Hi Holla Forums, can we discuss equality? I've always followed the enlightenment philosophers on this issue, i.e...

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

Also, these paragraphs sound so dated. Most of us in the present day don't rivet boilers together for a living.

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

but you'd be the exception, people do enjoy meaningful, fulfilling work, which is what everyone will have

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

Tell that to the president of the United States.

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

See

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.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/

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.

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.

No
Finally we'd all just go insane and kill each other… Which is perhaps the most authentic expression of human nature

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

Maybe it's just not selecting (you) for a reason

yeah, he's not born into privilege, do you not think meritocracy is good?

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

Yes

so you're unironically an advocate for despotism

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.

Technically that's nepotism, but I meant to say, yes I believe in meritocracy

Not really, the lumpenproletariat are much less vampiric than the capitalists, bankers in particular.

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.

I'm gonna need some evidence that vampirisms is inherent to humans as opposed to mutual aid, to form mutually beneficial relationships.

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.

"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

Do you want the Kropotkin pdf? It's genuinely pretty good, it might shine a light of humanism into your skeptic heart

Hit this disillusioned soul with it, why not

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution.pdf

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I couldn't find that quote in that book, OP. Which enlightenment philosophers have you read?

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.

Unsurprisingly, but it remains surely the case that divergent evolution is occurring in the human population.

Locke, Hobbes, Hume, and Paine

I know, but he's on about the broader subject of which compassion is a subheading

Which he rejects as romantic liberal wank.

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.

Morality isn't a factor. It's based in pragmatic self interest.

Like killing kulaks, starving Ukranians and taking their shit cause you can.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well shit, there's a thought.

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

Can't you see that your whole attitude is merely a symptom of consumerism. Your argument here only reinforces the failures of capitalism.

No, it's a symptom of being a historian, and this is not an argument

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/

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.

No, but he was my least favourite for that very reason, that and his retarded deism

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.

Ok
Context matters. None of these ethnicities were held in chattel slavery or systemically discriminated against for over three hundred years.

The whole idea of working for a scholarship is less likely if one's raised in a microcosm of poverty and poor education.

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.

Not really sure where you got all of that from.

Citations needed

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.