Surely the degree of anger produced either by optimism or pessimism can be
equal and extreme in nature.
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
On Nov 24, 2018, at 2:18 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ah, but when I am pessimistic, I’m angry and that causes me to want to act
against the forces that make me angry. I’ve made choices in my life that
expressed my social values and my anger at the anti-humanistic forces in
society. So pessimism and anger can be positive.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2018 3:38 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
I agree, it is what one does with those facts that really makes a difference.
But whether one is optimistic or pessimistic can have a lot to do with what
one does with those facts.
For example, if one is pessimistic, one could well give in to despair and opt
out of the political process altogether. Conversely, if one is optimistic,
then one might decide to not drop out, perhaps even to increase one’s efforts
to ensure a positive outcome.
There is a danger in optimism though. There is a risk that one can become
complacent. That has to be guarded against. I’ve already mentioned the danger
of pessimism, the possibility of a sense of hopelessness that can cause one
to just disengage from things.
The economist Paul Romer distinguishes between two kinds of optimism,
complacent optimism, and conditional optimism.
Complacent optimism is the child waiting for presents on Christmas morning.
Conditional optimism is the child who wants a treehouse, and realizes that if
he gets some wood and nails, and persuades some other kids to help him, he
can build one.
Conditional optimism is the belief that problems are solvable. Complacent
optimism is the belief that they will solve themselves.
So I am conditionally optimistic about our future, not complacently
optimistic.
Evan
From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2018 2:55 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
But what difference does it make? It seems to me that it is what one does
with those facts that makes a difference.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life
after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no
matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and
more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence
will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 11/21/2018 10:14 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
I don’t think it is pessimistic to assess the world as it is. But two people
can take the same set of facts, one feels hopeful, while the other sees gloom
and doom. Facts are facts, but people can have differing opinions about what
those facts portend for the future.
For example, one person can view all the actions of the Trump administration
and still be optimistic that the checks and balances of our constitution will
ultimately do their job, while another person can take the same facts and be
pessimistic that those checks and balances will hold up.
I’m not saying I am one or the other of those two examples. I just picked the
first thing to come to mind for illustration.
Evan
From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2018 3:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
But what good is optimism? It seems to me that we are better off assessing
the world as it actually is in order to act accordingly to get what we want.
That means that being realistic is advantageous over either optimism or
pessimism. But it also seems to me that any attempt to see the world
realistically is what you call negative or pessimistic.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life
after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no
matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and
more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence
will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 11/18/2018 6:14 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
Yes, genetics, which is horribly complicated, has to be a lot of the source
of our outlooks on life.
It seems that circumstances may be able to move that outlook perhaps a
little, but I’m doubtful that circumstances would, say, make someone who is
really pessimistic convert to raving optimism.
Now I have a book here called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman,, who’s a
big wheel in the modern positive psychology movement, but I haven’t read it
yet. I imagine he has data on this subject that I haven’t heard about, and
obviously, from his title, he may disagree with me that people really can
learn to be optimistic. I’ll see what he says and then reevaluate if he
sounds convincing enough.
For now at least, it seems that people’s temperments are pretty set early on
in life, probably by genetics.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 5:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
Not blindness, one’s individual experiences along with, I suppose, biology.
As a matter of fact, I’ve known many blind people who have an extremely
positive view of life and who do not feel that blindness has, in any way,
affected their life negatively. I remember one woman, I think it was when I
was getting the one guide dog I had, who was totally blind, who told me
vehemently that she had no wish to see and if doctors said that they could
restore her sight, she’d refuse because she was perfectly content as she was
and she didn’t believe she was missing anything. No, it isn’t blindness. It’s
the way that I, a person with partial vision, adjusted to my situation. But
different people adjust differently. I’ve met people with approximately the
same amount of sight as I had, who didn’t see as much as I ddid because they
didn’t use it as I did or because, perhaps, physically, it was different.
Actually, maybe it’s an inheritable trait. My older daughter is pessimistic,
more so than I, but not my younger daughter, whom we adopted.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 5:40 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
Miriam, you are not paying attention.
I cannot now recall, (although I know it’s been several times at least), that
I’ve said that I do not ignore bad news.
Did I not say that I read most of what you post here? And the proof is in the
fact that I often respond to the stories you post here. I even posted a bad
news story myself, from the Economist, about Jamal Khashoggi's murder, and
how it looked as though it was bearing out my cynical prediction that it
would probably pass without much serious consequence to Saudi Arabia, or MBS.
I could certainly post more, and I may if I think it’s important; but you’ve
got the darkness angle pretty much covered.
