford any capital, but if I were somehow able to accumulate enough money I would be legally allowed to own capital. Under monarchy, even if I got that much money, it would be illegal for me to purchase capital as an individual. That's enough of a distinction to make them different for me, thanks for bringing it up.
Yep, that's the idea! Functionally, Capitalism is more revolutionary and progressive than Feudalism, which is why it's a good thing that Feudalism is fading and Capitalism is the status quo, just like it will also be a good thing when Capitalism is fading and Socialism becomes the status quo.
Kinda. It’s not a very efficient market, but a market doesn’t have to be efficient to be a market.
I guess technically any system of trade could be thought of as a capital market, as long as capital is for sale.
What’s “exclusionary ownership” mean here?
It's the idea that because you own something, you're the only one who is allowed to use it, whether you're actually actively using it right now or not. You can contrast it with usufructuary rights, which are based on the idea that you only have rights to something while you're actively using it
So that would be like one of those rental scooters, or a set of scuba gear if you lived and worked on a ship? It’s yours while you’re wearing it, or maybe while you have it checked out?
Yep! I wouldn't say it would be "yours" exactly because you would never have actual ownership of the thing while you're using it, but it would be your right to use it and profit from it so long as you don't destroy it. A good example would be the way Native Americans viewed land use, following herds of wild animals wherever they went and moving from depleted areas to more fertile ones. This clashed heavily with European and American colonialists, who enforced their views of exclusionary ownership with barbed wire fences and violence.
Like territory. Your crew sets up camp somewhere, that’s your property until you move. You walk into a bar, you take over a corner. It’s your corner for the night.
Don't see the problem in that
The problem comes in what you define as "capital". Food and housing are the biggest issues for the modern world but there still exists the problem of PEOPLE being considered capital that can be owned by other people.
Food isn’t capital. Capital is wealth used to produce other wealth. A house definitely is. Foods just consumable.
Classic “capital” is a hammer owned by a laborer (that situation is one person playing both roles). The classic capitalist separation of layers is a guy who owns a truck full of tools, and he hires other guys to work on things using the tools, but he retains ownership of the tools.
You should be able to own a house. Everyone should be able to own a house. Food of course needs to be owned to be consumed.
Capitalism: The best system for harnessing the greed inherent in humans for the benefit of others. Capitalism produces the most wealth, and it's spread more evenly, than any other system.
Not sure how anyone can sanely argue that Capitalist wealth is spread more evenly than any other system when disparity is rising everywhere it's practiced, even if at slower rates in Social Democracies.
Not to disagree, but what examples are there of a different system being practiced which have a more even distribution of wealth?
Numerous different systems. If you want to look at modern, developed economies, Worker Co-operatives are smaller, Socialist entities that have far more equitable distribution, happier workers, and more stability. If you want a more Libertarian approach, EZLN doesn't seem to have very high disparity, a bulk of the wealth is owned by the Workers, though they reject terms like Socialism. At the risk of being called a tankie (I'm not, I am incredibly critical of more centralized Socialist projects), even the USSR had far lower disparity during it's time than Tsarist Russia or the current Capitalist Russian Federation.
The answer is for Workers to share the Means of Production in a democratic fashion, as opposed to having petite dictators focused on accumulating Capital.
https://calxylian.com/food-scarcity-and-the-fall-of-communism-in-eastern-europe/
Nobody brought up the USSR, and your linked comment has several issues, even as someone who is a critic of the USSR and does not wish to rebuild the USSR:
What is the point of your comment?
Because the comparison is between systems. In other systems some people often end up with nothing, as in not even enough food to survive. That happens less under capitalism, hence there’s a more even distribution of resources.
Kinda like two pieces of paper are both thin, but one of those pieces can be thicker than the other one, despite still being considered thin.
People end up with nothing under Capitalism as well, and there is less disparity in some non-Capitalist systems.
third person checking in here
The reason you are post scarcity is because other people around the world are not. This imbalance in wealth is because of capitalism
You fail to understand in your eagerness to jump on a soapbox.
