> The soviets also had the problem that they were an autocracy who had little regard for the conditions of their people.
This is just false.
In the USSR life expectancy went from 30 years in 1925 to 69 years in 1990[0]. On the other hand, in the US it started declining in 2015 without having recovered yet[1].
In the USSR, "In 1926, the literacy rate was 56.6 percent of the population. By 1937, according to census data, the literacy rate was 86% for men and 65% for women, making a total literacy rate of 75%"[2].
The USSR was also the first country in the world to legalize abortion, and it championed gender equality. In the meantime the US is going in the direction of banning abortion once again.
I have yo ask you, what you do mean by "conditions of the people"?
> In the USSR life expectancy went from 30 years in 1925 to 69 years in 1990[0]. On the other hand, in the US it started declining in 2015 without having recovered yet[1].
What a nonsensical comparison. Lol.
> I have yo ask you, what you do mean by "conditions of the people"?
Probably talking about the fact that the situation got so bad Gorbachev initiated such major reforms that the USSR collapsed. No biggie. Lol.
> Probably talking about the fact that the situation got so bad Gorbachev initiated such major reforms that the USSR collapsed. No biggie. Lol.
Not really answering my question here, just making some pointless humor.
Curious how all primary metrics for the population fell after the USSR got dissolved by Gorbachev. It's not a mistery that 70% of Russians approve Stalin anyway, guess they're still brainwashed after so many years, right?
Late Soviet communities mostly ran themselves within the existing law/power frameworks. Soviet society indeed had comparatively little regard for the conditions of people, but it is more of a cultural problem, and not an unique one.
This is the classic answer to the classic question about anarchy:
"who will do the unpleasant, demeaning work?"
"We only think it's unpleasant because we make it unpleasant. We can have clean, well lit factories. We just have to prioritize making that work more pleasant."
Also perhaps the least dignified work should be the highest paid? Unfortunately America has a sort of wealth cult going on that we dignify (and deify) those who are already wealthy.
The unfortunate reality is because these jobs are plentiful and easy to do (NOT saying they aren’t demanding, just that they don’t require advanced training) it incentivizes a race to the bottom in terms of wages - but we should do better as a society in guaranteeing high working standards and wages through regulation instead.
Plentiful and easy to do means nothing in the face of sufficiently low supply of workers. If there isn't a low supply of workers, then why is there a quote given about people turning down work?
If there was an alternative in the form of a guaranteed not-terrible job at minimum wage, wouldn’t that necessarily raise wages (or maybe working conditions) for currently terrible jobs?
Giving people a real choice seems easier than regulating every possible kind of job.
There is a problem right with the motion of "uneconomic". If fixing basic infrastructure or growing food is unprofitable, but building sportscars or yachts is not... that seems to indicate a problem with the economic system of allocation of resources.
If society thinks there are too many sports cars or yachts, then it can increase marginal wealth/income/property/sales taxes. And if society thinks there is insufficient food or infrastructure, then it can pay people to make food and build infrastructure. Either way, if both are competing for the same supply of labor, only the highest bidder will get it.
There are too many sports cars and yachts. We don’t need a single one of them. There are half a million homeless people in the US. The only reason taxes aren’t being raised on those and other luxury goods is because politics isn’t controlled by an algorithm but by a system whose outputs feed back into its inputs: the wealthy are made wealthier through political decisions.
Given the jobs are plentiful, isn't that an incentive to raise the wages? If you actually want somebody at your horrible job, you have to incentivize them to do yours and not somebody else's
Why's there a need to? If it's highly unpleasant and there's a shortage of people willing to do it then surely it's a perfect opportunity for the development of self-cleaning tanks...
As it is most of the truly unpleasant jobs of previous centuries don't exist anymore - if someone had found a way to make gong farming pleasant (look it up!) then flushing toilets and town sewerage systems might never have been invented...
UBI would go a long way towards pulling the very poor up out of the cycle of "I'll take whichever bad choice is least bad right now because I'm desperate."
If you work a minijob, you get welfare (housing, utilities, health insurance, cash) + the first 100€ you earn are yours to keep. On the next ~350€ you'll pay 20% for social insurance and get to keep some of it, the rest is deducted from your benefits, so you'll keep 100% of your welfare + 184€. There's no way you're worse off than on benefits if you're working.
If you work more, your benefits will be reduced until you earn enough to not get any benefits. Roughly 20% of people on benefits work, but make less than benefits, so they get the rest via benefits ("Aufstockung").
So I work, but still get roughly the same as if I didn't work. 200€ per month more doesn't seem to be a great incentive to start working again if it's, let's say, one of the less desirable jobs.
Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.
15-20% more is some incentive, I agree though, the delta should be larger.
> Furthermore, the "Aufstockung" means that effectively the tax payer is footing the bill for companies unwilling to pay a reasonable wage.
In some cases, yes. But you can also view it as "we need to employ people, but their skills really aren't competitive, so it's better to give them some money from taxes than to give them 100% from taxes".
Re a very complex problem with "nobody should be in such a weak position".
