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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   31529 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the far left here. The far left theories I'm aware of are very much not able to describe a fully automated world - the center of the ideology is the worker and the exploitation of the worker. This does not translate easily into a response to AI automation nearly as well as UBI which just uses the already in place mechanisms to tax and redistribute. It's the social left stuff that seems to be eating the world and not the economic left stuff which, if I'm frank, has just proven itself to be unworkable.

What do you even envision a far left AI automated world to look like besides a UBI? I can't even picture it, there will be no workers to own the means of production, no need for labor unions, just production and consumption and neoliberalism can handle that just fine.

This 2011 article, published in the Marxist magazine 'Jacobin' is probably one of the most widely reshared modern leftist pieces on this topic.

Much of this article seems already outdated and overly founded on scifi analysis as well as not really grappling with zero employment so much as much reduced employment. It also assumes some particular copyright regimes that aren't in evidence. I find the whole thing pretty unconvincing. The regime it calls socialism seems to me to just be modern neoliberal capitalism with 'socialism' scrawled on the side.

A distinction should be made, however, between democratic planning and a completely non-market economy. A socialist economy could employ rational planning while still featuring market exchange of some sort, along with money and prices. This, in fact, was one of Kantorovich’s insights; rather than do away with price signals, he wanted to make prices into mechanisms for making planned production targets into economic realities. Current attempts to put a price on carbon emissions through cap-and-trade schemes point in this direction: while they use the market as a coordinating mechanism, they are also a form of planning, since the key step is the non-market decision about what level of carbon emissions is acceptable. This approach could look quite different than it does today, if generalized and implemented without capitalist property relations and wealth inequalities.

Suppose that everyone received a wage, not as a return to labor but as a human right. The wage would not buy the products of others’ labor, but rather the right to use up a certain quantity of energy and resources as one went about using the replicators. Markets might develop insofar as people chose to trade one type of consumption permit for another, but this would be what the sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls “capitalism between consenting adults”, rather than the involuntary participation in wage labor driven by the threat of starvation.

So all the piss and vinegar for all those years only to come out the other side having done nothing but retard the progress capitalism has made but putting their name on the end like the worst constituent on a school group project. I suppose it doesn't really matter, and if giving them this credit will shut them up forever then perhaps that is a trade worth making but I can't help but look back at all the invective and feet dragging as the capital necessary for this was built, opposed by these people at every possible point and think it's a shame that we're really never going to get to say "I told you so". The despite all the speak of "excess" and "inequality" in the grand scheme of things these capitalists have for the most part pretty efficiently reinvested their gains into moving us towards this future and along the way consistently raised the standard of living of everyone on the planet. It is in fact the capitalists that are going to free us from the toils of our proletariat lives.

So I guess I continue to not really understand how modern leftists conceptualize themselves beyond the vague belief that it is unfair that they do not control the fruits of investments that they did not make.

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