So I vehemently reject the notion you seem to have that I look for only
positive stories, view the world through rose colored glasses. That is
demonstrably false, false, false! I’m not going to let you mischaracterize my
views in that way.
What I do in fact do is read both bad, and good, news. I actually read more
bad news than good, because it really is important to know what problems
exist so that we can know what they are in order to work to mitigate them.
However, I also do in fact look for good stories because I think the notion
that paying attention to only one side of a story is not only mentally
unhealthy, it is dangerous because it leads to, what can be, a self
fulfilling pessimism. I do not apologize for that.
And being blind has little or nothing to do with one’s optimism or pessimism.
I have been almost totally blind since birth, and I do not feel that the
world is going to hell in a handbasket. Conversely, there are many sighted
people who feel as you do, and also many that feel, as I do, that while we
have many serious problems, that is not the same as believing that we are
doomed. I am not sure what ultimately causes people to have an either glass
half full or glass half empty outlook on life, but I am highly doubtful that
blindness is connected to it.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 4:46 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
I guess I want to respond to Evan’s underlying charge, that I have a negative
attitude, that I read only negative stories. One can, if one chooses, ignore
the bad stuff and look for positive stories, look at the world through rose
colored glasses. That’s a personal choice, similar to the choice of having
faith that God loves us and has a reason for everything. For me, the signs of
disaster are all around us and if we don’t heed them and make our choices
based on reality, we not only doom ourselves, we doom succeeding generations.
I imagine that my life experience has predetermined me to view life in this
way. As a visually impaired person, I had to, from childhood on, understand
the world in which I lived, plan ahead to be able to function effectively in
that world, and never underestimate the obstacles. When I’ve been diverted
from that manner of functioning, bad things have resulted. So, while I
support and applaud any honest efforts to improve life for people, I’m
cognizant of the dangers and difficulties. I know that human nature includes
the capacity to cooperate, to love, to sacrifice for others, but it also
includes the lust for power, and aggression, and rage. Therefore, I don’t
assume that human institutions are benign. And I do think that we are now
living in a very dangerous time in a sick and corrupted society. Aside from
news articles and books, I see the problems in the everyday experiences of
the people around me and in the changes that I’ve encountered in my own life.
The symptoms are people’s distraction, forgetfulness, feelings of being under
pressure, and the impersonal nature of the interaction between people.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 4:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Evan,
I think it’s really nice that Amazon is increasing the wages of their
workers. I imagine that, probably, they might be increasing the hourly wage
to $15 for warehouse workers, if they’re lucky. One of those bad news
articles to which you refer, that I read the other day, said that if the
minimum wage were keeping up with our economy’s productivity and if it were
comparable to its value in 1970, it would be $25, I think that was the
amount. So if you had a family, a wife and one or two children, and wanted to
provide a relatively comfortable life for them, nothing fancy just
comfortable, could you do it on $15 an hour? I know that you read a lot and
you’re very intelligent. But I think that it’s all theoretical to you. I
don’t know if you have daily contact with real people who are living under
our present conditions.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 2:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Oh come Miriam.
I’ve read a lot of what you post here, and if that is any guide, and I don’t
see why it shouldn’t be, you spend most days consuming bad news. It’s an
unbalanced news diet. Just as someone who only consumes one kind of food
would not be expected to get proper nutrition, someone who only consumes one
kind of news is not likely to draw trustworthy conclusions.
We are not all screwed. Didn’t you, (perhaps in an unguarded moment), post an
article about how Amazon was increasing their wages?
And I am not talking about certain autocratic governments that ran what I
define as a planned economy. I am talking about certain autocratic
governments that ran what they themselves defined as a planned economy.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 11:10 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
I actually have more to say on the subject because you originally said that
our economy works better than a planned economy. I don’t read The Economist
and therefore,I’m not thinking within the usual framework of how mainstream
economists think and write. But I’m familiar with it because I hear it on the
news. I certainly hear it on Marketplace on NPR which, by the way is
sponsored by, (yes I know supposedly there are no sponsors), the Koch
Brothers). When economists say that an economy is working well, they’re
talking about it working well for business, for the stock market, for
investors. We’re all supposed to assume that the rest of us will benefit. But
we don’t necessarily benefit. Production is up. Output is up. Profits are up.
But the workers don’t benefit, nor does the general public. The profits are
re-invested into the business but only in financial terms. Stock holders
profit. CEO’s profit. The business doesn’t improve working conditions or
service to its customers. Games are played with its finances. Everything is
financialized. Most of us can’t even understand the intricacies. One of the
things I’ve been reading about for years is how we manufacture money and what
that means. It’s complicated. Apparently, what it means eventually, is that
we’re all screwed. It’s like global warming. The use of fossil fuels is
killing us. So, for that matter, is raising cattle so we can consume all that
meat. The raising of cattle produces even more CO2 than the fossil fuels. But
all those corporations are making money and they’re officers are living well.