It is only complex if avoiding questions about the value of human dignity, and the inability of laissez faire capitalism to deliver that, need to be avoided.
I think libertarian socialism does exactly that but in this case what's being argued for is JG (and UBI) which would help empower many, so we shouldn't be arguing against those things (not saying you are.)
Everyone is labeled by default. Unless you weren't assigned a gender at birth, don't have a skin color, don't have sexual preferences, didn't have an economic situation you grew up in, didn't have a family with either single parents or multiple payments, etc etc
Labels can be both self-imposed and given. A self-imposed label is one that a person chooses to use to describe themselves or their experiences. For example, someone might choose to use the label "vegan" to describe their dietary habits because they feel that it accurately reflects their values and beliefs. On the other hand, a given label is one that is applied to a person or group by someone else. For example, a teacher might use the label "gifted" to describe a student who excels in a particular subject. In this case, the label is not chosen by the student, but is applied to them by the teacher.
You're missing the point of the article by discussing given labels.
Doesn't land for me. I'm queer, my identity isn't huge, but it does include queer.
That alone is enough to make some folks want to do violence to me (I have first hand experience with this).
Telling me to "stop being x" is a bad vibe when x is something intrinsic about me AND the anti x folks hate me just for existing. I just want to live my life.
The point of PG is that to properly reason about X you have to look at it "from outside".
A mental conditioning fogs judgement. "Identifications" are mental conditionings that make you lose intellectual freedom.
An example from other authors:
> For instance, modern education often does much damage when young students are taught dubious political notions and then enthusiastically push these notions on the rest of us. The pushing seldom convinces others. But as students pound into their mental habits what they are pushing out, the students are often permanently damaged. Educational institutions that create a climate where much of this goes on are, I think, irresponsible. It is important not to thus put one’s brain in chains before one has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person
~~~ Charlie Munger
Edit:
just like the mental process described by PG has a strong taste of Popper's judgement on "Marx Hegel and Freud" - a consolidated cultural idea -, the warning against "identifications" has had quite strong proponents. One of them (indirectly but encompassing) is over 2500 years old and "quite preponderant".
> A mental conditioning fogs judgement. "Identifications" are mental conditionings that make you lose intellectual freedom.
Freedom and structure are always in contention as yin-yang, and you're completely ignoring the benefits structure can bring. I'd guess OP finds a lot of value in labeling themselves "queer", in that a lot of things that were ambiguous or confusing become clearer.
Most people aren't using paraconsistent logic, especially on Internet forums (unfortunately).
Furthermore, the sentence '"Identifications" are mental conditionings that make you lose intellectual freedom" is not really in line with paraconsisent logic. The loss of intellectual freedom comes about from being stuck on a recognized facet of your identity and unable to think of your identity as having a conflicting facet. If people could reason by freely jumping between towers of inferences regardless of the apparent conflict between them, then labeling yourself with identities wouldn't have the downside.
"Queer" is a vague identity with political connotations, by which I mean, the gay people who call themselves "queer" tend to be a lot more woke-leftist than the gay people who don't call themselves "queer". It's absolutely an idea and a constructed identity. The facts of the matter are things like sexual preferences and behaviors, but you don't inherently need to construct an identity around them. On the other hand, sometimes you need to be aware that even if you don't identify yourself, you will be identified by others, which you're going to have to deal with.
I think you've both got the right answer and explained it with a very negative framing.
Gender and Sexual Minority, LGBTQ+, and queer all describe a largely similar set of folks.
Queer arose not from "woke-leftist" spaces, but grew out of 70s and 80s radical gay and trans spaces - groups like the Gay Liberation Front - who were willing to fight back (violently if necessary) against violence and discrimination.
Queer is absolutely a political identity, a framing of ones gender or sexual identity. They intersect with one another. It's not unlike "I eat only plants" vs "I'm vegan", they mean roughly the same thing until you hit contexts where they don't.
I'm not a native speaker, not in the know of the nuances of those terms, just accepted the one you chose.
There's a point that I still don't understand. The article advices to keep identity as a minimum. Not having none, just not including every circumstance or opinion in your identity. The reason is that a fat identity makes you more vulnerable to bias.
Is being queer a fundamental part of your identity? Or is it something subject to change like "being a JavaScript programmer" or something like that?
The place where I was born... that is a fact, I neither can nor want to change that. I consider it a part of my identity but, at the same time, I try to take some distance from it so I can examine my own opinions and decisions.
Even at some moments I wonder what would I think if I had been born elsewhere or if I change nationality. But that doesn't mean I'm going to do that. That runs deep, but being an X programmer, a X-ist, a morning person, if I prefer cats or dogs, a member of NNN generation... that's circumstancial for me.
Whether you're sexually attracted to men or women isn't something that can change, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to enshrine it as a significant part of your identity. This is actually where the semantic nuances come fully into play. People who identify as queer are consciously choosing to identify as queer. There are gay men and lesbian women who don't identify as queer. Sometimes that's because they don't agree with the radical orientation of the people who do identify as queer, sometimes that's because they don't like the word itself, and sometimes it's because they don't feel a sense of group identity with everyone under the "queer" umbrella.
