CaptainSwing

You saying all politicians, even the aweful ones, should get participation awards, while us plebs should just know our place and shut up?

Underfunding and neoliberal management. There's a fair chance the government is hollowing it out to undermine public perception of the institution so they cang et away with doing away with it completely.

While I agree, there are plenty of poor sources getting too much uncritical attention in the press, even by China's own accounts there are a large network of education facilities, trying to hammer in a strong sense of national identity. It is hard not to interpret this as a direct assault on the culture of Uighur people.

It shouls also be viewed in it's geopolitical context - China is desparate to have secure land routes into Europe and the middle east incase things kick off in the South China sea, and by their calculations that security requires (forcefully) integrating the Uighur people into Chinese culture and nationalism. On the other hand, the west will take what opportunity they can to attack China on human rights grounds, despite the hypocrisy of all the human rights abuses around the world they happily ignore (the treatment of Kurds in Turkey, for example).

TLDR; we can be critical of western imperialism, while still holding China to account.

I'm disappointed (though not surprised) to see Marx so marginalised. In particular, Schumpeter was in massive debt to Marx, as is quite clear from reading Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The whole idea of creative destruction, for example, which is popular up to the day, is basically lifted straight from Marx. Of course, the evolutionary economists who consider themselves in Schumpeters legacy, tend to ignore this link too.

The socialist getting the most attention in this article is actually William Morris, who tended towards more libertarian ideas of socialism, though not as anti-statist as Goldman. Morris and Orwell were probably fairly close to eachother in terms of how they positioned themselves on the socialist spectrum of their time, both being kind of anarcho-curious state socialists

You're right Orwell had a vendetta against the soviet union and similar 'authoritarian' socialisms, but I think this article reads closer to a good faith self-criticism directed towards his peers rather than a dig at authoritarianism.

> ultra left wing ads

That might be pushing it a bit. We're talking Jeremy Corbyn here, not Amadeo Bordiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-leftism

Important to remember that, despite jokes like these, Oscar Wilde remained a committed (if ideosyncratic) libertarian socialist.

I guess schumpeters point with creative destruction was the rupture required to replace one paradigm with another (Incidentally, he got this straight from marx). Technology, and markets, move in fits and starts as conservative tendencies meet with more efficient, or qualitatively different, competion. For both schumpeter and marx this view was seen as opposed to equilibrium models of economics on which much of mainstream economics and game theory still relies

Jeremy Corbyn (current leader of the labour party) released a very interesting 'digital democracy manifesto' during his leadership campaign, though it isn't officially labour party policy (and probably will never be). There's a more in depth paper somewhere, but this is a short summary: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/corbynstays/pages/329/...

Yeah, I guess 'cut the crap' was maybe considered a bit crude.

Thanks for the response.

The source code (data sets, license, etc) is one thing, but the actual physical robot is something else.

If 'the 99%' owned the robots it could help

10/10 would back this

You're right that it is tricky. Many social anarchists and communists use the phrase 'voluntary cooperation' to describe the social order in a communist society (in the sense of a society without either capitalism or the state).

Whether this is possible or not is beside the point. The argument I was making was simply that the use of the word anarchy in the concept is at odds with its use by most adherents to anarchism

it may be 'true' within the set of axioms on which it rests, but 'wrong' in that those axioms (rational self-seeking behaviour, etc) don't hold in reality. More, those axioms themselves could be reflections of capitalist ideology.

I think that this is a really interesting concept, but dislike the name. All social anarchists (anarchist-communists, anarchist-syndicalists, even mutualists etc) would see anarchy as a social process rather than a purely individualised "every man for himself" system. It disregards the possibility for non-coercive collective forms of decision making.

but, saying this, a concept that discovers the loss in a system where each actor is purely self-interested is useful and interesting.

Going by usernames we should probably be friends Mr Winstanley

I agree with the criticism that you're making, but I think your police force comparison contains fallacies. Human institutions cannot be told from the assumption that we all began as isolated individuals and arrived at the solution of centralised control as the outcome of a set of rational collective choices.

I'm sure there are many 'origins of the police' narratives, but one I know is the Metropolitan Police of London were developed explicitly to curtail the dock workers from exercising their customary right to take small amounts of the goods they were unloading home with them. To generalize from this (a dangerous game, I know, but this seems to be the flavor of the thread), institutions are constructed to protect the interests of one class from another

beautiful text but, as with others, I take issue with the conclusion.

What about the internal hierarchies of the firms involved? Who was freer, the owner of the pencil factory or the men in Sri-Lanka working for pennies to mine the graphite?

