Why is it that Holla Forums has so many deontological socialists?

However, the left uses an abundance of appeals to emotion and spooky identity politics to garner support.

Who's "the left?" Liberals do, but they aren't part of the left.

I'm mostly talking about left-libertarians, some social anarchists, and some tankies.

What, deontology? Do you mean this?
Where things get hazy is the argument a land owner might make, that their land is in fact devalued by other people using it. I think the countercounterargument to that would be to point out that it depends on what they're using it for (for example planting crops will suck up all the nutrients but you'd be free to build a road a couple years down the line), and that we're at no shortage of land for most purposes anyway.
I think the consequentialist version of it would look more like this-

Utilitarianism thought of in terms of "happy points" is poorly construed utilitarianism. There is a limit to human contentment, and that limit is known as ecstasy. The human endgame is everyone in a constant state of ecstasy, having nothing to worry about and everything they could possibly want. This "utility monster" that never reaches its limit is not something that's realistic.

Wewie blewie. Humanitarians.
Don't even get me started on the idea that this board likes idpol too much. And Holla Forums has too much love for the Semitic Menace.

Don't samefag, you fuck.
Alright, wise guy, so what do you support if you don't support rights or equality? Are you one of those "individualist anarchist" cocksuckers?

The utility monster does reach his limit, he just construes say, 10 million times more happiness from what he enjoys than a human. The idea is that since he construes more happiness, we should always do what the monster says. You can talk of the utility monster without talking about points at all.

Well it's not like it would matter in full communism how much he wants anyway, see my drift?

Besides that, he's still going to be operating at maximum comfy at some point.

Tbh I'm undecided on ethics, I'm leaning towards Egoism, but also need to read Kant.

Egoism is the only thing that makes sense. You will find "Ethics" to be man made spooks, social constructs.

The real problem is seeing egoism, Kant and utilitarianism as at all at odds with each other, like you just did. You can reach the conclusions of the other two with any of the three. I only call myself a utilitarian because I think the framework of using rules and guidelines is not fundamentally designed to be expandable and face new dilemmas like a simple principle is.

For example, egoism postulates that the greatest good a man can work towards is his own happiness. But I would argue that spreading the love to your surroundings in a utilitarian fashion will make you much happier in the long run.

Kant a shit, though.

Because gommunism has such bad gonsequences :D DDDD

Because marxists generally have a very poor understanding of ethics. Anyone who understands ethics knows consequentialism is a fuck, and virtue ethics is superior.

It's reflected in that no one here reads Macintyre.

try again, but this time: write something substantial

The ideas of good and bad are abstract, and each person defines it in their own way. Some people adore the idea of the state, while others reject it, both for moral reasons. Private property isn't bad. It just doesn't please you that people don't have the resources they want. There's a difference.

Holla Forums does like Hitler fairly often, but it doesn't stop humanitarianism from being the religion of equality.

Anarchism is flawed. See, Revolutionary Catalonia and the Free Territory of the Ukraine both failed to protect themselves from their neighbours. All too often, anarchists assume the endgame without considering the difficult uphill battle against highly militarised governments. How do we achieve anarchy? Fighting the political system usually succeeds in strengthening the police and turning the opposition into scape goats. This is generally ineffective unless more heavily armed than the existing military. There is the possibility of using the political system against itself. Many accelerationists voted for Trump, believing that he would cause the US to fall. This could also be done by voting in someone like Adam Kokesh who wishes to eradicate the government. Another option is to ignore the function of the state. Basically, doing what you want. You could establish a TAZ (temporary autonomous zone) to gain support. I do what I think will benefit myself the most. This means even supporting certain laws if they benefit me personally.

Bad consequence? That's spooky shit. Physics doesn't have bad causes and bad effects? Things just happen. Moral and ethical descriptions are the product of the human mind, and have nothing to do with the physical status of the universe. From an ideological standpoint, full communism is an endgame that would please me. However, the haunted heads of the political spectrum are often getting in the way of their own ambitions.

Consequentialist reporting in. Everyone is actually a consequentialist. All other ethical systems are derived from a consequentialist framework, and if you disagree then you haven't gone all the way to the root of your understanding. We are all fundamentally decision engines - we take input from the world to build our understanding of it and then based on that understanding we act in an attempt to achieve certain things. Ultimately we're after emotional states, but the conditions that cause those states can be wide-ranging and often very specific. The only reason anyone constructs an ethical framework is to facilitate this process. Virtue ethics and deontological ethics only make sense because they theoretically produce favorable outcomes (consequentialism).

Utilitarianism is nonsensical. "Utility" is a totally arbitrary concept. The most sensible framework to use is to imagine all people as agents within a social system and evaluate their freedom (the absence of situational restrictions on the choices they can make). With sufficient freedom, people may pursue their own pleasure. Since pleasure is such an idiosyncratic thing, it cannot be efficiently given. Instead, society would get better results (more pleasure, less pain) by focusing collective efforts on minimizing oppression or restrictions on people's agency. The causes of suffering and unfreedom are much more universal than the causes of joy, because the former are rooted respectively in basic brain structures and social context, while joy relates much more with personality. Furthermore, suffering begets suffering because people tend to repeat their traumas on others, which makes the elimination of suffering even more important as a priority. Maximizing utility or happiness is a fool's errand. Who can tell better what is useful or joyful than the individual?