> Queer arose not from "woke-leftist" spaces, but grew out of 70s and 80s radical gay and trans spaces
I guess "radical" would have been a better choice of terminology than "woke-leftist", but really you're looking at very similar communities that share an ideological heritage and who tend to complain about any terminology people use for them. The term "woke" is new but the basic ideology goes back to 70's radicals as well.
I would add, "woke" is not necessarily a negative label, and indeed was originally used most commonly in a positive sense intended to describe people who were awake to the reality of the world. It's only more recently come to be used a pejorative mocking the original usage.
I wouldn’t even say it’s all pejorative mockery. Setting aside the negative connotation, I think we all know what ideas and movements the term “woke” refers to, and the people on that side of the discussion haven’t, to my knowledge, agreed to any other nomenclature they would prefer, which means the only people using the term are the ones criticizing the underlying group of ideas and movements, which is where the negative connotation comes from. (And then some of those critics unfairly overgeneralize, similarly with the term “socialist”.)
If you act according to your Real Preference RP, then RP is a fact; if you Role-Play, it is also a constraint.
Edit: there is also a notable third position: when you act from a what you judge a Right Position RP - you do what is right. It must be noted because it may look like an "identification", but it is different in important ways.
I would argue that no identity is a fact. All identities are beliefs on the part of the person doing the identifying. To identify something as X is to express the belief that it is X.
This reminds me a class very long ago, when the teacher wrote two contradictory definitions of style in the blackboard, one saying that style is what the authors have in common with their school, the other saying that style is what the authors have that others don't.
Of course, those were defining two different concepts: the style of a school and the personal style.
To be precise, identity is very easy to define: it's to be you, instead of anyone else. Until someone invents some kind of brain trasplant, it's impossible to transfer consciousness, so your identity is your body, more specifically, your brain. That would include your memories that, although can be erased by trauma or illness, are mostly very strongly rooted.
Outwards, it would expand to your habits, your chemistry, your beliefs. All that can change, but it's difficult. So it's more your personality than your identity.
Then there is "identity" that isn't. More like being part of a group, so it's parallel situation to that of style. You identify yourself with a group, you define yourself as the sum of the groups you include yourself in. Identity is very much about individuality. "Identity" seems to be the opposite: the inabilty to be someone on your own.
Unless we're getting to some deep metaphysical stuff, I don't think I buy that. Yes, some identities are solely based on belief. But others are indeed based on facts: someone might identify as "basketball player" because they play basketball. Or they might identify as "tall" because they are in the top 10% of people for height. The height example might sound silly, but there are people who are somehow "proud" of these sorts of traits that they have no control over.
Certainly the situations can sometimes change: the basketball player might stop playing basketball and no longer identify as such. And I suppose someone who has never played basketball in their life could adopt the identity of "basketball player" if they wanted to, but... that's fine, that would be a case where that particular person's identity is based on a belief (or delusion).
I'm not talking about what the identity is based on. I'm talking about what the identity itself is. I think this is useful to help clarify the difference between "X has the identity Y" and "X is Y" which otherwise seem very similar. The former means that "someone believes (or many people believe) that X is Y".
Literally anyone can be Christian, but that doesn't make it a useless tag. It's a linguistic and mental shortcut that has utility despite the relative ease of application.
They do, and some will absolutely do (to some it is important to "assess" language) - it really depends on what you mean with "people" (of course I meant a subset).
What happened there is, in the succession of editings I left that 'people' there in a way that happened to be ambiguous. I made a composition error out of inattention.
No. It is not a matter of being «native». It may be your mothertongue of not: it is an approach transversal to all (this class of) languages.
It is the set of those people who intend to speak English, though surely not the language in use among the English. "Currently typical" English does not mean "good" English.
Edit:
On the contrary, «native English speakers» are the one who will follow that: they are the ones supposed to have absorbed more English (and relevant) literature.
I have just checked and I see the terms employed correctly in Joyce, in Wilde, in Chandler, in Hammett, in Paul Johnson, in Niall Ferguson, in Woody Allen, in Spike Milligan.
As absolutely expected: there is the gathering of the Assessors.
Of course queer as "unusual" predates "queer" as gay. :D It's a reclaimed slur. It was a negative label applied to people who ultimately decided to make that negative label a part of their identity.
[...] To my info, the first use of 'queer' for "homosexual" is from 1922, and the term was used for "eccentric" for the last five centuries.
('gay' for homosexual was reported as widespread "communitarian" use in medical texts in the 1940's - the use for "promiscuous" is at least four centuries old. In some territories, 'gay girl' still means "prostitute".)
Edit:
I misread your post. Of course, "of course" ""queer" for homosexual" can easily be a "reclaimed slur". There should be no surprise about it.
And your use of 'gay' in «"queer" as gay» is "queer". That is not ""queer" as gay", it is "queer" as "unaligned in sexual orientation", and not necessarily "gay". Just nitpicking on language though.
