When Holla Forums was first created...

Stay spooked kiddo.

He's going all out!

lol the most useless of people

Is it better to be useful or to be harmless?

One who is not purely dogmatic. I don't think we need to throw away the entire government, I just think we need to reduce its size and scope, and to promote civil liberties wherever possible.

I can abide by those terms.

I don't give a rat's ass about race though.

Most people are ultimately useless in politics.

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What's your opinion on autonomy as a concept?

yeh ur cool we have nazis here too so have at it fam

Erm… there's a few ways to interpret that question. I am presuming you are referring to the autonomy of individuals?

Scientifically speaking… we have no goddamn clue if there is or is not free will in humans, or if everything is just a deterministic response to neural stimulus. From any individual's perspective though, it at least seems as though we do, and it should make sense that laws should respect the fact that we do have free will. We own our own bodies, and ought to have as much liberty to do with them as we please.

I think what he's getting at the idea of interdependence - "no man is an island." In other words, that nobody can claim to be the sole owner of something they made if they had society's help.

Every man is the sole owner of themselves. I feel as though no form of government can be moral if it does not hold at least this truth.

I meant individual and collective self governance. You being the highest authority on yourself and any collective being the highest authority on itself.

Obvious

Presumably. A democratic rule of law is preferable to, say, an autocrat. An individual who attempts to govern a collective without their consent, ultimately, ought to have their head on a pike.

GOLDEN
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if you don't feel strongly one way or another as long as you can smoke weed, then why do you even care about an imageboard based on talking about politics?

fuck off assmad redditor

If you can't defend your ideology then either it's a shit ideology or you're a shit adherent.

First off, I don't smoke weed. Second off, moderate does not mean apathetic. I am very much a capitalist and a Libertarian. I just don't think we need to completely throw out agencies like the EPA and such.

Oh, hey. You're me about 5 years ago.

Contrarians are welcomed as long they put some effort to make arguments
Hot red text
A better board for all of us

Then consider the workplace and the necessary labour that went into it. Strip it of all monetary aspects as they create the conditions that make themselves necessary, just imagine the actual necessary work to create and run whatever workplace this is. Why does an individual owner get to dictate the conditions of all of these others? Would they consent if they actually had other options besides a dictatorial workplace?

We might as well, what is good for the environment is not good for profits.

This is some pretty serious irony, given the origin of that meme. Maybe you should go back to reddit.

Pretty sure from context they were going for an ironic reversal given how we allow non-leftists here.

user, I grew out of my socialist phase when I entered college.

Labor is just a form of trade. One person exchanges money, and perhaps some other benefits such as health insurance, while another exchanges their time. You are free to make whatever bargaining that you wish with your employer, and they are free to choose whether to hire you under your conditions, or to hire someone else. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that there are fewer employers compared to a large number of laborers, and as such, the value of labor is rather low (and decreasing, thanks to automation, competition from the third world, etc…). It would be immoral for the owner to be forced to hire you, just as it would be immoral for me to force you to buy my old computers. We each have a right to use our own resources as we please.

user, I'm sorry to break this to you, but there is no "they". All of the employers around the world did not collectively decide that they were going to enslave us all into some system where they control all of the resources. Every one of your bosses is well… a person. Just like you and me. Their paycheck is different, but they still have the same needs of food, shelter, etc… as everyone else. When they got into their position, if they were not born into money, they probably took some sort of risk. Even well-managed businesses are not guaranteed to succeed. Can you imagine going tens of thousands of dollars into debt with no guarantee that you'll be able to pay it back? Oh wait, you can, it's called college. You're not so different, are you?

Good for the profits of the dumper, bad for the profits of other companies. If I run a fishing company, I'd rather not have to explain to my customers why the product may contain mercury.

I was drawing a parallel to make a joke, stop being a humorless faggot.

Basically so long as you present your ideas in a coherent manner that doesn't devolve into shouting meaningless stock phrases, you're fine. Fair warning though, there is an expected higher standard expected for creating new threads than if you're just posting in the middle of an existing thread, so think long and hard before bumping an existing thread off the catalog.

Fair enough.

I primarily lurk, but this board really isn't prone to idiotic outbursts of pure rage. This is a leftist board, but there's a fair amount of differing thought here. I'm not quite as extreme as some here, and there are some ideas that I would dismiss just as readily as I would far right ideas.

Either way, it's a much more civil environment than what you'll find in right leaning boards. The discussion can be pretty thoughtful at times.