If that works in the short term with people whose minds are stunted (deliberately) by poor education and poverty, why do you have an issue with it? If a world where everyone is happy and nobody suffers is the aim, why avoid taking a more effective route? When determining what is true, emotional appeals have no place, but in persuading people to listen to the truth they do.

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Right, just like how everyone is an egoist - some are involuntary while some are voluntary. The left fails to captivate me due to its appeal to rights and ethical code. While my more Nietzschean side understands the efficacy of an Übermensch as the basis of master morality, it's not something that I feel obligated to follow. Many feel the need to be followers and to submit to others, which is the reality of the spook. These social constructs aren't real, however their manifestations and exploitations are very real. The idea of authority is conjured by the mind by the existence of coercion. Because people fear death and desire survival, they are likely to do things that avoid death. Authority is the exploitation of this phenomenon.

I would say that people generally strive to be happy, and that having things taken from them makes them unhappy. So, I guess, because it violates general happiness it should be considered unethical? Is that how you think we should base our moral code?

It can also be more subtle than that. We evolved under conditions of resource scarcity, and thinking expends resources. Our brains are an immense demand on our metabolism relative to other species, so making our thinking more efficient was selected for to avoid wasting resources. Ideologies that offer simple, easy-to-understand solutions appeal to that paradigm.

Same.

Among many other things, like preventing someone from having something in the first place, especially the opportunity to do something a person wants to do.

If it stands in the way of a person doing what makes them happy, it's unethical. This also applies to what makes the person happy. If torturing people makes me happy, then that is unethical because it causes suffering and unfreedom in others. Freedom and minimizing suffering is prioritized above happiness, so I would have to find something else to make me happy. I don't have to be commanded to do this; as we established, people will do this for themselves.

I don't think we should have a moral code, which is based on judgement and virtue. I think instead we would most benefit from an egoist-like system where it's mutually understood that we're out for our own interests and what culture or ethic of behavior would facilitate that.

Ecoism is a spook.

Ha! Nice try, I've never read Ilyenkov. :^) Read a book.

S P O O K
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Very interesting analysis. Now, how exactly are we defining scarcity? Are we defining that as a limited amount of resources?

And I feel like we agree when it comes to morality.

Anything is a spook if you allow it to haunt your mind.

Scarcity has a strict definition. It can be defined most simply in Econ 101 terms as supply < demand. You don't need infinite supply to get post-scarcity, just supply greater than demand. We have arguably already hit post-scarcity in some areas, like food production. We produce more than enough food for every person on the planet to eat their fill. The reason they don't is related to distribution and food waste and other details. In that sense, you could draw the line of scarcity between "food" and "food availability" for instance. There's more than enough food for everyone, but the service provided by grocers is not i post-scarcity yet.

How do we continue to keep the supply greater than demand? How do we increase the availability of other goods? And how do we get to this point?

Innovation makes production more efficient. At the moment most labor is wasted on unnecessary products that have to be heavily marketed to create the demand. If the economy wasn't occupied with creating a lot of useless junk and sucking the planet dry of resources, the capitalist system would collapse. For any company to make money, it needs to sell its products. For that to happen, lots of people need to have the money to buy it with. For that to happen they need to get enough money from work. Because wages pay workers so much less than the value of their labor, there's a fundamental conflict here - most of that value goes to the capitalist class. The power the capitalists have in the labor negotiations means they will take as much as they can. But the more they take the less the workers have to buy products. Capitalism solves this by coming up with bullshit products to give workers something to do that the capitalist class will have a reason to pay them for. This isn't a conscious process necessarily, it's more the "stable" state that the system arrives at. Ultimately, this makes capitalism a degenerative system that will collapse under its own weight if something else doesn't destroy it first.

TL;DR the overwhelming majority of labor is being wasted because capitalism maximizes profit-making to the exclusion of all else, including doing anything productive.

I see. Now, the objective is to end capitalism, right? How is that goal accomplished? And how do you respond to the assertion that free market corrects itself?

This makes a lot of sense. The position of cashier at grocery stores or any fast-food restaurant is essentially unneeded as we already possess the technological capacity to replace them, but without the workers, only other wealthy people could buy the products.

Fearing Spooks is a spook.

Anything is a spook if you spread it around as such regardless of how you perceive it.

Yes.

Depends on ideology. Broadly speaking you can divide it into 3 categories: anarchism, marxism-leninism, and reformism. There is a ridiculous number of variations on these, but most have never been tried for any significant length of time.

Reformism is an attempt to work within the current system, particularly the government, to instate reforms such as via the New Deal. And just like the New Deal reforms reliably get rolled back over the years and end up being a waste of time that if anything delays a revolution.