Generally in a political sense (related to the gay sense). Someone who does not accept heterosexuality as a norm or default way of being, even though it may something that they personally prefer.
The author may be suffering from a form of blub paradox when it comes to how he identifies, which I would assume include white, male, rich, smart, founder, and writer.
It's easy for him to discard "lesser" identities like "javascript programmer" because that doesn't cost him anything.
Wrong assumption. We do not necessarily "identify". All those terms in that list can be fully avoided as identifications. No, it is not normal to be "identified" with any of that.
The idea the author is talking about is explicitly not the "I am..." stuff. The "I consider myself to be..." stuff is what is important to his thesis that the "descriptors you hold dear to your self-image" (which he calls "identity", but I agree that can be an ambiguous term) can blind you to opinions and evidence contrary to what you already believe, and make it difficult (if not impossible) to have honest conversations about things.
I may literally be an average-height, average-build, bald, white man, but I don't consider any of those things to define me; they are not central to my self-image (at least I don't think they are; it's possible I've let some of that creep into my psyche more than I'd like). Yes, they are literally a part of my "identity", but not in the way that is relevant to anything the author is talking about.
No, you are misunderstanding what is meant with "identification" in these texts. The starting point is PG's text.
It is about how "identification" clouds your judgement. If you can just describe yourself ("happen to be male") that is one thing; if when you think of yourself you cannot abstract from some attributes, there is where you have "caged" yourself.
Not sure what your point is? It's okay to be white (or any other ethnicity), and it's okay to be queer - no matter how many people would tell you otherwise. That doesn't mean you have to take either of these and make it the be-all and end-all of your identity. The difference should be obvious - it was surely obvious enough to PG.
He doesn't tell you to stop being x. The title says keep your identity small, implying he knows it's impossible.
I'm not saying this is true, it's obviously not, but what if we lived in a universe where science objectively found that being queer was an actual disease and could be cured with a pill? This is the science and logic in that universe. So in that universe does your identity then preclude you from having a scientific and logical conclusion about being queer? If you didn't have that identity I would say it would be easier to be objective about that topic in that universe?
This is the thing Graham is talking about. I hope you can see the purpose of the (obviously untrue and just hypothetical) example, despite it being negatively related to your identity. I think it's still possible to disassociate a little bit even if it's an intrinsic part of your identity.
Good point. The essay misses examples of what is an inescapable part of one's identity.
To answer other commenters: sometimes being queer can be as obvious to others as your skin color (because you are holding the hand of your partner, because you are at the beginning of a transition, etc...) and, using PG's criteria, is one of those things that other people will discuss without expertise (sometimes very negatively).
And, even if it is not obvious that one is queer, it is one of those topics where showing that you belong to that group (when you can afford it physically and mentally) is important. Both as a signal to other members (to show them that they are not alone) and as a way to normalize your identity (which, in the longer run and as a group effort, helps a lot to reduce bad reactions).
You're also conflating unchangeable characteristics (such as skin color, or sexual orientation) and some feeling of group belonging. We would certainly find it a bit weird if someone felt that they "belonged" in a valued group merely due to, e.g. having light-colored skin, and expressed a need to "show off" that specific fact about themselves to others. That's key to the "identity" distinction PG is making here.
This feels like a false dichotomy: while you cannot change your sexual orientation, you can choose to make it more apparent and it has clear benefits for other lgbtq+ people around you (which, for me, gets it out of the selfish connotations of showing off: wherever you live, being openly gay still carries a non-zero physical risk, you don't do it just for the fun of it).
At the risk of being wildly misunderstood, you can still choose to minimize your "queerness footprint" in public discussions. You can let your experience with that inform your opinions without making it into An Issue that you are queer.
It's not easy, but it's possible and I think a lot of our perception of people "at the top" being uniformly a particular profile is partly a reflection of the fact that people who get good at not making their identity into An Issue are the ones who get more tolerance in public spaces. I think this gets misinterpreted by many people as "That person is not queer" rather than "We don't know. They haven't actually said and it is a private matter anyway."
> You can let your experience with that inform your opinions without making it into An Issue
Right, and that's exactly the point of the article that I think a lot of people aren't getting here. Even the things that you "objectively are" need not be these "core self-image" things that can lead to blind spots and a lack of ability to have reasonable discussion. But it's certainly understandable when something like that does become core, especially when someone has experienced discrimination or oppression because of it.
> I think this gets misinterpreted by many people as "That person is not queer" rather than "We don't know. They haven't actually said and it is a private matter anyway."
I think the "that person is not queer" often comes from a place of frustration that the person "at the top" isn't using their position and status to help normalize being queer (or whatever the marginalized group is). And that not doing that is essentially hiding and trying to fit in (and, further, "denying who they are"), in order to attain and keep those "on the top" benefits and status.
Personally, I think it's not ok to expect someone to become an activist (or at least publicly acknowledge who they "are") just because they have position and status, but I can understand why it's frustrating when someone doesn't.
Slavery means lots of things. Chattel slavery, yes, but also forced labor like in us prisons. Indentured labor, child soldiers, forced marriage, etc etc.