The numbers simply do not lie:
There is not one reason for anyone, anywhere, to go without food, water, or shelter. That some regions lack the production is irrelevant, others over produce and still refuse to meet the needs of their own, much less others.
It's because we're bad at distributing resources equally. Don't really care if you don't like the fact I used the word capitalism.
The question is; is it capitalism that causes our inability to properly allocate resources or is it just the fact that humans are bad at allocating resources? What economic system would incentivise the equal distribution of said resources?
Unfortunately for the post scarcity information society, the capitalists are in fact moving on — to fascism.
Fascism is the violent reaction to the fall of Capitalism, just as fascism is on the rise, so is Socialism. The fight against fascism is critical, as that which replaces Capitalism will be either Socialism or fascism.
It is up to the Socialists to beat the fascists so that we don't end up down that dark timeline.
ITT : People who want to argue about dictionary definitions and ignore the topic of the post.
Well I think it's normal since the common meaning of the central word is misrepresented. Post-scarcity means there is no scarcity, which is not the situation right now. Also the title says "post information scarcity" which i didn't now was a thing and that we still don't have. Factually correct information is not very easy to come by nowadays, and not easy to verify. And if we talk about scarcity of goods and services we certainly have a shitload of factories but some key jobs are not automated yet and in case nobody noticed we have some serious problems with natural resources.
.
I, and I alone live in a post-info-scarcity world. Everyone else is just dojng the best they can.
Oh great wise one of infinite information, what does this new word mean?
What's the alternative then?
The problem is that while we have infinite information we do not have infinite energy/resources yet. The shift when we get it to remove power from the structures will be larger but reminiscent of the piracy/copyright battles lately
We absolutely have enough to shower every single person in lavishness. Its just not distributed. We arent post resource, but we are post scarcity.
You're confusing wealth with resources. If we evenly distributed wealth everyone would be wealthy but it turns out farmers would still have to farm etc.
We don't have the resources to give everyone on earth a palace. We don't even have the resources on earth to give everyone a western lifestyle sadly.
Infinite resources/energy is waaay past what you're thinking. Think startrek and replicators
And we never will. At least not in the hands of the general public.
It's FAR to dangerous.
Eh not really. Lock replicators from weapons. More resources means adequate mental health support. No scarcity will remove most war justification.
Religion will be the last thing we need to kill for peace. It's inherently divisive and anti science
How exactly would you lock replicators from making weapons?
With the lock setting
Ah I see!
Firstly, capitalism isn't going to just "poof" away just because there are more resources available. The rich will just hold them back to create artificial scarcity - like is done with diamonds.
Secondly, even discounting that, there are plenty of resources that are genuinely scarce no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
But if you're referring to just the scarcity of information - then you're still not quite right as not all that information out there is good information - a lot of it is misinformation (i.e. propaganda, etc.)...
And even that discounts the fact that for many people, they don't have the tools/capability to access the information, or simply can't access the information full stop (I.e. due to censorship, etc.).
We're in a post information scarcity society and there are still people out there who think the Earth is flat.
Simply providing people with the answers is not enough you actually have to make them believe those answers, and there's always going to be people who are desperate to not accept those answers because doing so would make them the same as everyone else, and of course that's not possible because they are special. And they are special, just not in the way that they want to be.
Lol
The rubes need something to collect so they can lord over you. They don't want an intelligent society. They want something they can game to get big numbers.
In 1980, 'middle class' was still defined as one job paying for a family of four. In those days $1 million was still considered a vast fortune. By the time Bush Sr. left office 'middle class' was two salaries to support a family and $1 million was what a rich guy paid for a party.
To be fair, "middle class" isn't a real class, the closest is petite bourgeoisie. What's thought of as the middle class doesn't necessarily have the same class interests, as they vary in social relation to the Means of Production.
When you're discussing politics you have two choices. You can avoid highly specific terms and focus on real world problems, or you can parse out the meaning of every single word and win a meaningless argument.