So we’ll fight wars to keep control of oil supplies. Oh, and by the way,
fighting those wars is also bad for the environment. So people can be wealthy
and live high on the hog now, and to hell with the future. My point is that
talking about economic systems and saying that our “mixed” economy works
better than a “planned” economy, makes no sense to me. It depends on what you
mean by “works better”. And the other thing is that when you say that, are
you actually talking about the economy, or are you thinking about particular
autocratic governments that had, what you define as”a planned economy”? Just
suppose, if Cuba had been treated as a friendly country after its revolution,
if it had been left alone and had set up a socialist economic system, if the
US had had normal economic relations with it, that planned economy might have
done really well. Castro would not have had to be as authoritarian because he
wouldn’t have been under threat of US invasion or his own assassination. It’s
hard to know what a real socialist economy in a truly democratic country
would be like because the western nations have never permitted such a thing
to exist.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 10:28 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
It is a mixed economy. That is, certain aspects are planned, but certain
aspects are not.
If you believe our economy is anything like the kind of planned economy Roger
is talking about, I think you are not understanding what he means by that.
Nobody is sitting in some central ministry somewhere and deciding how many
boxes of cereal should be produced.
Nobody is sitting in some central ministry somewhere and deciding how many
cars should be produced.
I could go on with a few million more examples, but I think it is clear
enough.
Our economy is not planned in anything like the way Roger is thinking of.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 10:14 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Evan,
From everything I read, we have a planned economy. It is planned and
structured to benefit the wealthy. Just read a bit about how the IMF deals
with developing countries. Look at our tax structure. Look at how the
international banking system works. Think about all those meetings like the G
7, G 20, Davos, etc. Look at the world population or even, just at the US
population, at the percentage of people whose health, housing, nutritional,
and educational needs are met. The economic inequality isn’t accidental.
The fact that you feel that you are part of a sector of humanity whose needs
are met, doesn’t mean that our economic system is working properly or that it
is unplanned.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 9:27 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
So far at least, despite all of its shortcomings, and there are many, the
unplanned economy has done quite a lot better than any planned ones I’ve
heard about.
Perhaps, at some future date, with sufficiently powerful computers, a planned
economy might work. But I would have a hard time trusting the people in
charge of the computers doing the planning.
Evan
From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 8:53 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Well, I don't think this author quite understands what Marx was all about and
he really goes wrong when he equates Stalinism with communism as if there is
no other choice, but he still hits on a few things that can be agreed on. I
have answered you claims that communism could not work by pointing out that
for the majority of time that humans existed it was the only economic model,
but primitive communism is still not something that we would want to return
to. Even though prehistoric people participated in a communist economy they
didn't know it. They had no concept of economy and one thing they did not do
was plan their economy unless you count something like storing up food for
the winter. Capitalism is not a planned economy either. Oh, the federal
reserve may fiddle with the interest rates or tax policy may be changed with
claims of definite effects, but the real effects are not even close to the
effects claimed in the rhetoric. What we need is an economy planned with
human needs in mind and without profit as a motive. Marx, lenin and others
have had a lot to say about how that should be done, but it is unquestionable
that they did not have computers. Computers have become a lot more powerful
than they used to be and are becoming even more powerful. In the past
economic planners could use pencil and paper to make calculations and then
came adding machines and then came computers which are primitive by today's
standards. By the way, I remember reading a book from the NLS called
Stonehenge Explained. Without digressing too much into what it was all about
I will just say that the author used what he considered an extremely advanced
computer to make calculations about the rocks that make up Stonehenge. He
raved about that computer that he used in the early sixties that took up a
whole building and that he had to apply for time on and had to wait for
months. Most of us now have home desktop computers that are many times more
powerful than that one. So when doing economic planning we really should take
advantage of whatever tools that we have available to us and I am sure that
these computers can make that planning many times more efficient than Marx or
Lenin ever imagined. One of Lenin's more famous quotations was, "Soviet power
and electrification equals communism." I doubt that he literally believed
that. It was more of a political slogan meant to emphasize the importance of
bringing electricity to the Russian people. And, like I said, Russia was
something of a backward country at the time of the revolution. There were
very many areas where no one had ever seen a light bulb and bringing
electricity to the masses was a high priority. That has been mostly
accomplished. I suppose there might still be s few outposts in the backwoods
of the Russian territory that still don't have electricity, but that would be
very rare. The essential technology now is the computer. It just could be
that a world soviet power combined with the use of computers for an economy
that would be geared toward human needs rather than profit would equal
communism.