The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery.
It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The incorrect response is to say, "that's a useless way to think". Show some intellectual curiosity - why do people believe that, what values do they hold, what are their reasons, which arguments do I disagree with, etc.
I'm a socialist, I don't think capitalists have a "useless way to think about the world", I have fundamental critiques of specific policies and different values on certain social behaviors.
Struggle slavery; you're not free not to struggle on the face of the Earth, otherwise you will not survive. Man, how dare the universe spring forth creatures, yet foist that on them.
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
It isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
Worker cooperatives are legal and there are some around today. There's nothing stopping workers from owning the fruits of their own labor. Yet most workers choose not to join or start cooperatives, and instead prefer wage labor. Why is that?
It seems that most workers prioritize a steady wage without the risk of being an owner. And it's difficult for worker cooperatives in capital-intensive industries to attract outside investors; investors who put in significant amounts of money quite rationally want some control over the enterprise rather than leaving the decisions up to workers.
One of the most prominent examples of employee ownership was with United Airlines. Employees gained majority ownership in 1994. That kind of worked for a while but ultimately failed, ironically partly due to labor union disputes. It seems the workers had trouble deciding how to share the fruits of their labor.
A good elaboration of this point is Greg Dow's "Governing the Firm" and "The Labor-Managed Firm".
In short, worker-owned businesses are rare because individual workers are poor (relative to the capital that's needed) and they can't get external funding because the investors want control in return, which labor management can't provide.
That's why most large-scale worker-owned businesses are part of a federation supported by a bank - e.g. Mondragon's Caja Laboral. Institutional design indeed does matter.
Funding is a huge part, for sure, but also getting incorporated. Talk to a lawyer and your state about founding an LLC or sole proprietorship. Ezpz. Done in an hour.
Talk about founding a workers co-op that's democratically run? With shares issued to each worker? There's just no template for it. It's days of work to get it over the line.
This really is the same as the YouTuber "how I bought a house within a week of watching this video"
"Ownership is so easy, imagine if you not only have to work, but also have to deal with ownership problems such as maintenance, insurance, business and real-estate, logistics, marketing, depreciation, and management. - and, best of all, you don't own any of it if you stop working!"
In order to own the fruits of your labor, you have to pay for all the tools and materials you need, and the space where you apply the tools to the materials.
The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you.
Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.
I'd encourage you to read The Conquest of Bread for some high level thoughts on other ways we could arrange things that a) aren't primitive and b) aren't capitalism.
> People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
They don't exactly choose.
If a person wants to live by hunting and gathering, or by subsistence agriculture, he first has to acquire fertile land. And all that land is taken. In the United States, you don't even have the Right to Roam. Nor, on the public rights-of-way, do you have any right to so much as a sidewalk.
The ability to live an "indigenous" lifestyle no longer exists. The whole place has been terraformed.
You are trapped by the actions of everyone else. Mathematically, it's some kind of game theoretic equilibrium. But what it feels like is a prison.
Now you're just making excuses. In the USA at least, there are still small parcels of fertile land available very cheaply in isolated rural areas where no one else wants to live. Look for places in Alaska or Appalachia. If someone wants to live the 18th Century subsistence farmer lifestyle then it's totally possible. Get off the Internet and go live your dream.
This is very short sighted. 10 billions people cannot live off the land like that, and the land won’t stay cheap or undefended for long if millions of people suddenly spread out of the cities to do what you say.
We’d just end up with tribes defending their land because isolated people are vulnerable. It won’t solve the issue of involuntary labour, if anything it would make it worse for quite a lot of people as it is easier for leaders of smaller groups to exercise absolute control. We’ve been there before and there is a reason why we ended up in our current situation. The life of the average urban dweller is still better than that of a medieval serf.
I never claimed that billions of people can live that way. I was merely responding to @FooBarBizBazz's comment above, pointing out that they can live that way if they really want to. There are others living that lifestyle voluntarily right now. Personally I think it would be miserable, but the option exists for those who really want it.
In developed countries at least, most labor is voluntary. There are certainly cases where people have been trafficked and essentially held as slaves, and we should do everything possible to stop those, but such cases are rare.
There are quite a few Amish communities that pretty much live like that. We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. I think it would be significantly harder to get away with farming without buying the land, at least in the contiguous states.
I think a typical Amish family farm is nowadays worth $1-2M, maybe more. And I believe their children have been moving to new places in recent years, in search of more affordable land.
> farming without buying the land
Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests. There are surreptitious irrigation systems, and there's a whole cat-and-mouse game to find and destroy them.
> We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle.
You're right though. Particularly, I would bet, up in Alaska.
Maybe I was confusing amish with Quaker? I think it was a quaker village near where I grew up, they still use horses to plow fields and stuff like that.
Either way, they're obviously not all living like that, but whichever one it is, they have communities here and there where they live old school
> Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests
This is a million times easier to do than grow crops. Of course it's possible people could get away with growing crops in national forests, but the risk/reward just isn't there like it is(was?) for weed.