Wow this is pretty bigoted against redditors.

Anyone who believes they did doesn't understand Marx's critique of capitalism.

Good. Redditphobia is code word for anti-communist.

The arguments for socialism does not require morality. The niceness of a bourg does not concern me. They have to profit, they have to be competitive, because of the profit motive they will do what they can to stay afloat. This means often they must automate certain positions, reduce wages or just lay off labor. It is not the fault of any one capitalist, it is the nature of the system itself.

Also nobody is blaming a fishing company for global warming. It more that immediate significant investment into developing alternate energy sources are way too expensive for the government/private corporations and are not immediately profitable.

You must have had a meme tier understanding of socialism. Like I did when I was in college and voted for Ron Paul in 2008.

And simultaneously, this will mean there will be less people capable of affording their products. They will also need to lower prices. Eventually though, we will need to switch our economic model entirely when automation knocks out a large enough portion of labor. The question then becomes "what sort of economy can we create that at least has many of the benefits of capitalism, while a large percentage of the population is unemployed?"

Of course not. I'm saying that what is good for the profits of one company (say, one which dumps garbage into the ocean) is not good for the profits of another (say, a fishing company).

I have seen many different types of economies all calling themselves "socialism", and the only thing they had in common was inefficiency. Capitalism also has its share of inefficiencies, but it's the least terrible one we've got, which involves the least amount of people starving. It's not hard to go homeless, but it is to starve to death.

But what if we do not want an employer? A workplace owned and dictated by some guy, on what authority is he entitled to the labour of a coerced workforce? They can not truly consent as attempts to change the mode of production (anything but saying yes) are met with violence. We do not desire to be hired, we desire to own the property that we made, we manage, and we keep running.

When I say "they" I don't mean any one person or group of people, I mean the systems and artificial rule sets we live by that encourage certain individuals to act in certain ways. Like money justifying itself. You do not need money to build a factory, you need money to pay for the building of the factory, but paying for the factory is only necessary because the economic system we live under has money, it's not inherently necessary in building a factory.
Our bosses act in their rational self interest, this involves competing with each other sure, but it always involves piggybacking off the labour of their rented humans. We want to manage ourselves, govern ourselves, have everyone be able to work for themselves.

At that point you enter automated communism, trying to get arbitrary universal income without the scarcity to justify it to work, or extermination of the poor.

Then you are free to start your business. You can keep it down to just yourself and have no employees, but this also means that not only must you produce the product, but you must also find someone who wants to buy that product. Having an employer has its own benefits, in that you only have to worry about doing one task. Everything else is taken care of for you. If the business flops, oh well, just find a new job.

They aren't really coerced, at least not by their employers. For food to exist, for houses to be built, for infrastructure to be maintained, someone must do work, and that someone does not do their work for free. We are the consumers of those people's products, and so we pay for it. For us to be able to pay, we must do work ourselves. Money is only a facilitator of exchanging work for work.

Please describe your means to "change the mode of production", and how it is met with violence. Surely, with enough startup capital, a socialist-like economy can exist within the context of a capitalist one, so long as the taxman gets his due.

You seem to have contradicted yourself here. Is it or is it not necessary to build a factory, as you see it? As I see it, someone has to dig up the raw materials, someone has to process those, someone then has to take those processed materials and turn them into machinery, and the components that make up the building itself, and someone has to assemble the building itself. And there's generally a lot of someones involved in each of these tasks, all of which need to be compensated for their work. I think we should both presumably agree on one maxim: no one does work for free. The only question then becomes "how do we best distribute the resource, and how do we best plan the economy?"

Work gets done a lot more efficiently when people work together, and when you have a lot of people working together, you typically need someone to manage them.

Kys

rude

Most small businesses fail I believe, and it's not particularly easy to just up and start one, on top of that, capitalism relies on wage labour and there must necessarily always be a portion of individuals who work for other people. I propose a collectively owned workplace.

They are coerced into working specifically under a workplace dictatorship instead of a workplace democracy as their options are very limited. It is not work I am arguing against, it is lack of autonomy in work and the exploitation experienced.

For the means I want to say, expropriation of productive property and land for the class who has contributed all of the necessary effort.
A socialist-like economy is not nearly enough I want communism and for that, you can't have money to tax or a state to take it or enforce absentee ownership.

