harwoodjp
harwoodjp on Hacker News
Your dualism between model and world is nearly Cartesian. The model itself isn't separate from the world but produced materially (by ideology, sociality, naturally, etc.).
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Personal property is distinct from private property.
> violence necessary to steal the means of production
You could argue that private property is theft, necessarily enforced by a repressive state, and reappropriation is justice. The general strike is non-violent (until the police arrive).
> You also conflation democracy with freedom. 49% gets subjugated by the other 51%.
The interesting part about decentralization is that it somewhat relieves this problem. Federation allows for complex arrangements that coordinate towards consensus. So it might not be necessary to subject populations to laws they don't agree with with such broad strokes.
If you read the literature around the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin's coup was highly criticized as un-socialist: Luxemburg, Goldman, etc.
Simple litmus test for socialism: do workers manage production completely, through direct democratic processes?
> Socialists are always concerned with distributing production equally.
Not really. Socialism (the project of the labor movement) is concerned with workers being in control of their own work, not vessels for capitalist exploitation. Syndicalism is a form of socialism that emphasizes decentralization and federation, as opposed to command control. How resources are allocated under conditions of such federated governance is up for debate.
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Socialism is older than Marxism and shouldn't be conflated with it.
> Where are all the creative products the Soviets made?
The USSR was a state capitalist/authoritarian regime, nothing like socialism.
> Are you proposing we seize their land?
Not necessarily, but I think the workers should operate their farm democratically.
> That’s what the Soviets did
The USSR was state capitalist. Workers' councils (or soviets) stopped being considered very early on.
> If I build a robot in my garage to automate harvesting the peppers I grow in my backyard, do I own it?
Yes, it's your personal property. Private property is something else.
Well actually socialism has been historically concerned with maximizing human creativity. Fourier’s utopian vision was “libidinal” work that aligns passions with labor. Marcuse has a similar view in Eros and Civilization. Chomsky views creativity as axiomatic for humans, and syndicalism the appropriate system for harnessing it.
You guys are both discussing intelligence hierarchies (wtf?) without regard to actual history of popular labor movements being violently squashed.
Your view is called Social Darwinism and it’s really dangerous/dystopian. Also collapses under scrutiny.
Automation makes jobs unnecessary. We should build social infrastructure that allows people to pursue their passions with basic necessities guaranteed. This has been possible for awhile now.
Socialism is seizing the workplace from the capitalist.
Why don't workers unite to democratically manage production? The police, propaganda, wage slavery.
It's true that, in those groups, a shared ethnic identity enables economic cooperation. But the lack of solidarity you observe is the result of a regime of coercion. The official policy: leave your neighborhood, family, friends, and passions for 40+ hours a week to build a capitalist's business. You have to do it to survive. And the police are there to make sure revolts don't break out.
Your "holes" example is a distortion (simplification and misinterpretation) of Marx's theory.
It’s actually off putting if you check out a potential employer’s GitHub and it’s filled with obsessive committers, obviously working late hours, weekends, holidays, etc.
I assure you that your life in tech, waging for a boss, is a waste of time.
You’re confusing empiricism with evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology isn’t exclusively empirical.
I don’t think you understand what philosophy is.
The point is that naive (vulgar) empiricism is untenable because to perform and evaluate scientific practices you inevitably invoke premises that are rational or pragmatic, not empirical.
> experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth
Can you help me design experiments to prove the following?
* Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and predictive power, are preferable
* I'm not dreaming and there's no evil demon deceiving me
* The next swan will be white because all prior swans I've observed are
* Technology acts as a context of justification for scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy
* Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth
> Empiricism can be justified empirically
It's so obvious you haven't engaged with the subject matter.
> few would expect food being distributed for free
uhh
In Debord's explicit engagement with surrealism, he admits its influence. Detournement, for example, draws equally from Asger Jorn's technique of "modification" and Surrealist collage.
Furthermore, as a Marxist, he'd have to admit the dialectical (material) influence of surrealism and its offshots, including his.
Also - Situationist tactics are just as prone to recuperation as Surrealism. Anti-advertising, street art, etc. are totally integrated.
To add further nuance, Surrealism continued after Breton, et al. Surrealist groups still exist and were acting in parallel to the Situationists in the late '60s. For example, the Chicago group emerged from the Industrial Workers of the World/SDS, staged interventions (a la situations) and were among the first to distribute Situationist literature through their bookshop.
That's fair re: use of neoliberal. Surrealism's aim was to develop liberatory modes of thinking/being, in contrast to dogmas of rationality, capitalism, commodity culture, etc. SI = Situationist International
Critiques aside, the Situationists are indebted to Surrealism for its development of "unconscious" techniques. Derive, psychogeography, etc. are theoretically similar to automatic writing.
Your comment misses the political dimensions of Surrealism. They swayed between Leninist and Libertarian socialism. The entire point of the movement was to resist neoliberal tendencies, which produced disasters like the World Wars, etc.
See: Sadie Plant's The Most Radical Gesture for a description of the relationship between Dada, Surrealism, and the SI.
I wonder if a scan -> OCR -> LLM proofreading pipeline is possible?