Worker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't.
Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.
Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
They "freely accepted" it as an alternative to starvation when they were forced off of the land they were previously farming so that it could become a large private farm.
A lot of the land that was enclosed wasn't even productive after privatization. Some of it just stood (and still stands) idle, despite previously providing sustenance prior to enclosure. Big estates with an abundance of non-productive land was a popular thing at one point.
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
There are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
Nope. Customers choose what kinds of pursuits receive monetary compensation.
You have something you want to do (and get paid for) that investors won't pay you to do? Can you get customers to pay for it? Then just go do it. Nobody's stopping you.
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".
This is the baseline for basically pretty much all life on earth. You will die unless you perform labor to interrupt death. Your body itself must perform labor in order to generate the energy and to allocate the resources you provide it to survive as well. If you expand the definition of slavery to encompass labor, then all living things are inherently enslaved until they die. Philosophically that might be interesting in its own right but it's not actually a very cogent critique of labor nor does it justify the use of the word, "slavery."
Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others. Those kind of relations eventually erupted with the advent of agriculture that allowed people to settle and accumulate assets.
> It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
Yeah, but for a person coming into it, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just earn a wage and buy existing goods, rather than be self-sufficient and grow your own crops, plant your own trees to harvest lumber and mine your own ore to make steel.
Nor is the shift back to hunting/gathering even possible at this point. The population of the planet is such that we would consume all animal and plant matter within months, if it were not replenished in highly structured ways on farms.
> Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
Labor having value is in fact wholly arbitrary, which is why its value fluctuates depending on various market conditions. Fundamentally, it depends on people valuing living, which is why what I'm saying is not unnatural.
"Wage labor" is just "labor."
> If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others.
Asset owning people do work, though. This notion falls apart under minute scrutiny. There's of course people that inherit wealth that only ever exchange it for consumption of goods or services, but those people are still inheriting labor from people that chose to give them it.
Yes, but with the invention of private property, people are no longer allowed to labor directly for their own survival as subsistence farmers without first working for wages and then purchasing land.
It seems strange now that wage labor is so normalized, but at the start of the industrial revolution, many subsistence farmers were forced off of the land they had farmed for generations as it was turned into large private farms and instead had to seek wage labor.
It might help to read more about Marxism to avoid a reductio ad absurdum.
The general argument as laid out in Capital vol 1 is highlighted in the working day[1]. This section introduces the contradiction between laborer and capitalist, namely, that a laborer is paid for his or her time, while the capitalist in turn receives the product of creation.
The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why. All life on earth doesn't participate in economy of labor and earn wages. If you agree, and I hope you do, that such a proposition is absurd, then I kindly refer back to the first sentence of this comment as we're now on the same page.
1. Vol 1 Chapter 10. Section 1
2. The C-M in the M-C-M circuit.
3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
4. If you're yelling at the screen, "But that's the point!" then yes, we're also in agreement. This maybe one of those "so so so close" moments.
> The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
> 3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
Even if you just presume this to be true, which is ridiculous, it fails to acknowledge that 1) resources are a finite and scarce, 2) supply and demand are variable, and as such, so is the value of labor and goods (money is a representation of labor), and 3) that the "capitalists" in this situation are performing labor by performing transactions (but also probably many other things as well).
Your argument basically hinges on the notion that the value of goods is static and that certain types of labor have zero value.
I regret to inform you that this argument is not mine; it's Marx's. You're more than welcome to direct your complaints to him, but he may take a while to respond.
Be assured though, if you take the time to read Capital, your criticisms are addressed. I'd encourage you to read it. It's a much better way to understand the argument than a HN comment section. Good luck!
If it were simply about Marx's argument, then you wouldn't suggest that we (you and I, not Marx) could be in agreement, which you mentioned in your previous comment.
This is like me telling you to go read a textbook on economics. Obviously it's a better way to learn about economics than from me, but that's not really the point, is it?
You made a clear rebuttal to my original comment, supported by what Marx wrote. I'd ask that you take ownership of your own argument rather than shifting it over to Marx. Your assertion was this:
> Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why.
In order for me to agree with your assertion, I'd have to agree with the basis for it, which was Marx's writing. I made a point as to why I think it's wrong because I think Marx is fundamentally wrong. Asking me to read Das Kapital or talk to Marx is non sequitur.
Take a step back for a moment. The point your making is that wage slavery shouldn't exist as an interesting or separate category because all organisms have to work to live. This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive. It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentally confused.
> Take a step back for a moment. The point your making is that wage slavery shouldn't exist as an interesting or separate category because all organisms have to work to live.
I am saying that extending the definition of slavery to simply include any process that is being thrust upon a living being is idiotic. All living beings are required to perform labor to live. Performing labor for wages is an extension of that that fits within a human framework. Rather than individually performing all the requirements to live by creating your own shelter, making sure that you stay warm, hunting other animals or gathering edible berries, nuts, and the like, we've figured out a way to more efficiently divide the labor and abstracted away the notion of labor into something called money (or wages). It enables human beings to use their time more efficiently and is why we are such a successful species.