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life
after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no
matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and
more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence
will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 11/12/2018 10:21 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
Roger, I found this while looking for something else. It’s something I saved
and then forgot about. It’s speculative, but thought you, and perhaps others
here, might find some interest in it.
Evan
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122568/what-if-stalin-had-computers
What If Stalin Had Computers?
A new book contemplates the end of capitalism (again)—it's a nice story, but
a terrible plan
By Malcolm Harris @bigmeaninternet
When will capitalism end? It’s not a new idea, and even the capitalists
suspect it will happen. After all, every other mode of production has fallen,
and capitalism isn’t a steady-state system. It simply isn’t built to stay the
same. As firms incorporate new technologies, capacity increases per-capita,
and jobs change, so too does the nature of commodities and consumption. It
happened with the assembly line, and it’s happening again with information
technology. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted these trends
would reduce everyone’s daily toil to part-time by now, while Karl Marx
thought the same developments would compel workers to seize the whole system
and abolish wage-labor in general. But the system still lives.
If the history of postcapitalism so far is a repeating chorus asking “Are we
there yet?”, then the new book from Channel 4 economics editor Paul Mason,
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, is a reassuring “Almost!” from the
front seat. Like a good co-pilot, Mason keeps his eyes on his indicators, and
he has the end in sight. Or at least on his graphs. How the transition might
occur is less important than that it must.
Marxist economics is not a vibrant field within the anglophone academy or
public sphere. Even Thomas Piketty’s best selling import, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, didn’t take much more than a good title from the
communists. Mason is an oddity, as an economics commentator of some stature
(at least in the UK, where he has been an economics/business editor since
2001) who believes that labor is the source of all value. He spends much of
the first half of Postcapitalismredeeming the work of heterodox Soviet
economist Nikolai Kondtratieff, whose model of 50-year four-phase market
cycles is Mason’s preferred historical gauge.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Kondtratieff wave explanation is an intuitive way to look at 200 years of
economic history: In Mason’s telling, industrial capitalism has completed
four cycles since 1790, driven by the interrelated processes of technological
innovation, global expansion, capital investment, and not least by labor
struggles. The story a cycle goes more or less like this: Capitalists
incorporate new productive technology, sharing the proceeds with workers;
profits slow and workers fight with their bosses as firms try to depress
labor costs; when capitalists can’t find any more savings, they’re forced to
incorporate new technology and start the cycle over. Despite its Soviet
origins, mainstream British and American economists have found the model
useful for describing how capitalism manages to persist.
The problem is we seem to have broken the cycle. Where workers should have
been able to leverage their power for higher living standards, capital
instead outsourced production, smashed unions, captured the regulators, and
expanded money supply by unpegging the dollar from gold. Mason calls this
counter-cyclical move “neoliberalism,” and it’s a helpful definition for a
term sometimes used carelessly to refer to anything bad and capitalist.
Kondratieff described a dance between capital and labor that was
theoretically sustainable—a heresy that did not go over well with Stalin, who
felt that the proletariat was only days from halting the waltz.
As it turned out, Stalin was wrong and capital broke up with labor, not the
other way around. Mason calls our current situation the “long, disrupted
wave”: The lights are on, and Kondratieff’s dance is over. This isn’t the
only relationship that’s broken; capitalist economics is incompatible with
information technology, Mason claims. As the supply of some commodities (like
music files) becomes infinite, price-setting becomes arbitrary and
unsustainable. How do you measure the amount of labor in replicable file? The
adaptable system of production that Kondratieff saw from the other side is
sinking. “The most highly educated generation in the history of the human
race, and the best connected,” Mason writes, “will not accept a future of
high inequality and stagnant growth.”
Postcapitalism really begins here, at the bargaining table with capital and
labor looking for a plan that will settle their differences once and for all.
If the world is headed for imminent ecological collapse, then to continue on
with our current capitalist mode of production is suicide. Maximizing actors
don’t kill themselves, so the operative question is what to do next. How can
we maintain people’s standards of living while socializing production,
reducing labor, saving the environment, and making the best use of new
technology? Mason has some ideas.
The book really comes into its own when Mason addresses the possibilities of
contemporary planning. He does not go as far as to endorse “cyber Stalinism”
but at the very least poses its thesis: What if the problem with the Soviet
Union was that it was too early? What if our computer processing power and
behavioral data are developed enough now that central planning could
outperform the market when it comes to the distribution of goods and services?
