Re: Disabled In Socialist Countries
My personal opinion is that I guess I have to unload now, lol.
Here's some of the flaws in capitalism:
- Money doesn't really accurately reflect value of labour. For example, lets say you have 10 lead developers on each important team and their wage is no more than 5 million dollars combined. While a CEO could be replaced, despite being risky, the value of the developers is probably a lot more intregral to the success of the company because that entire sector of the company could fail without the knowledge being passed down properly. So if one of the leads decided to leave, they would be in a much stickier situation than the CEO. Especially if all the leads left. But the CEO still gets paid many more times the value than these 10 developers combined - is that really justified?
- to elaborate on the first point, money doesn't reflect labour at all with things like rent, investment, IP or nowadays, cryptocurrency. Many of the wealthiest people didn't really innovate anything at all (true for all those except IP). Also, notice all of those things require the ability to make prior investment, that means that those who are in poverty will have a much harder time being able to make income through passive means.
- the idea that capitalism leads to innovation is inherently flawed. First, its important to point out that innovation occured before the existence of capitalism. Second, it actually stiffles most innovation by weakening the workforce with repetitive work. It encourages the consumption of media that are based on what will sell rather than something that makes people think, so over time, things become more and more meaningless. This kills innovation. Under capitalism, the motivation isn't to create, but rather to escape the frustration and misery of pointless work. Third, because under capitalism products must survive market competition, over iterations, diversity dissolves and monopolies form. Innovation is focused around surviving in the market rather than producing actual meaningful innovations that are useful to consumers - it's just that in ideal conditions they correlate much more strongly.
- Capitalism directly interferes with the direction that technology is going. Accessibility in technology is a good example of how capitalism and the spread of accessibility are inherently conflicting ideas, and that JAWS thread I made is a good example of this. However, the problem extends far beyond just accessibility. We are seeing that social media being centralized around corporate control is both encouraging blanket censorship and privatized control of technology. Because of capitalism, we can't use the immense power of the internet to share our code and make essentially the best software possible - this code hoarding slows down progress. And really, the only reason why its done this way is so that programmers can survive. Is this really necessary?
- To build on the last point, Capitalism interferes directly with automation. Why don't we automate many of the tasks that we have people working? Because if they don't work, they will starve. One major problem with communism in the 20th century is that human automation isn't practical; but technology can be seen as an extention of humanity. If technology is able to progressively automate more and more necessary production, then what need is there for work at all? Humanity can focus on different matters that have more to do with what they want to create, such as arts/communications/ect. Technology and automation work very well with the propogation of ideas but interferes directly with capitalism.
If we used technology to automate agriculture for example, we would have no need for thousands of workers, but because we are dependent on an economy, we can't do this even if the technology existed, because it would destablize other sectors that are not automized yet.
- IMHO, using technology, humanity can slowly transition safely towards fully automation production, allowing people to focus more on communication and propagation. Essentially I view this as a transhumanist step towards eusociality. Right now, capitalism is one of the biggest things in the way of actually reaching this goal.
These are really not things that I think are acceptable and people shouldn't be looking at the situation like a dichotomy between capitalism and socialism/communism. In my opinion the biggest problems that socialism faces is the problems that are inherent to statehood, and how to maintain production while technology catches up. If technology is suitable I find literally no excuse to not embrace non-state communism, but I think that trying to put this in place now is hasty and honestly ridiculous. I have a really unusual position on the matter that I don't really want to get into but I think this helps illustrate a wider image of the problem - I don't want to encourage people to think like me, but rather to think about the problem from their own perspective to offer more meaningful input, because imho late stage capitalism is a serious problem that needs solving regardless of communism or not. Also, I think anyone trying to start a 20th century revolution in the modern era needs to learn a little bit about the effect computers have had on the 21st century.
EDIT: BTW anyone wanting to post their experiences about being blind in the soviet block or anything, don't feel intimidated by this post lol, I actually think its really interesting information about the failures of 20th century communism.
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