Marxism-Leninism is what most people call "communism," where a minority of society leads the revolution to sieze the government and use it to ideally act as a proxy for the workers to control the Means of Production. In practice, MLism at best deteriorates into and at worst actually begins as (many would argue, myself included, that it by definition is) state capitalism. State capitalism is the same as regular capitalism except instead of a bunch of capitalists holding a virtual monopoly over the MoP, the government holds an actual monopoly (or close to it). I would go so far as to call this the "final form" of capitalism, because capitalism's trend is toward consolidation of private property. Mega-corps absorb smaller companies and merge together. The end of this trend would be a single entity controlling everything. In "nature", capitalism would collapse before Disney bought everything, but state capitalism skips the normal progression to arrive at this state. State capitalism has unique and interesting properties but suffice to say it's maximally unstable and will collapse inevitably, returning to an "earlier" form of capitalism, which just resets the countdown clock to collapse. This is what happened with the USSR and pretty much any "communist" state that most people have heard of.

Anarchism argues that revolution will only work if the people have a revolution that removes the state and organize from the ground-up. The problem here is that it requires widespread class-consciousness and willingness to more or less chuck the established system and rebuild. Typically things have to get really bad for this to work, and the people have to also be educated enough to grasp the basic concepts (protip: it will never happen in the US). The core vulnerability of anarchism is that it's weak militarily (relatively) and outside forces can probably invade and return the land to capitalism. See Catalonia (revolutionary Spain) for a good example of this. Anarchism is also the one of the three with the most variants. Seriously, there's fifty fucking thousand strains of anarchism and anarchists love to argue over who's the specialest snowflake. The left in general has a huge sectarianism problem.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Also, define "correct". Will capitalists continue to make loads of money? You bet. Will the people who ended up homeless end up not homeless? As fucking if. Most of economics is literal religious dogma worshipping markets as some kind of karmic force. Seriously, economists use spooky terms like "the invisible hand." There's no omnipresent intelligence guiding the economy. It's a bunch of people doing whatever is in their interest in the system.

Yes. Also, imagine for a moment that instead of having a minority of owners who take most of the cash, every worker has a (more or less) equal stake. As automation increased, the same amount of value would be created for less work. This would mean everyone could take home the same pay, while doing less work. There'd be no need to make whole industries of trash products. We could all be working a few hours a week and everyone could have a standard of living that we associate with "upper middle class". Of course, as technology develops we would still come up with new jobs, but those jobs would only be jobs that serve some purpose - people aren't going to go do pointless work. If they can't find some need to fulfill and get paid for, they will do science or make art or something like that. The idea is to reduce the work that's needed for society to function, whereas capitalism requires work to be done to the point that needs have to be manufactured (and less profitable needs ignored).

I'm very familiar with those. At this point, however, the first world isn't in a position to oppose capitalism and the state.

How do you imagine civilisation functioning in full communism? Do you see it the same way Post-Left Anarchists see their anarchy?

anglophone philosophy and obsolete problems

Stirner should be shrugging, not reaching out his hand.

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GEEEEEET OOOOUUUUUUUUUT ANGLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSS

A few words on Marxism-Leninism.

The workers (and soldiers) of the Russian revolution were the minority, not any Leninist vanguard party. Trotsky, for example, wasn't even in-country at the time it all started; neither was Lenin. They only arrive later, even if their impact was significant to put it mildly. Maoism, which is essentially modified ML, would more accurately fit your description; and ironically it was a peasant-based movement.

Whether the Soviet Union was state capitalism is a tired old debate I'd rather not wrestle with again. Suffice to say both the state capitalist theorists and the "degenerated workers' state" theorists (read: Trotskyists) are (smugly) missing the forest for the trees. The idea that it's equivalent to capitalism in the West ("regular capitalism") is laughable; the Western bourgeoisie were very quick in their judgment on this matter, and maintained it after the Second World War. Even in the USSR, to speculate that this was effectively a "single entity controlling everything" is, again, false. Moreover its crises were different, and neither was it certain to collapse, anymore than a final collapse of capitalism is certain. Most, apart from those who like to pump up early speculation as prophecy, considered the USSR unlikely to collapse, until it did. We can say the same for capitalism. It's here until it's not; the process is not certain; should it happen for capitalism I'm sure speculation will again be heralded as prophecy.

As for your take on anarchism, I'll add a few things.

Typically, things have to be really bad before either any kind of marxism or anarchism are considered; even worse than Greece, which says a lot. People don't have to be educated in anarchist literature in order for it to work: Rojava is a living example of that, though I'm sure many anarchists would take issue with it being classified as such. Whether it works is a matter of organization, and that's only an issue for the real snowflake bullshit artists. Military weakness is not a matter of anarchism. It's a matter of industrial capacity. Both Rojava and Catalonia suffer(ed) from a lack of it. And vulnerability to external intervention is arguably what shepherded the Russian revolution into many of its unresolved problems and tragedies, which played far greater part than any kind of intrinsic flaw of "state capitalism". So it's hardly a flaw of anarchism.

Reformism is 100% bullshit that kills real socialists and anarchists, so I have nothing to add there.