99% of the people in America know exactly what I mean when I say 'middle class.' Maybe 5% know what 'petite bourgeoisie' means. Probably less. You don't win elections by arguing the difference between the Social Democrats and the socialists, you win them by talkign to people about how much a gallon of gas costs.
I think the argument is that creating these definitions ruins class solidarity. You are working class if you have to go to work every day to live period.
Or you can present people with actual plans written in terms they understand and are comfortable with.
I used to work in public health. One of the first things I learned is that a patient needs to be approached on their own level. Some people can handle exact medical terms, and others blank out when they hear terms they don't understand.
If you have someone's ear for five minutes, are you going to waste three of them trying to bring them up to your level, or do you change your terms to fit their point of view?
Depends on how much distortion is required to get the concept to their level. If the concept doesn’t map to there, then giving them the impression that they understand is misleading them.
In those case middle class is just fine for petty bourgeoisie. But there’s always a distortion in swapping out terms for similar terms, and that needs to be paid attention to and recognized as a potential source of misunderstanding and trouble.
Read 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' Malcolm came from the streets and had been in prison. He could break down complex idea into terms the people could understand. Don't assume that because someone lacks your vocabulary they are ignorant. Like I siad, it's on the leader to reach out.
Well, there’s the concept of group consciousness, and that definitely depends on a good working set of definitions.
Yes, but at the same time, this is just an argument for using terms incorrectly and perpetuating bourgeois terminology. The idea of a "Middle Class" was invented in order to give the Proletariat a realistic goal (in their eyes) to work towards, in order to divide the Proletariat against itself.
If more people understand class dynamics, they will also understand more about their surroundings, and will also be able to better think for themselves, instead of you trying to do all of the thinking for them.
Education is important.
Education is important, but not all knowledge is equally important.
I liken it to a carpenter who uses Imperial units instead of metric. You can argue that metric is more exact, but if the carpenter can do the work why 'correct' them?
It's not the job of the people to be better educated, it's the job of the leaders to find a way to speak to them that they understand.
I disagree. It is the job of leaders to push for education, so that the people can be trusted to make correct decisions on their own. We currently have an issue with rising fascism at the hands of an under-educated working class, which is resulting in a violent backlash against academia and science, because education is being strategically cut by fascists.
"Tax the rich." Anyone can understand that.
"Tax the rich" is woefully insufficient. A good start, but that's it.
And what's your starting point?
Education, and building up parallel structures like networks of Mutual Aid, and mass unionization. Increasing taxation helps, but without parallel structures and an increasingly educated populace taxes are just money spent to continue fueling the Military Industrial Complex. Taxing with no real direction doesn't actually help, you need both cause and action.
A lot of generalities. How about something specific? Something people can do right now? You didn't even mention getting people registered to vote.
Probably just autocorrect but it’s “Petty Bourgeoisie”, referring to those who own a shop or restaurant or something, often joining in the running of it. We call them small business owners in the US.
Not a typo, but we are functionally talking about the same thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie
Can we stop posting about communism every single day?
Yeah, probably when the system changes.
How about no? We already tried Communism and many people died and it fell apart.
Part of the reason Capitalism sort if worked in the 60's was because it had to globally compete with communism. We seem to forget how hard the red scare had to be pushed to silence the growing American Communist constituency.
Wages were high for low education workers because they had to be to stave off the communist political movement.
The second the Soviets collapsed, capitalism started its more evident decline. Capitalism only works with competition, even from a meta perspective.
We didn't try shit but bowing to a succession of neoliberals.
Go live in china bro. Noone stopping you..
China is yet another capitalist cryptofascist country
Capitalism incentivizes production so well that the mere charity of individuals provides more for free than all the redistribution the government can manage under a controlled economy.
Capitalism’s primary activity is commerce, with a tiny sliver of charity on the side. That tiny sliver of charity is the biggest pool of resources made available for free under any system.
In what unicorn world are you living in? There are so many subsidies for so many sectors that it isn't even funny. Capitalism is parasitic at its core and the only reason there is charity from the rich is for the good publicity.
The society is already wealthy, but all the wealth is drained in the hands of a few.