If you raised your hand and said this in an American ECON100 class, you’d be
laughed out of the room, so Mason as prominent public employee deserves a lot
of credit for bringing it this far into the English-speaking mainstream. The
possible socialized uses of technology is an exciting can of worms. Using
large sets of behavior and population data, capitalist firms like Amazon and
Google have developed predictive capacities that would make Soviet
cyberneticians weep with joy. Capitalism says that the best use of this
capacity is to sell people stuff, but parts of this process are so socially
unproductive and unnecessary—we don’t just have clickbait sites, we have
third-rate clickbait sites—that it can’t possibly be the case.
“Imagine if Walmart or Tesco were prepared to publish their customer data
(suitably anonymized) for free,” Mason writes. “Society would benefit:
everybody from farmers to epidemiologists could mine the data, and make more
accurate decisions.” This is just the beginning; remaking productive
machinery in the collective interest means driving necessary labor down as
far as possible with data analytics and self-management. Why can’t a
meatpacking factory function like a web startup, with room for autonomy and
achievement targets instead of required hours? It’s fun to imagine how we
could do better than capitalism if we all decided to, especially if no one
had to worry about creating and maintaining false scarcity around info-tech
goods.
The best existing example I can think of for the kind of efficiencies Mason
predicts is the difference between Netflix and Popcorn Time. Netflix is, of
course, the $28 billion media streaming company with over 2000 employees.
Popcorn Time is a legally shady alternative that streams media torrents over
a clean ad-less interface. It’s a functional and free alternative, what
economists would call a replacement good. Popcorn Time makes no money, and
has a staff of 20 around the world who volunteer their labor part-time.
Netflix is (as a streaming company) a near-total waste of time. Those
2000-plus workers could be developing a nutritious Slurpee and designing a
distribution infrastructure. Or babysitting. Hell, they could be lowering the
collective labor burden enough so everyone has time to masturbate one extra
time a year, and it would still be more socially useful than charging rent
for access to digital content.
In Mason’s telling, postcapitalism involves an abundance of resources,
including free time. Without capitalism’s wastefulness, we can refashion the
world to allow human potential and creativity to blossom. It’s an enjoyable
thought experiment, but capitalists are not looking to make a deal. Given the
choice, I have no doubt that the ownership class will literally abandon the
planet Earth before they surrender capitalism. Bosses no longer negotiate
with organized labor if they can avoid it; they’d rather make a blanket offer
to all workers as individuals: Work and/or starve. Violence and coercion
don’t play much of a role in Postcapitalism, but that’s not true of
capitalism. Huge, advanced police forces ensure this is the deal whether
people “accept” it (as Mason says) or not.
Imaginative as it is, Postcapitalism is not a revolutionary book. As Malcolm
X observed very clearly of revolution after revolution: “What was it for?
Land! How did they get it? Bloodshed!” Capitalists understand this principle
very well, and their state proxies are well-armed. The vanguard movements of
postcapitalism that Mason identifies—the global occupy sequence, Brazilian
World Cup protesters, fracking blockaders—have all been forced out of
whatever territory they were able to take temporarily, and that’s with the
authorities exercising significant restraint relative to their capabilities.
Since postcapitalism doesn’t detail the “How?”, it doesn’t have to answer
“How do we kill that many cops?”
There’s a reason Marxists—even heterodox ones—don’t usually speculate on how
to arrange communism: Marx says not to. “Communism is for us not a state of
affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to
adjust itself,” he writes with Engels in The German Ideology. “We call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Not
even Marx claimed to know what communism will look like, but he knew it would
have to destroy capitalism first.
It’s hard to follow Marx into his beautifully hopeful “will have been” idea
of history without thinking he’s doing some sword-in-the-stone prophecy, but
he nonetheless reveals important problems with postcapitalism. I cannot
imagine the real movement that could, in retrospect, validate Mason’s version
of history. The true qualities of capitalism, including the weak points where
it finally fails, will only be visible in the shadow of whatever social force
destroys it. The people Mason describes, at least as motivated and defined by
the historical factors he describes (education, connection, stagnant wages),
do not seem willing or able to confront the system at the necessary scale or
with the required intensity. To borrow a perspective from Marx, I do not
believe Mason’s theory of capitalism will have been the case.
The true story of capitalism, like all social forms, will be written in its
ashes. Until then, a theory of historical necessity and a couple bucks will
get you a cup of coffee. Mason criticizes leftists for being against things
that exist instead of for things that could be, but the position of the cart
in relation to the horse isn’t up for sensible debate. Postcapitalism is
still one revolution away.
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