I didn't contradict myself I was trying to make it very clear that what capitalism makes necessary, is not actually necessary. It is only made necessary by the fact we are all playing by its rules. So all of what you said is necessary, and the compensation is "everything", without money how are you going to get a car? It will be given to you. Why will it be given to you? Either because we are past a level of reasonable scarcity with cars and their materials and so everyone gets a free car, or if we are not past a reasonable level of scarcity, because you have contributed in some way to society, like for example by driving a bus, then you are permitted to the collective wealth of society and can go get a free car from the free car warehouse.

Work getting done more efficiently when people work together really only strengthens the argument for workplace democracy over workplace dictatorship. I've always supported managers, who are mere managers, that can be instantly recalled, and were democratically elected. There is no need of an owner with absolute authority in this setup at all.

This tbh

Again, no reason you can't in theory start this inside of a capitalist economy. I mean, I'm a part of a "collectively owned" bank. You know what they call it? A credit union. The members have the option to vote on the people running the place, and all of the profits of the credit union are doled out in various benefits to the members (cheaper loans, longer bank hours, less fees, etc…). I see no reason why a group of people could not start a business, share ownership, share benefits, and vote on everything amongst the employees. If it's a workable model, more people will do it.

If and when we get to that point this might make sense, but…

Now we run into the economic calculation problem. Say we allow everyone to choose their own job. Many jobs will be overstaffed, because everyone wants to do them, and many will be understaffed, because no one wants to do them. Okay, now we have to change the amount of reward for each person to encourage certain jobs and… now we've run into a problem that capitalism has "sort of" solved.

Ultimately, both involve cooperation, at least amongst employees. It's just a matter of how worker hierarchy is structured, and there's no reason why a nation should need to change its economic model to change the workplace model.

Larger corporations are not typically run by a "one guy gets absolute authority" model. A CEO is elected… just not by all of the employees. Make a business with a model that gives employees more power, make it compete on the open market.

I think you're missing the point of the Marxist critique of Capitalism. It has nothing to do with what you can do "voluntarily". How do you think "Capitalism" came to dominate the West and then the rest of the world? Did people magically start trading and working under a boss on their own accord? Or was it bathed in blood like most of the transitions between epochs?

That's not even getting to the point which is that Capitalism is unstable. It is riddled with internal contradictions. We will always witness crises every decade big or small.

You should know how that works. You can only believe that kind of shit if you never leave your own torture chamber to check for yourself. I'm sure it made Holla Forumsacks feel good about themselves and fed right into their preconceptions. Truth is secondary.

Note that Holla Forums does have a rather strict moderation. It's just never been along political lines. You have literal nazis posting in this very thread, I mean come on.

Everything has a bloody history, user, and I think regardless of the economic and governmental system we have, there will be crises where large numbers of people die. I also think given our current government's state, one of those crises may be soon to come.

You see, that's fine with me. What's a pain in the ass to me is when I can get banned for playing the devil's advocate. I have often found that taking the opposition, even if one does not believe it, makes a great way for people to learn new things. Holla Forums does not want to learn, however.

tbh Libertarians are made fun of here, but never banned

t. NEETzi

Why on earth would a libertarian browse a fascist board? What did you believe you had in common with them?

Im assuming a moderate libertarian is a neurotypical libertarian who doesnt sperg out at every violation of lolbert religious dogma. They may hold a few heretical freedumb hating views themselves such as supporting UBI, certain welfare measures, and caring about civil liberties more than muh sacred property rights. They trigger the living shit out of the ayncrap, paleo, and alt right strands of lolbertarianism. Gary Johnson and Reason magazine are good examples.

I think these types are much easier to convert to our side than liberals. Autistic dogmatic lolberts on the other hand are harder to convince than fascists.

A capitalist business will accumulate capital into a single pool and thus be better able to grow, crushing smaller competitors. Co-ops cannot succeed against porky in the long run.

This does of course mean market socialism is bad at growth compared to capitalism or state capitalism. But that's why its a *post* capitalist thing. We need growth, but not infinite amounts. And if we do keep pushing growth forever capitalism will collapse in on itself anyway when most people get put out of work by the robots.

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You're fine. We might disagree, but as long as you're kind and polite, that's no problem whatsoever.

Just in response to this point:

We are not agains management or coordination within the workplace, but the concept of one (unaccountable, undemocratic, …) "Owner" as such, unrelated to production, which gets the surplus value.

You can post here as long as you don't deliberately shit post or spam.

It's quite clear you were never a socialist, but merely a LARPing liberal. You have no understanding of Marx's critique of capital or the concept of ideology.