And the crass juxtpositioning of 'central planning' and the 'free market' is lazy and disingenuous. I'm no celebrant of the USSR but they weren't incapable of abstraction in their central planning,a s this seems to suggest. They werecapable of coordinating the production of pencils without Stalin knowing every process involved (just as mail functions without one man who knows each of the streets in America)

It's far from a perfect comparison, but I'm reminded of this classic Brecht poem: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-worker-reads-history/

A wage relationship, or a pensions deal, is not an individual problem, it is a collective problem of the whole workforce.

Sorry, I don't know this movie/book, but I will check it out.

This is a bit like saying "the government is corrupt so lets we'd be better off without it". Better with union representation than without, though better with unions who actually represent their members than corrupt unions.

The union exists at the point of confrontation (or negotiation) between employer and employees, and there is every reason for the employer (who doesn't want to negotiate) to undermine the unions. This can lead to both actual corrupting influences, and constantly spreading the idea that the union is corrupt, is a 'drag' or a 'burden', in order to undermine its strength.

The last thing I'm saying is that current union structures are ideal and devoid of corruption (and what little I know about US unions, the case is worse over there), but that organised, collective struggle is what wins gains for workers and that unions are often the best vehicles for to push those struggles forward.

> Trying to force an employer that does not value you like they should to behave otherwise instead of finding one that does is masochistic.

I think that you overestimate the ability of workers to exert an influence by switching jobs, but also, and perhaps more seriously, assume that the only strategies for workers getting fucked over are individual strategies. Collective struggles are what can change things on a more fundamental level, and great gains have been won through the organised withdrawal of labour.

That moment when tech workers realise that they have been working class all along

I get the hype. It IS amazing and we shouldn't forget that. I too am sometimes swallowed in the euphoria of what we have created and what we will create, the possibilities open to us, and those others just around the corner.

And I mean it when I say I don't mean to be a spoil-sport, but as you say yourself, it's not all good.More specifically, the good and the bad are not evenly distributed. Where the economy gives with one hand it takes with the other. When a labour saving technology is introduced to reduce prices, and increase ease of access, to the consumer, somebody becomes unemployed, or is forced into situation of job insecurity.

Without confronting hard questions about the distribution of value generated by new technologies this tech-euphoria is a purely self indulgent act. In an age where some of us have access to every book ever written on our phone, people lack access to a decent education. While some of us can order a 'lyft' in minutes to get to work, others struggle to pay the bus fare for the 2 hour commute for their minimum wage job. While airbnb allows some of us to travel the world meeting interesting people with more ease than ever before, thousands are homeless on the streets of San Francisco. While some order home cooked meals to their door, others starve.

I say this not to attack the euphoria. We ARE living in the future. We ARE creating the future. But the future, as the past, is composed of great contradictions. The euphoria we feel for that which is possible must confront a great anger at the grim reality of increasing inequality.

That we have the technology required for the whole human race to live in health, dignity, and security is nothing new. Since the end of the 19th century people have been celebrating the human races' liberation from toil, and its access to the fruits of our collective labour. (My personal favourite example is Kropotkin's "conquest of bread", http://libcom.org/library/the-conquest-of-bread-peter-kropot..., published in 1906) The question which hangs is still that of distribution. How do we evenly distribute both the labour required and the spoils of that labour such that nobody goes without?

Whenever we think "damn, I got it so good", we should also be thinking "why do some still have it so bad?", or "how can society be organised in such a way that we can all benefit from this?"

Without this critical response to the great technological developments of our age we run the risk of losing our selves in a "filter-bubble" of those who share our privilege, and with that loose sight of the full potential of the technologies we use and create.

Sorry for my glib post. (I deserved the down vote)

I am not convinced that the bigger problems to the world have answers which can be provided by a 'start up', and feel that the tendency toward "X-is-broken" type start up pitches tend to suggest techno-fixes to problems of social structure.

only the organised struggle of the disenfranchised of the world can end class society, eliminating both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, providing a ground on which these problems can be usefully approached. No venture capitalist is likely to invest in this, unfortunately.

In direct answer to your question: voluntary associations of the toiling masses

"Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly" This sums up the uber situation very well.

I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.

I'm happy that somebody has raised this point. David Harvey gives a particularly good analysis of the concept of monopoly as it relates to rent here:http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/...

To usefully understand the struggles taking place around Uber's "disruption" of traditional taxis we need a more nuanced perspective than regulation=monopoly=bad/free market=competition=good

The bourgeoisie

Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity.

Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his keynote speech at the Edimnburgh International Book Festival a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-...

"But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market?

"We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having.

"So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "

Why should we have to choose between low paid, dangerous, uninteresting/soul destroying work or unemployment and poverty?

The question about automation, for me, is one of how we can more sensibly organise the necessary work so that we can each share both the labour and its products?

I dream of a world where I can make machines to save work, and know I'm not putting somebody out of a job they need to feed themselves, but reducing the workload for the whole of society, giving us more free time (or more stuff).

"I shall hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and quibble on HN after Dinner" Marl Karx