there are two kinds of inequality, natural inequality, which stems from physical and mental abilities, and unnatural inequality, which is entirely due to the fact of property, especially of things and land for which those who own them do not use themselves, but rent the privilege of use out to others.
Justin Parker
Ok, but wouldn't natural inequality inform social and economic inequality? "Unnatural inequality" sounds adventitious and idealistic. I understand that what the society values might not cater to one's personal strengths, but I don't understand how the society can fundamentally change the fact of inequality.
I mean, if you're stupid in capitalism, you are no less stupid in a socialist state, or in the wilderness for that matter; clearly if you're the village idiot, socialism won't help you be less fecking useless to your comrades.
Carson Harris
a stupid member of the ruling class generally has an easier time in life than a stupid member of the ruled class, you're not seriously going to deny there is such a thing as class privilege right?
not with absentee property rights it doesn't. Have you seen most royal familys? They're inbred idiots, they didn't earn any of their wealth in the sense of labor.
Cameron James
I've met stupid 1-percenters, I've noticed that they generally don't stay that way for long, eventually some guy comes and rips them off and they end up part of the ruled class.
Parker Hill
Ok, economic equality, but that just leaves us with the problem of incentive. Do I just work for no net profit because I love my society that much? Cold-hearted reasoning dictates that I sit my ass down and let the socialist state feed me.
Landon Morgan
I have a non-moral response to this: I want to live in a society where the not most "fit" or productive still have decent lives, even if artificially uplifted by society because chances are you or someone you love is going to fit the criteria and you would not want to see them left behind or liquidated. I'm for soft eugenics to gradually improve our species, but if we were to do something retarded like kill off anyone with an Autism Level below X then where does it end? Chance are you are average intelligence (or strength or creativity or whatever) and are just as likely to find yourself on the genetic chopping block as anyone else. By embracing and tolerating those more mediocre than I am, I am saving myself from eventually sharing their same fate.
If Holla Forumsacks want to kill off anyone not white in their fabled day of the rope, it wouldn't surprise me that a good portion of them would chicken out if it actually happened when they find out being Greek or pale hispanic isn't "pure" enough.
Brody Russell
the incentive is social climbing and your own creative drive to do what it is you love to do. labor vouchers to buy non essential items from state owned co-operatives
Juan Turner
Sounds reasonable, but isn't capitalism the best soft-eugenics system? It doesn't exclude charity, but it doesn't let r-strategies of reproduction go unchecked, instead it promotes K-strategies, or the breeding of the most competent
Adam Murphy
first stage communism is the first and only incentive driven, giving each according to their ability
also this:
What is the cause of the fluidity of manpower?
The cause is the wrong structure of wages, the wrong wage scales, the "Leftist" practice of wage equalisation. In a number of factories wage scales are drawn up in such a way as to practically wipe out the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the unskilled worker lacks the incentive to become a skilled worker and is thus deprived of the prospect of advancement; as a result he feels himself a "visitor" in the factory, working only temporarily so as to "earn a little money" and then go off to "try his luck" in some other place. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the skilled worker is obliged to go from factory to factory until he finds one where his skill is properly appreciated.
Hence, the "general" drift from factory to factory; hence, the fluidity of manpower.
In order to put an end to this evil we must abolish wage equalisation and discard the old wage scales. In order to put an end to this evil we must draw up wage scales that will take into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. We cannot tolerate a situation where a rolling-mill worker in the iron and steel industry earns no more than a sweeper. We cannot tolerate a situation where a locomotive driver earns only as much as a copying clerk. Marx and Lenin said that the difference between skilled and unskilled labour would exist even under socialism, even after classes had been abolished; that only under communism would this difference disappear and that, consequently, even under socialism "wages" must be paid according to work performed and not according to needs. But the equalitarians among our economic executives and trade-union officials do not agree with this and believe that under our Soviet system this difference has already disappeared. Who is right, Marx and Lenin or the equalitarians? It must be assumed that it is Marx and Lenin who are right. But it follows from this that whoever draws up wage scales on the "principle" of wage equalisation, without taking into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, breaks with Marxism, breaks with Leninism. marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/06/23.htm
Asher Hughes
Aren't labour vouchers called money by most people? Also you've just said I can't own anything, so why wouldn't I steal it instead?
Dylan Morris
like a check, it's exclusively noted to you, not worth stealing, and like a movie ticket, once it's used, it's gone, no exchange, no room for speculation or hoarding.
Austin Robinson
meaning for all of human history as it provides each according to their work while fully developing and allowing their potential in abilities to develop
Blake Cox
So the first stage of communism is meritocracy?
I'm still interested to know how you stop useless leeches from breeding like rabbits at the expense of competent workers in any later stage of communism.
Bentley Russell
basically Star Trek, work for yourself to grow "useless leeching" isn't a thing, it's a smear against unemployed and those who have given up on themself because they cannot develop their potential under capitalist exploitation
Wyatt Adams
Also, these paragraphs sound so dated. Most of us in the present day don't rivet boilers together for a living.