No, you're not enslaved because you feel like you have to work for a wage. Unless you are being coerced by another person into performing labor for them (with or without compensation), you are not being enslaved. External natural forces like going hungry or going cold are not acts of coercion. That is simply life.
> This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive.
I'm not sure how you extrapolated this, either. To quote you, "It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentally confused."
2) in a way that instead of simply rebutting, attempts get more curious instead.
The response simply isn't very hacker newsy and it's coming across that you simply don't like Marxism so I must be wrong. Please take the emotional reaction out of it. Thanks.
I don't like Marxism but it shouldn't come across as me simply disliking Marxism. I've provided plenty of ideas supporting why I disagree with both Marx and you that you are more than welcome to respond to (so far, you've chosen not to).
Your original comment was worthwhile responding to, but the rest have largely been performative rhetoric. If you don't have any actual refutations to my ideas, then please refrain from responding at all.
Likewise, but please refute things you're actually familiar with. You've been arguing against what you think Marx has said rather than what he actually said. I think you could make some really compelling arguments against Marxism, but it would require you to read something you disagree with. You come across as a rational and intelligent person. I think you're fully capable of reading something you dislike in order to craft better arguments against it.
I think you'd have better luck by explaining your ideas further, rather than simply trying to associate ideas with emotionally charged words like 'slavery' or 'sex trafficking' by writing them next to things you dislike.
This analogy got me thinking, but only for a little bit.
Similarity: people are forced to do things which they would not choose to do. (Different form would be preferable or for some none).
Difference: level of freedom. Wage slave can choose a lot (whom to slave, what to do with the wage, if to change occupation or if to invest).
Sex trafficked person has far fewer options.
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".
Slavery usually includes ownership and force. I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it. Like "chicken holocaust" isn't really a holocaust, even though some chicken farms are terrible places, but it's really not the same.
You wouldn't talk of nutritional slavery even though you're not free not to get nutrition, because you'll die. "Wage slavery" very much falls in the same corner, I think. Take away everything else, and imagine an individual being alone on earth. There's fruits to eat and wood around to build a shelter. If the individual doesn't reach for those fruits, and doesn't use the wood, they'll be hungry and cold, and eventually they'll starve. Are they a slave?
Ownership applies very specifically to chattel slavery, and does not apply to the vast majority of extant slavery today.
> I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it.
No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
The force is rooted in private property; importantly: private in this usage is jargon, meant as ownership of productive means, not as individual personal ownership of arbitrary stuff. To the extent productive property ownership is concentrated and pervasive, which is a nearly total extent in most of the world, this force is practically unavoidable for the vast majority of workers.
Your likening, along with several others, of waged labor to basic labors like nutrition or shelter is not wrong but misses the point. For “wage slaves” (quoted not to dismiss its validity but to indicate I’m still engaged with clarifying the term), the only options available to acquire food and shelter are:
- work to enrich others in exchange for a fraction of their productive output
- become an owner of productive private property and an employer of other “wage slaves”
- become an owner of some productive private property and voluntarily share it with others (to the extent that’s achievable, practical and sustainable)
- reject productive private property claims (which itself may be punishable by more explicitly forced labor! but in any case is a high risk to other aspects of one’s autonomy however limited)
If there truly are fruits to eat and woods around from which to build a shelter, from which anyone could freely choose that lifestyle rather than wage labor, then the term “wage slavery” would definitely be as sensational as you suggest. But for, well, nearly everyone who works for wages, that isn’t true. The options above are the only ones available, and acquiring private productive property is an exceedingly limited pursuit regardless of how one wants to use or share it. For the nearly everyone else remaining, they must toil so others profit or they must do crimes.
> No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
You say that, but that's not at all how it worked when that very thing has been tried by groups like the Khmer Rouge. Who, incidentally, took people from their homes at gunpoint in Phenom Penh, forced them to work for nothing, and even stole their kids from them. You can claim that's an implementation detail, but when you point out that workers collectives have trouble working on a very small scale, that's an indictment of the idea that this idea could work on a national scale, because organizational problems only get harder the bigger you are.
And despite the Khmer Rouge ostensibly doing that for the "collective good", being marched out of your home to farm rice at gunpoint seems to me to be a lot closer to what most people think of as "slavery" than choosing an employer, choosing what type of work to do, being able to obtain free education online for nearly anything, being able to start a business of one's own (including worker collectives, if you wish), and being able to get loans to start that business. All of which are regular activities for us "wage slaves" here.
It seems I haven't made my point very clearly: I wasn't suggesting that there's ample self-maintaining land for everyone, that's clearly not the case. But if there was, would its inhabitants be slaves? And who's slaves would they be? Nature's? God's? Their own?
Is a self-employed black smith who owns everything downstream a slave? He'll mine the ore, smelt the iron, produce his own coal for his fire etc etc. Still, he'll have to sell his product at a fraction of what it's worth it to his customers. Like your "wage slaves", it'll be a very large fraction of it, but it's a fraction, they wouldn't buy it if it cost more than it's worth to them. Is the black smith a slave?
I love how many comments here are, "I have no domain expertise, but these seem like nitpicks".
If a user provides feedback like this, listen. Getting this sort of detail from a user about design decisions is invaluable. They know the ergonomic setup they need, what works and doesn't, and they will have insights a non domain expert simply can't.
A truck driver who isn't the intended audience for the vehicle and doesn't understand the engineering decisions that went into the product. For every con he lists there's a con to the opposite approach. There isn't clear cut right and wrong here. It's just different use cases.
People always say this and I have to ask: have you seen the job market in India lately? It's competitive. Salaries used to be 1/10th that of a US engineer. US-based companies pay a premium, with Google offering L5 engineers over 100K total comp.
Bootcamps are more challenging to evaluate, as they have a history controversy around their graduation rates / job placement rates. Anecdotally, I just don't see a ton of bootcamp graduates on the market relative to CS degree holders. However, stats seem to indicate there were ~25K graduates in 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/626932/north-america-cod...
But this can be somewhat misleading, as it includes all trainings - including existing software developers reskilling.
This is an outdated viewpoint. 10 years ago, outsourcing to India involved a lot of tradeoffs that usually ended poorly. But Bangalore has become a first-world city in some ways, with a middle class that was educated in Western universities or viably-equivalent Indian universities.
Before the pandemic, I worked with a guy (in person) who was educated at an Indian university, who was as good a developer as any of the American intermediate developers I've worked with, including fluency in English. The rise of remote work has further enabled this sub-economy to flourish: since I've gone full-remote myself, I've worked with a few Indian developers and learned a lot from them: they're not worse developers than me (I'm a senior full-stack developer with enough experience to predate the existence of "full-stack developers"--much of my experience with Fortune 500 companies). There's even enough of an economy in Bangalore that one of my coworkers left for a pay raise to work at a company based in Bangalore.
There are still downsides, primarily time zones. And if you are looking to save money, it's not going to really work out that way: you can still hire chop-shop Indian devs for 20% of what you'd pay a Western dev, but Indian devs who are equivalent to Western devs will require Western pay (minus at most 20-30% to account for the time zone issue, but you'll pay that out in management costs due to the time zone issue).
I'll also add that, coming from nonprofits, some people viewed hiring from India as a way to provide "aid" to the poor in India, but it doesn't really play out that way: most of the folks who are educated enough to work Western jobs, obtained that education because they are from the upper castes with generational wealth.
Karl Marx talks a lot about alienation as capitalism advances. Alienation from our labor, alienation from our society, and eventually alienation from the self.
Independent of how you think of the rest of Marx's work, I think it's useful to examine this specific concept in the modern era. What you are describing is a classic example of alienation from society - as our society turns increasingly to machines to create and deliver entertainment it's easier for us all to just... stay separated and isolated. Machines tell us marvel movies are profitable, so we get marvel movies, etc.
And I know hn is not a fan of Marx, generally, but this concept I really think is applicable here.
I wonder if the same type of alienation appeared in late Soviet Russia or Mao's (or even current day) China? That was also people having the humanity ground out of them by a faceless technocratic machine not really a happy community of people helping each other.
The problem might be less "capitalism" and more the rise of large highly specialized bureaucratic nation states.
Would you be happy if only your tax rate went up, or is that tied to other people in your tax bracket also paying out more and thus, presumably, benefiting society more than they would by hoarding/wasting the money?
I don’t think it’s weird that people don’t behave “rationally” in the crude sense of that word[1]. But it seems really weird to be happy about your tax rate going up. Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries. So there seems to be two explanations:
(1) Either you consider yourself prodigal and want an authority to take care of your spending for you.
(2) Or you have weirdly framed your views for extra shock value; and you simply dislike inequality and suffering; and you think that the state can help alleviate some of it by reallocating social resources in a socially beneficial manner. And you think it would be just if they also would take some money from you, even if it’s done by force. There is really nothing surprising about this view; I would rather say it is very popular. (And, unfortunately, for most people that feeling for equality doesn’t spread beyond their own country.)
[1] In principle, rationality in economics doesn’t necessarily imply egoism. It just means that the choices made by a person have nice properties like completeness or transitivity. Whether your choices maximize your consumption, consumption of other people, the scientific progress or the amount of plastic in the world ultimately doesn’t matter.
> Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries.
Why not both? I am happy for my tax rates to go up - indeed, I will vote for any political party that advocates this - and donate to developing countries (and also food banks in the UK because we are shamefully bad at being a developed country.)
The third option is that it genuinely makes me happy, because it implies we're taking care of everyone more. My money going to charity is fine. My money going to taxes implies other wealthy people like me are also chipping in for schools, healthcare, etc.
The idea that we have to use force to take money away from people to take care of those in need doesn’t make me genuinely happy. That is rather depressing that we cannot solve those problems without ultimatums based on violence. Necessary? Maybe. Wholesome? Not really.
They were also huge. Community level programs like this can be much more functionally democratic and uplifting.