Joshua Nelson
If you will give me enough money for free, I have every incentive to leech. I would have irresponsible sex with every female in a 60 mile radius and foot the bill to big gov
Jordan Morris
but you'd be the exception, people do enjoy meaningful, fulfilling work, which is what everyone will have
Daniel Williams
you asked about later stage communism there is no money and if you want to fuck around, you only need to find partners willing to do so because there's nothing you got to offer to them but your own person no bill you can foot to anyone
your mindset also does not apply to a later stage communist society neither does mine, merely being able to have an abstract idea of how it'd look like doesn't mean that i, raised under capitalism, would fit into this society
Jose Harris
Tell that to the president of the United States.
Evan Ortiz
It has nothing to do with whether I can develop myself personally, it's just what you'd be letting me get away with. I'd be a perfectly happy welfare leech if my government told me I'd get $50,000 a year for doing jack shit. I would be a tycoon of fucking and doing hard drugs, maybe I'd learn to play guitar if it would help my lifestyle, but I wouldn't be a benefit to anyone, I wouldn't even grow an ear of corn for it.
Tell that to Hillary, apparently she's even dumber than that assclown
Easton Jenkins
See
Henry Nelson
and society is fine because it doesn't matter because we have material abundance to the point that millions of "leeches" wouldn't even be a hurdle for the system of production and distribution.
In a way but it's not selecting for any kind of tangible improvement (intelligence, strength, speed, whatever), it's selecting for nepotism. To be honest if you're filthy rich there's not really a reason to want the world to change, but then again 99.999% of us aren't rich and never will be so changing the system to our advantage would be better course of action.
Sebastian Stewart
i just told you that there'd be no money. no welfare. there'd be a society of freed mankind that helps each individual to achieve collective greatness. if you were to be at the bottom of this society will try to elevate you. there is no person that just wants to sit idle and rot to death, taking all in and not express itself and be acknowledged as part of the whole for its contributions.
if you were to learn guitar, you'd do it for yourself so you kill some time and can be proud of achieving something and because you could play it for others that give you approval. anything you learn to better yourself is already a contribution to the whole of society. and you'd very fast get tired of just a guitar and some basic chords.
Jacob Turner
No Finally we'd all just go insane and kill each other… Which is perhaps the most authentic expression of human nature
Leo Edwards
also someone with such a dismissive attitude towards itself and society has issues mental health would be taken care of, people wouldn't be left behind to become bitter self excluding leeches and there'd be all resources open to you to get out of your house, away from dreaming up the thug life of banging whores and doing drugs, and give you all the free access to culture and education that you can now only dream of
Isaac Gray
Maybe it's just not selecting (you) for a reason
Jaxson Bell
yeah, he's not born into privilege, do you not think meritocracy is good?
Hunter Long
you don't actually believe that this experiment on mice has anything to do with human society, … right? i mean the experiment isn't even on that issue but adresses "overpopulation" by rodents
Ethan Williams
Yes
James Lopez
so you're unironically an advocate for despotism
Lucas Smith
I think insanity and killing are the most authentic expressions of human nature, I don't see the problem with inferring an end result
You guys have it all wrong, you shouldn't be worried about me, trolling aside, I want to earn my keep and live a respectable life. Instead you should concern yourselves with the human garbage that actually lives the lifestyle I described and which the welfare state allows to proliferate in ghettoes.
Jace Long
Technically that's nepotism, but I meant to say, yes I believe in meritocracy
Nathan Collins
Not really, the lumpenproletariat are much less vampiric than the capitalists, bankers in particular.
Charles Jenkins
Vampirism is a human trait, it belongs no more to bankers than to the lumpenproletariat than to shitposters. Honestly, if you don't think anyone could be JP Morgan with JP Morgan's money, you haven't see enough of the world yet.
Liam Butler
I'm gonna need some evidence that vampirisms is inherent to humans as opposed to mutual aid, to form mutually beneficial relationships.
Elijah Collins
When I say "equality" it's less of a literal kind than a principled one. For example, yes, we all have differing abilities and traits, but that doesn't mean we don't all deserve the means to live. "Equality" for me doesn't mean there aren't differences between people, but it also means more than equal before the law. It's a weird in-between.
William Sanders
"You know, despite everything that's happened, I still believe that people are good at heart." —Demonstrably false things said by Ann Frank
There's my evidence
Asher Nguyen
Do you want the Kropotkin pdf? It's genuinely pretty good, it might shine a light of humanism into your skeptic heart
Well yeah, but compassion itself is a means to an end. Nobody's going to mate with you if you give every impression of being a monster. But what about those times when you can get away with it? Such as say, an SS guard at Auschwitz? They were just ordinary people, and they all lacked the conviction to abstain from evil or even conceptualize the idea that what they were up to was wrong.
Nolan Peterson
Ann Frank was murdered by people who were desperate and lied to by the upper class. you can teach a pack of dogs cannibalism, but if it were "natural" in any form, they'd have gone extinct long ago.
Zachary Evans
I'm willing to agree that generally people don't feel like killing one another, but that's just because they're inhibited. What happens when they are not? I'd argue that apart from a few enlightened people who have truly gone beyond common moralizing, most would sink into barbarism when given an excuse.
I don't buy the idea that they were lied to successfully, I think they were lied to unsuccessfully, and were mostly just willfully blind to the truth because they were on a power trip.
Ayden Robinson
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I couldn't find that quote in that book, OP. Which enlightenment philosophers have you read?
Gavin White
I know you Holla Forumsyps are allergic to reading anything outside of the inforgraph format but maybe if you read it you would know Kropotkin isn't talking about compassion. Just a thought.
Wyatt Robinson
Unsurprisingly, but it remains surely the case that divergent evolution is occurring in the human population.
Locke, Hobbes, Hume, and Paine
James James
I know, but he's on about the broader subject of which compassion is a subheading
Cooper Phillips
Which he rejects as romantic liberal wank.
Chase Bailey
Precisely, nor should I feel particularly filled with hope at Kropotkin's rhetorical attempt to elevate an economic transaction to the status of a moral ideal.
Brandon Miller
Morality isn't a factor. It's based in pragmatic self interest.
Robert Miller
Like killing kulaks, starving Ukranians and taking their shit cause you can.
John Robinson
But you're getting it backwards. The reason they can't be productive is because they were born into a microcosm of poor education, poor nutrition, poor community, and few opportunities. How the fuck can you say you want a meritocracy when you where born into a 100m dash with a 50m head start over other racers?
Gabriel Clark
I'm just saying, nothing about pragmatic self interest or some idea of ethical egoism stands in the way of any conceivable act of violence. Ann Frank was just flat out wrong to conceive of people as inherently good for any reason, and her life is a testimony to that fact and nothing else.
Jack Carter
This meme has been btfo enough, there are plenty of scholarships one can get if you work for it? So why don't I see more hardworking ghetto dwellers on campus? Oh that's right, because there is actually a darwinian dialectic at work in everything and those people are returning to the primordial soup as we speak.
Jace Morris
If the human garbage of which we are speaking actually had a work ethic, nothing could hold them down. The Jews used to live in ghettoes 150 years ago and it was enforced, but the second Jewish emancipation happened they rushed right to the top positions in society, so much so that it still makes incel Nazis mad to this day.
Camden Rogers
Most people don't actually apply this kind of reasoning. See: Workers striking to protect their miserable jobs in the Thatcher era, even though the unemployment payments were generous compared to nowadays and had weak conditionality.
That said, you can work for material benefit without private property ownership. You still have personal property, and you can still improve your material wellbeing - if we're targeting "fairness", we just don't have inheritance of goods.
Caleb Reed
assumes one has the tools to work for it. I'll give you a trillion dollars if you make me a car. What do you mean you don't have the machine tools? That's not my problem, you just aren't working hard enough.
Chase Diaz
Well shit, there's a thought.
Landon Bell
They don't have the tools only because their parents don't tell them anything of use, or leave them on the doorsteps of an orphanage. That's not because society hasn't tried at every turn to help them.
Also, they have a really fucking poor work ethic, did you know that? Very much unlike other groups who started their time in America in ghettoes, such as Irish, Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Chinese, Koreans, and just about every other goddamned nationality.
But with blacks? Only sporadic success stories, the rest just have this insufferable self-perpetuating victim complex
Anthony Smith
Can't you see that your whole attitude is merely a symptom of consumerism. Your argument here only reinforces the failures of capitalism.
Julian Turner
No, it's a symptom of being a historian, and this is not an argument
Benjamin Nelson
Is your appreciation of him based on fake quotations from Holla Forums as well? Thomas Paine was a radical egalitarian: kpfa.org/episode/grain-march-31-2015/
Christian Young
You seem to have this strange idea that because I'm pro-capitalist that I go to Black Friday sales armed with an M16 and a bowie knife like Rainbow or some shit because of how much buying stuff and bloodlust (apparently) factors into my identity. I could write more realistic lines for Sesame Street about capitalism than that.
Carter Cooper
No, but he was my least favourite for that very reason, that and his retarded deism
Charles Carter
the 🍀🍀irish🍀🍀 are a special case, they control everything. i'm not American enough to want to school you on your own history, just know your country is a disaster from start to finish t. Briton.
Logan Wright
Ok Context matters. None of these ethnicities were held in chattel slavery or systemically discriminated against for over three hundred years.
Easton Rogers
The whole idea of working for a scholarship is less likely if one's raised in a microcosm of poverty and poor education.
Ethan Gomez
It's clear that the only value you can see in people is their economic value. History did make you this way. You can't analyse history without a mindset and yours was edgy realism.
Zachary Carter
Not really sure where you got all of that from.
Adrian Lewis
Citations needed
Michael Fisher
going to need a lot more citations
Also, why should we have a puritanical work ethic? We already produce a surplus as a society? We could eliminate half of the average labor time for humanity and still produce enough to live with comfort.